There came a harsh hissing sound, and the wall made of metal slid away. From the illuminated geometric tunnel beyond, one of the False Ones emerged. Wrapped in a blasphemous robe of bright yellow, the creature that now stood before him was different than the one who had taken him from his home in the ruins of Ur’thenoth. The False One seemed to look down upon him with disdain. He met its gaze, trying to contain the anger he felt toward the false prophet.
After a long moment, the creature spoke. “My name is Kaj.”
Talm gazed up at him but did not give him the dignity of a reply.
Kaj considered him and drew a thin breath. “Do you know who we are?”
Talm stared at the creature and gave a slow nod.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
He hesitated, and then gave a slower and less decisive nod. He knew what he was meant to do. He had been born into his fate—the elder Zurt had always said that one day he would be taken. You are our only hope, he had often been told by his grandfather. Indeed, the path open before him was one of fulfillment. Hereafter nothing would happen that hadn’t been dictated by the Yellow King’s will. That thought brought a hollow smile to his lips.
Seeing the understanding in his face, the False One grinned. “Then let us go. Your destiny awaits.”
Kaj then led Talm down the halls of wonder. After a long while, they arrived at a large chamber protected by several metal walls that retracted into their frames as they approached. Inside the chamber, Talm was shocked to discover more False Ones waiting. Tall ones, short ones, bladed ones, clawed ones. Counting Kaj, there were eleven altogether, spread out in a semicircle in the center of the room. Talm’s heart began to race as fear crawled up from his frozen core. Behind him, the metal wall slid shut. He was trapped.
Kaj looked down at him with a twisted smile. “Go.” He pointed a long, clawed finger toward the middle of where the others stood.
Swallowing hard, Talm began to walk toward them. Each step brought closer the ingrained fear of the False Ones. A hundred hungry eyes were upon him. Sweating, shaking, Talm began to doubt his conviction and the hopes of the Websworn. They had been deceived; the elders had been deceived, somehow. How was he to effect change when the False Ones were in control? He began to sweat, and his steps slowed even more until he was scarcely moving at all.
“Go.”
He was paralyzed. The figures before him were the traitors to the order. They were the spawn of the black science of Griffith, the cult leader whose madness started them down the path to ruin. He was supposed to lead them, or so the prophecy said. But the eyes before him were not the reverent eyes of subjects—they were hate-filled, putrid things that looked at him as nothing more than their latest meal. Just like the men in the dirty yellow garments with the fire weapons in the caverns below, he was no more than food to them.
The mad panic set in. Talm turned on his heel and began to run from the circle of robes. With a leap, he threw himself against the metal wall and began to claw at it in desperation. But the wall gave no reply. As the terror gripping him became absolute, he was seized from behind by two of the beasts. He struggled as the False Ones dragged him, but his meager muscles could not save him from the things’ superhuman strength.
They carried him into a smaller alcove of the main room. Before he could mount any further resistance, his back was slammed against something huge, cold, and hard. Two of the creatures bound his arms to the fixture with lengths of rope-like metal. As the rope-things tightened, the bones in his arms strained against the force and began to crack. Talm tried to yell, but he had no voice. Instead, a hot seething rumble rippled through his throat, tearing at the tender flesh. He was trapped, and every motion he made to break free just made the cold pain of the bindings bite deeper into his skin and muscles. The False Ones collapsed around him, forming another tight semi-circle of yellow robes and ghastly visages.
“Relax,” Kaj said with a throaty laugh. “It will all be over soon.”
As Talm struggled, thrashing his breaking arms against his restraints, the closest of the Vant’therax extended their wretched hands toward him. A chill of abject terror washed over him when he caught a glimpse of the light reflecting off a sea of bulbous forms; their hands and arms were alive with spiders. At once he knew: these were the legendary Nothem. It was just as the elders had said. Gasping for breath, he struggled harder. But there was no escape. The hands were upon him, and then the skittering legs of the Nothem found his bare skin.
