A Conversation in Blood

by Paul S. Kemp

  DEL REY | NEW YORK

  A Conversation in Blood is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Paul S. Kemp

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kemp, Paul S. (Paul Stuart) author.

  Title: A conversation in blood: a tale of Egil & Nix / Paul S. Kemp.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Del Rey, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016033770 (print) | LCCN 2016048368 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780553392005 (hardback) | ISBN 9780553392012 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Fantasy /

  General. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.E52 C66 2017 (print) | LCC PS3611.E52 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2016033770

  Ebook ISBN 9780553392012

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Beverly Leung

  Cover illustration: © John Picacio

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Paul S. Kemp

  About the Author

  Nix bounded backward but the creature’s thick arm and fist caught him squarely in the torso and audibly cracked his ribs. The force of the blow drove the breath out of him in a pained gasp and knocked him back into the hard metal of the wall. The moment he hit the wall the edges of his broken ribs ground coarsely against one another. He tried to seal off a shriek behind clenched teeth, but it slipped the reins of his control and the force of the scream misted the air before him in spit and blood. His legs would not hold him up and he slid down the wall to the floor, gasping but trying not to, each new inhalation a knife stab of pain in his chest.

  “Nix!” Egil shouted.

  Nix couldn’t see his friend; the huge, misshapen bulk of the creature, the leftover of the Great Spell, blocked Egil’s body from view.

  The creature roiled toward him, one lumbering step, another, the movement of its form under its filthy, bloody cloak more like a landslide than ambulation. Nix knew he was going to die. Pain and blood loss blurred his vision, shrank his field of view down to a tunnel in which he saw only the creature, the otherworldly creature, as it advanced on him.

  Its movement allowed Nix to see Egil behind it. His friend was down on all fours, but favoring an arm, bleeding, beaten, his forehead wrinkled by pain. The eye of Ebenor, tattooed on his pate, the symbol of his faith in the Momentary God, a farce of a deity that Egil somehow ennobled, was smeared with blood.

  “Over here, creature!” Egil said, visibly working up to an attempt at standing. “Over here, you fakking thing!”

  The creature stopped, its bulk rippling under the filthy cloak it wore. It turned to face Egil with whatever passed for its head.

  “Get up,” Nix said to Egil, the words barely a whisper. “Get up, Egil.”

  And Egil did. His huge muscles bunched as he lifted the mountain of his frame, put a leg under him, and used his remaining hammer as a crutch to get himself upright. He inhaled, gripping the hammer in his right hand, the veins in his arm standing out like cordage. His left arm hung limp at his side, broken or dislocated at the shoulder. The look in his hooded eyes promised an answer in violence, and so did his tone.

  “That’s right,” the priest said softly, staring at the thing. “Over here.”

  The creature tensed and roared, the sound coming from a dozen mouths, a cacophony of rage and frustration that somehow reminded Nix of crashing surf, an elemental sound, the sound of something inexorable, unstoppable. Egil did not blanch in the face of its anger.

  “Likely we’ll do this again sometime, creature,” Egil said, raising his hammer and spitting in the creature’s direction. “Or maybe we won’t. Either way, you don’t clear today without first answering to me.”

  The creature took a halting step toward Egil, the singular priest of Ebenor facing the singular horror of worlds gone by. Nix used his hands to shift his weight but even that slight movement caused bone to grind against bone. He hissed with pain but fought through it, tried to maneuver himself so that he could get his feet under him, to rise and stand with Egil, but the prolonged agony nearly caused him to pass out. He could barely breathe. He felt as though a boulder were on his chest, and he knew what it meant: Blood was filling his lungs. The sound he’d heard that reminded him of surf wasn’t the creature; it was his respiration, his impending death.

  Again? he wondered.

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  Nix saw Egil’s tracheal lump work as the priest swallowed some hard truth. Egil glanced first at Nix, then off to his right, and said, “Do it if you can, Jyme. Do it now.”

  The words and what they implied opened a path through Nix’s pain and brought him a moment of clarity.

  Jyme’s voice carried from outside Nix’s field of view, though Nix knew that Jyme stood at the place that was no place, that was every place, that was the only place, the Fulcrum.

  “I don’t— How?” Jyme asked.

  Once again Nix pressed his hands on the cold floor, tried to move his body so that he could see Jyme, but the pain brought another scream. He faded, unconsciousness beckoned, but he held on, forced himself to hang on. He blinked hard, shook his head, and raised a hand feebly in Jyme’s direction.

  “Small changes,” he said, but his broken chest could make the command little more than a strangled whisper that ended in a bloody, painful froth. “Only small changes, Jyme.”

  The creature roared, took another step toward Egil.

  Jyme spoke again, his voice wearing a hint of panic. “I don’t know the fakkin’ words, Egil! This is Nix’s play, not mine. Nix, what are the words? Can you hear me?”