Talm cast his head from side to side, but there was no way to stop their march. The prickling of those legs, a whole tide of life—ancient, sacred life that you have defiled—advanced upward, to his shoulders, to his neck, up his cheeks. When they came to his eyes it all went dark. Some of them crawled into his mouth and stifled the meager scream he’d summoned. And when the hot pain in his ears came, he knew that all was lost. Spasms rocked his body, and the feeling of foreign things invading his eyes and ears and throat grew more severe. He felt tendrils of some unseen force stab into his temples. He recoiled, banging his head against the knotted metal behind him. Blinding pain enveloped him. Invisible psychic spears thrust through his eyes and skull and mouth, bringing alien thoughts to his brain. Then, everything he had ever known changed.
At once his mind was inundated with a million images, all strobing in cacophonous discord. He saw a woman—his own mother—screaming. He saw the sign of the Yellow King, whose name he now knew to be Nayor, written upon the pages of a book he had never been fortunate enough to read. He saw the liquid-filled tubes containing the living fetuses of the False Ones; he observed the words of confirmation of the success: fourteen of fifty-six was the mantra. He watched a screen—that’s what this thing was called, a screen—as the genetically modified embryos were lanced and jabbed at, and their cancerous chitin infections began. He saw himself looking down upon his own, the Websworn, in contempt; zealots to furtive magic, disdainful of the power science and the artifacts from the Web promised. He was the one to open the path, to unite man and spider as Nayor himself would have. It was not merely enough to weave the helices—he had to become an embodiment of that ambition, a Conduit to His will.
Traitorous thoughts, meandering thoughts. He watched in horror as a blade embedded itself in his throat. He felt himself choking as the blood poured into his windpipe. The snapping sound as the purple man broke his neck and sent him over the edge—he was dead, but now those thoughts lived on. From death came life, just as he was pulled free to serve his place in the cycle. His forerunners Repton, Griffith, and Dwyre had played their part, but now it was his time—his time to weave the helices, to bring about the Coronation. As the Nothem’s memories flooded his mind, he began to lose himself; he was not the successor to the man named Dwyre—he was Dwyre. The memories of the boy named Talm were surrounded and crushed by the deluge of new information and experience.
It was as though he was awakening from a timeless dream of existence and into a reality that had been waiting for him the entire time. How was he to believe it was not these thoughts and memories which were real? The memories of Dwyre began far before the birth of Talm, and Griffith’s and Repton’s even longer before that. But that couldn’t be. Who was he? He had been Talm, but so too had he been Dwyre and Griffith and Repton—and he’d been them for far longer.
Surrounded by confusion and fear and uncertainty, he began to howl. The False Ones around him reacted in shock as his shouts echoed throughout the room. Amidst the sounds of his vocal cords straining against reason and logic, the painful thoughts spearing his brain began to fade. Behind his eyes, a blue sea of neural connections began to glow and coalesce to form the thoughts of the False Vant’therax, and between them, like bulbs strung upon a Christmas tree, were the cells belonging to the other members of NIDUS. His mind was attacked by voices that were not his own, but this time they were echoing from the other minds now speaking through him.
“It is finished,” came the thoughts of Kaj.
/> “At last,” came a gruff mental-voice, which he knew belonged to Nal. “I can speak freely again.”
“The King smiles upon us,” came another.“It worked.”
As the thoughts of the Vant’therax buzzed through the mental network, Talm fought to keep them out of his mind. For a long time, he did nothing other than scream. Everything he had ever known was forfeit. He shook his head from side to side, and he did not stop until his throat had gone raw and exhaustion began to overtake him. When one of the False Ones drew closer to him, he looked up with wide and terrified eyes at his captor. His vocal cords ached, but his false memories told him he now knew how to use them. With cracked lips and a dry tongue, he uttered his first words. “Name. What is. My name.”
The dead eyes of Kaj seemed to shimmer in mockery. “You have no name,” he said. “You are nothing but our tool. You are no one.” A pause, and he smiled a wicked smile. “You are Nemo.”
Chapter 9
No News Is Bad News
Mark’s mind meandered between awareness and apathy. Eyes closed, back against the low rock wall, he had hoped to catch a few moments of rejuvenating sleep. Though the pain in his head had lessened a bit, there was still a distinct throbbing due to the lack of meaningful rest. Sixteen hours had been a wishful figure to throw out; the hours counted for nothing when those dreams pulled him back toward that night six years ago. It seemed ironic that the vivid dreams of Simon Dwyre’s past had proved the more restful.
Behind him, there came a quiet splashing from the fountain. It was hard not to think upon those ripples and their cause. Those adventurous thoughts, too, he pushed from his mind, hoping against all hope to gain even a moment of sleep. But it was not long before a voice from behind roused him once more.
“Mark?”
He sighed. “Mmm?”
“About testing me for magic. Are you feeling well enough to give it a shot yet?”
“I suppose. Although before we enter into testing, you have some preparations of your own. You need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of what magic is, and how to utilize it.”
A soft splash from behind. “Alright, so I guess now’s as good a time as any to lecture me, huh?”
Mark opened his eyes, a small tremor of pain running along his skull as light invaded his world. “Well, as you know, magic is a universal medium, analogous to the fifth fundamental interaction.”
“Uhh . . . . Yeah. Of course.”
“The way you influence it is, in layman’s terms, through attuned brainwave impulses. Can you sit where you are right now?”
“Sit? Uhh, sorta.” Another splash, presumably as she adjusted herself into a sitting position in the pool.
“When you are comfortable, let your breathing calm. Take slow breaths, and fill your lungs with each. Do not release the air until you are at peace with it.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Worry not. Just try it. Bring yourself to utter calmness. Try it now, if you would.”
“Yeah, alright, fine.”
A short while passed, and the only sound Mark heard was the soft babbling of the fountain. Assuming Spinneretta had at least managed to capture a natural rhythm, he continued speaking. “Keep breathing like this, and let your natural energy come alive. Visualize your body’s energy as a field flowing all around you. Visualize that field moving clockwise around you like a tornado—slowly at first. Focus only on the sensation of the energy moving. Tell me if you feel anything.”
And again it all went quiet. For a few minutes, he dared not speak for fear of impeding her exercise. He just studied the intricate workmanship of the tiered walls before him.
“This is stupid,” Spinneretta said. “I think I feel something, but I’m ninety percent sure it’s just the wind. That or it’s my imagination getting worked up because I’m thinking so hard about trying to feel it.”
“That’s the whole point. Even if it is your imagination, you’re directing your natural energy toward target points in space. On a fundamental level, you have created a change.”
“Uhh. What?”
“That’s the very foundation of magic. The mind is the master.”
“This sounds an awful lot like hippy bullshit to me,” she said, splashing a little. “I thought magic was a bit more sophisticated than auras and chakras.”
“Oh, you know about the chakras? This will be easier then.”
“You have to be kidding me.”
He raised one hand over the wall at his back. “Are you looking this way?”
“Yeah.”
Ignoring the cold headache that ripped through his temples, he pulled the Flames of Y’rokkrem into being. Ghostly light and shadows began to flicker over the tiled ground and sculpted walls. He thought he heard a small gasp from where Spinneretta was bathing. “My own energy is the conduit for the Flames. When I summon them, I will their power forth and beckon it to work through me as an extension of its greater being. Then it’s merely a matter of directing the Flames where I need them. It’s a little different than the little aura experiment you’re doing right now, but it’s the same principle. The mind is the master.”
“Is it really that simple? Just breathing and thinking about it?”
“Not exactly,” he said, extinguishing the Flames, “but one must walk before they may sprint. I’d like you to keep practicing this. Once you are slightly more comfortable with it, I will test you for latent potential.”