  “Just look at them,” Nix whispered. The words would almost read themselves. Jyme just needed to look at them.

  “You don’t need to know them,” Egil said, his tone strangely calm. The priest eased himself to his right, filling the space between Jyme and the creature. “Nix already activated them. Just read the stanzas like Nix said. You can fakking read, Jyme. Be the damned hero, now. That’s what you wanted.”

  “Small changes,” Nix murmured, though he was drifting and the words came out a half moan. He cursed himself for not having told them enough. “Anything more and we don’t know what will happen. Everything could be lost. Small changes, Jyme. Small.”

  Maybe Egil heard him mumbling, for the priest glanced at him and they shared a look that spanned years, maybe worlds. Egil gave him a single nod, a gesture that said everything between them, and turned his heavy-browed gaze away. His nostrils flared and he squared up to the creature, the same way he’d squared up to everything they’d ever faced.

  Nix’s eyes were
heavy, closing. The pain subsided, a bad sign. He heard Jyme speak but the words blended together, a rising surf again. Or maybe that was his failing lungs.

  Nix heard Egil shout and the sound pulled him back from the edge for a moment. Bleary-eyed, he watched the priest charge the monstrous creature, lone hammer held high.

  The sight made him smile softly.

  Whatever happened, he hoped he and Egil would meet again forever.

  —

  Jyme stood inside the socket in the floor, and the shimmering, translucent column of light that descended from the ceiling illuminated him, exposed him, separated the world he knew from the world he didn’t. At moments the light seemed present, at others, gone. At moments he felt present, and then gone himself. The whipsaw made him dizzy, made his footing questionable, his stomach queasy. There were writings on the smooth walls, etched or scratched into the metal by many different hands. There were images, too, alphabets he didn’t know, things he could not make sense of, that were not to be made sense of, that he feared looking at too long.

  Worlds gone by, he thought, recalling Nix’s phrase.

  How many times? How many?

  He stood on the spot, what could only be the spot, a hole in the world, a socket in time. It made him feel strange to stand there. He felt looked at, no, looked on, no, looked through, like he was barely there, like something he couldn’t begin to comprehend—some potential—filled the space all around him. The clock was some kind of spyglass or foci that had led them to the place that was no place, to the Fulcrum, where the universe looked down on men and laughed. For some reason he thought of the tattoo on Egil’s head, the sign of Egil’s faith, the eye of Ebenor, who was god for a moment and only a moment. A ridiculous, futile moment, no doubt.

  The creature’s roar brought him back to the present. His mind had been drifting, as if infected by the place, its potential.

  Be the hero.

  His own thinking, haunting him, mocking him.

  He might have already failed a hundred times. He couldn’t know.

  Small changes. Small.

  A temptation burrowed its way to the forefront of his brain. Make a big change. Be a lord or king or a god. Destroy the creature, the afterbirth, the palimpsest, whatever Nix had called it. It would all work out.

  Nix’s admonition warred with that thinking. Little changes or everything is at risk. Minimize unforeseen consequences. Just put in a contingency, Nix had said, a dependency woven into the fabric of the world. A small thing to help us along.

  Jyme watched as the irate creature flung Egil’s corpse against the wall of the room with no more effort than if the priest had been a child. Egil’s body hit the stone with a dull thud, left a smear of blood on the wall, and flopped grotesquely to the floor by Nix. The priest’s hammer rang as the head struck the stone. They were dead, and in death the same as in life: side by side. Jyme was alone.

  Be the hero.

  Those were his words, or at least his thinking. And he meant them. And they teamed with Nix’s admonition and won the war against temptation.

  He licked his dry lips and had to work to slow his breathing. Sweat soaked his jerkin and tunic. His legs felt as though they’d give out at any moment, as though he’d slip off the spot, lose his footing somehow, and fall forever. He was still exhausted from the climb. And he was frozen by the weight of what he needed to do. He was paralyzed by the uncertainty of whether he should do it at all.

  No, he knew he should do it. He may have already done it. Or maybe Nix had already done it. But the Jyme of right now didn’t know what would happen, and the not-knowing terrified him.

  The magic of the place-that-was-no-place stood the hairs on his neck on end, caused his skin to tingle. Fear magnified the sensation. He held the plates in his hands, their metal warm and vibrating, slippery, their potential already awakened by Nix.

  They felt alive in his hands.

  —

  The world, this world, awaited his decision.

  They’d fakked it up, the three of them. Fakked it up good. Everything they’d done had been for nothing, at least this time.

  How many times? How many times? He felt like he was missing something, something important.

  “Shite, shite, shite.”

  The hulking creature—Jyme still didn’t know what to call it, not really—turned on the barrel-thick trunks of its legs and faced him. Its hood had fallen away, revealing the misshapen horror of its head, the congealed mien of four or five human faces. Slobber dripped from one of the mouths; blood dripped from another; rotten teeth poked out of all of them, the angles wrong, grotesque. The many mouths inhaled and exhaled in rhythm, causing the creature’s form to heave and roll. Jyme winced at the sight of it. It was as otherworldly and impossible as this place.

  Most of the bloodshot eyes in the lumpy egg of the creature’s head moved about seemingly at random, though one pair managed to stay focused on Jyme. The mouths opened, strings of spit and blood stretched between the ruined lips, and they spoke together, but not quite in unison.

  “Give us what I want I will we will do it you don’t know how to do it I must we must do it!”

  Hearing its voice steeled Jyme to his task. He inhaled, lowered his chin, rummaged deep into his being to find the courage, and eyed the horror.

  “Fak you, thing. We go again.”

  All the eyes widened and looked at him, focused on him, and it lumbered toward him.

  Jyme looked down at the plates, the writing—the script had changed to the common alphabet—and recited the stanzas as the creature began to scream. The words poured from him, easy, simple words, nothing like he would have expected, and he felt the power gathering. He tried to picture in his mind what he needed to picture, tried to imagine what he wanted, only small changes, a little help for them next time through. The huge creature closed on him, the clubs of its fists raised to strike.

  Be the hero.

  “No!” the creature said. “It must not no we I must no stop stop stop!”

  As the remaking neared completion, Jyme realized his mistake, their mistake, the mistake they’d been making each time.

  He made the change.

  Be the hero.

  Rain soaked him and grunts leaked from between the rotted, misshapen teeth of his mouths and all he could do was smell the world and blink in the downpour and the night and all he could do was walk and seek and try to keep the grunts from becoming moans and the moans from becoming screams, and there was no release reprieve rest but only the monotony of fear and constant pain and solitude and despair.

  One clubfoot after another sank deep into the mud of the road he should not travel the road but he had lost his way in the rain and found himself on the road and now he did not want to get off the road because it must lead somewhere and somewhere drew him because he otherwise had nowhere to go forever. He’d had a name once, or names. He’d known them long ago but he could no longer remember them. They were buried under the chaotic heap of his thoughts and memories some his own some others he was a vestige a leftover an afterbirth the price.

  Afterbirth afterbirth he was the Afterbirth, a necessary by-product to the process but irrelevant after. Afterbirth, that was his name now.

  He murmured the words maybe or just thought them or moaned them it didn’t matter because he was the afterbirth the leftover. Strange worlds lived in his memory but he could not know if they were his memories because he recalled only vignettes and they all melded and made no sense and so he moaned at the building pressure of the past and so he was the Afterbirth. He didn’t know why he existed but knew only that the world he walked was not his world and it never could be his world.

  He could smell himself the odor of his flesh and robes and realized he could smell others too others not far off. He had missed them in the rain and now he was too close to their sweat their shit their menstrual blood the road dust the wretched debris of the world in which he was the most wretched of all and the world was not his world for hi
s world was gone in the casting of the Great Spell.

  He should get off the road and remain unseen on the edges in the shadows where he always hid, where he stayed out of sight because he feared life in a cage and because he knew the words of the Great Spell were lost and so the remaking could not be cast again. He diverted toward the side of the road, thinking to shelter in a copse of trees—

  “You a’right there?”

  The voice shocked him stopped him in his steps and the mud gripped his sodden boots and his sodden thoughts drifted for a moment out of the mire of their despair to focus on the crispness of the moment. He blinked and blinked under the depths of his hood and cloak, his body heaving, his mouths open and pulling in wet breaths.

  “I was askin’ if you were all right,” the voice said again, as a short, stout man stepped out from the deeper darkness under the copse of trees to one side of the road. The man was looking down as he stepped out, adjusting his breeches as if he had just relieved himself. His body was a normal body not an afterbirth not an unmade. A dagger and a short, wide-bladed sword hung from scabbards on his belt and a wide-brimmed floppy hat and trail cloak shielded him from the rain. He was a man of this world and the man looked up and was talking to him, to him, the man talked, spoke to him, perhaps because it was too far for the man to see him very well in the dark. The man had disease in him, eating at him from the inside, the Afterbirth could smell it. He would die soon, probably in great pain. The Afterbirth envied him and hated him for his mortality and weakness and normalcy.

  “Sky’s taking a piss, yeah? I like a little privacy when I do the same. Can take me a while, if you take my meaning. We probably shoulda just stayed nearer the caravan.”

  The man rummaged in his pocket for something as he approached, and the Afterbirth was rooted to the earth and when the man was close enough to see the Afterbirth, to take in his size and form, he stopped in his steps and the stink of fear rose on him.