A quiet sigh. “Fine.” A few seconds passed, and Spinneretta took a deep breath. Then came another large splash. The sound of moving water stilled. After a couple moments, there was a louder sloshing as she resurfaced. “The damn sign doesn’t work underwater either, even while thinking about your auras and crap.”
“Mmm.” Mark nodded his head a little and gave up on getting any sleep. He opened his mouth to say something but was distracted by a screeching sound from overhead.
A shadow glided against the backdrop of the great cliff. The small creature circled, aloft on the sound of fluttering wings, before it perched upon a precarious stone outcropping above. It was a green-skinned, fungal creature. Its dorsal wings, little more than white, fibrous gills stretched along an uneven membrane, batted at irregular intervals. It looked like a slick, rubbery owl mixed with a cockroach. Though its nub of a head had nothing resembling eyes, its two curved antennae twitched and tasted the surrounding air. Mark thought it was looking at him.
There was a surprised gasp surrounded by a splash. “Wha, what the hell is that?”
“Another local, by the looks of it,” Mark said. “What a strange creature. I wonder where it’s been hiding.”
“Do you think it’s dangerous?”
“My first thought is no.” The fungal hawk-thing twisted at the midsection and began to peck at one of its gill-wings, though it lacked a beak. “You know, it’s almost cute up close.”
Spinneretta scoffed. “Now you just sound like Kara. If she were here she’d have already named that thing.” She paused, and a weighty silence fell between them. “Do you think they’re alright?”
“I think they’re all just fine. Annika wouldn’t let anything happen to them.” Then again, how many days had even passed since they’d arrived in this otherworld? The cycle of time was different here, but how different was hard to say.
“What do you think they’re doing right now?” Spinneretta asked.
He gave a weak shrug, not taking his eyes off the bird-thing. “Waiting for us, I imagine.”
Spinneretta laughed under her breath. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be too polite to keep them waiting.” She stopped talking, and the water stilled. Then she drew in a sharp gasp. “Oh, goddammit!”
Mark sat up straight, at once on edge. “What is it?”
“I don’t have a towel.”
Even though Spinneretta’s body was clean, the filth clinging to her dress made her reluctant to put it back on. It could be worse, she reminded herself. In the end, she felt at least
sixty percent cleaner, and that was good enough. As she wiped her hair down with Mark’s shirt—gracefully loaned to her as a towel—she kept thinking about what he’d taught her about natural energy and magic. Though she had indeed felt something when she quieted her mind and forced herself to imagine moving auras, there was no way it was actually magic, right? There was no way it could be that simple, so unmagical.
The strange gill-winged bird-thing hadn’t moved from its perch. It just sat there, nibbling at itself like a cat. There was something unsavory about it, owing in no small part to the distinctly vegetative biology it bore. It moved like its whole body was a throbbing tumor, pustules at the end of its nub-head expanding and shrinking grotesquely.
Mark returned from his privacy-granting exploratory absence not long after she’d finished redressing. He emerged, bare-chested and with a comfortless length to his face, from one of the numerous passages that shot off from the bathing plaza. “The city is thin but long,” he said, gesturing behind him. “It looks like the mountain pass ends maybe ten minutes that way if we cut through. But the streets and passages branching along the mountain could very well be endless.”
She wadded up his wet shirt and tried not to stare as she walked over to meet him. “What’s the plan, then?”
“Our surroundings are still quite foreign. We can use this city as our base, at least for now. We have water. We have shelter. That leaves food as the only basic need unmet. Worst-case scenario, we could probably hunt and eat those flying things, as they seem to enjoy roosting in the upper reaches of the canyon. Though I imagine you’d prefer to hunt terrestrial game instead.”
“I’d prefer potato salad to any of those.” God, I’d kill for a bowl of lentil soup.
“You know what is so often said of beggars. In any case, it is temporary. Remember that we need only to find enough food to last until you can open the portal again.”
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 9