The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  THE PULSE

  by A. E. Shaw

  Copyright © A. E. Shaw 2013

  Published by Antelope Horizons.

  ISBN: 978-0-9576381-0-5

  All Rights Reserved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Fear

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Background

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Lesson

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Fire

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Outside

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Revelation

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Mountain

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Parting

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Chase

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Sea

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Fence

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Man

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The City

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Night

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Mystery

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Kidnap

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Mappers

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Awakening

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Story

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Book

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Call to Arms

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Truth

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Plan

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Breakfast

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Agreement

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Journey

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Before

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Back-up

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Consequences

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Stories

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Journey II

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Pulse

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The Culmination

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Meeting

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Flight

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Preparation

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Dinner

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Truth

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Murder

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Arrival

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The Fallout

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The New Order

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The Leaving

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Fear

  A glistening pig is wheeled in, its back crackling-gold, hissing fat dripping from its roasted belly onto a mound of vegetables. Aiden and his guests barely notice: the table already embraces an infinity of golden platters piled to overflowing with steaming, smoking and oozing delicacies.

  The Great Hall is rich with the scent of meat and firesmoke, the thick air stinging the throat with the tang of dark wine and incense.

  Aiden is midway through storytelling, an account of an ancient battle, the lessons learnt from it. His guests are rapt with attention and awe, for his presence is the greatest honour there is.

  His arms rise and his voice lowers as he tells how the general falls from his horse; the guests hold their breath as all hope is surely gone, but –

  - the fire in the grand hearth goes out, snap, without warning. Its embers glow red and yellow. The resulting crimson glare turns the glorious party into a vision of pure horror, the guests’ open mouths rendering their faces masklike in the new dark.

  Aiden tries to speak, to continue his story – how kind of the room to add such drama to his magnificent performance – but no sound comes from his throat. The guests are clutching at their chests, fighting for their own voices, or, worse, for breath.

  A rumbling comes, a rushing too; they meet in the middle of Aiden’s mind as a roar which distils into a nameless, shapeless howl which splits the table with volume and ferocity. Infinite noise and calamity as the scene disintegrates in front of Aiden; the pig is buried under an avalanche of baklava and cinnamon buns and the guests disintegrate into a calamity of crowns and pearls and brocade.

  The redness intensifies and the howl peaks as an ear-blistering screech, and so Aiden wakes up, sweat-drenched, shoulders shining and shivering in the dank, chill air of his bedroom. He’s twisted the silk sheets he sleeps between down and around his chest, tied his knees tight against his ribcage.

  He meets the morning of the last day inside the only place he’s ever known wearing a cloak of pure and absolute fear.

  Not that much further from here, Aiden will remember this moment and see it as premonition. As proof of his own infinite excellence. But then, much further from here, both in time and distance, he’ll come to learn that he of all people should be much more careful with that word. Excellence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Background

  Aiden builds a fire in his room every morning. He does it by touch in his blanket-black room: there are no candles, windows nor even cracks in its hefty stone walls.

  He builds his fire from scratch, never making it easy on himself by doing the sensible thing of stacking the logs the night before to dry. He prefers to blindly search out each piece of the puzzle with his bare hands, laying them this way and that, stripping the driest, most brittle bark as he goes and knotting it to make the kindling he’ll place in the fire’s heart.

  Aiden’s bone-thin fingers have little else to do in the day, besides turning pages and pushing back his lank, limp colourless hair.

  Aiden is nineteen years old. His face has never seen natural light, his lungs have never known the pleasure of fresh air, and he’s no idea of what it feels like to walk for more than a matter of moments. Still, his milk-blue eyes are bright and busy, and his mind is keen and perpetually racing. He looks sunken and raw, new and wizened simultaneously; a fresh, pale seed desperate to spring from its dry, dead pod. Aiden was built full of potential, and that shines through relentlessly, despite his peculiar exterior.

  His day and night are entirely artificial, created by repetition and habit, rather by measuring of the Earth’s revolutions (which may, for all he knows, have long since ceased). He knows about the sun, but presumes it to be in the past, an odd presumption in connection with his understanding of physics and astronomy, but one of the many consequences of learning theory in a vacuum.

  He strikes the fire alight with a sparkmaker, a slim piece of clicking metal he imagines was designed specifically for his hands only at some point in the distant past. It fits the motion of his fingers to perfection.

  As the fire crackles into life it illuminates his room: square, bare greystone walls, the only furniture a marvellously ornate sideboard, whose polished surface is covered with tiny statues and small bowls of smooth, shaped gemstones. These catch the firelight eagerly, desperate to keep a piece of it for themselves.

  The stone walls are double-layered, designed for insulation and protection from a climate that died in a different age. Now they serve only to keep Outside right where it is, and Aiden well away from it. Thus far, they have been wholly successful.

  The fear that yanked Aiden from his sleep is deadened, if not quite vanquished, by the increasing firelight. Time to get on.

  Aiden pulls at the pump to the side of his bed, allowing gushes of ice-cold water to splash into the sink. He splashes his face with it and his features snap back from their flaccid, sleep-pressed state into their usual angular forms. He paws wetly at his bony c
hest, at his sharp-ridged shoulders, trying to wipe away the horror he woke up with. The shivers won’t stop, but he feels as if the water itself might protect him.

  He stands naked in front of the fire and focuses on his breathing. He has no business with fear. Everything is for me, he repeats, soundlessly. Everything in this world is perfect and for me. Everything, he repeats, with variations on the theme, over, and over until he crosses over from nervous to bored, detours into confused and finally ends up, as all teenage boys do, even in Aiden’s confined existence, at hungry.

  His clothes - a loose, white tunic, and soot-black trousers which button a little more loosely than they were intended to - are made of as fine a silk as his bedsheets. Aiden’s skin is so thin and insubstantial that any other fabric brings his skin out livid in a heartbeat. His shoes are silk-lined too, ankle-high, cased in a fine and satiny leather.

  The final layer of Aiden’s wardrobe rests on permanent dents in his collarbone. It’s a diamond collar, chunks of the precious stone worn smooth by who knows how many generations. The effect, sleek, grand and overly accessorised, is completed when he takes a small leather bag from a drawer in the sideboard and fills it with a selection of the smallest, prettiest jewels in the bowls. Only a quarter-palmful at most, not too heavy, but their presence makes itself felt once the bag is placed in his shirt pocket, over his heart.

  These finishing touches are a necessary extension of self, as vital to Aiden as any familiar. He’s been brought up surrounded by precious stones. They glint from every surface and fixing in his home. In childhood, they were as close to toys as anything he had, and since childhood, he’s worn them daily.

  The collar, contrary to his beliefs, wasn’t made for Aiden, but for one of the many great and terrible men and women that came before him. Some of his jewels are, in our terms, worth staggering sums of money. Some are little more than flotsam. To Aiden, every single jewel is vital.

  The fond rumble of the breakfast gong rises from the stairwell behind Aiden’s door, reverberating into a cheerful timbre as it fades away. Washed, dressed and accessorised, Aiden finally feels he’s successfully rescued himself from his nightmare. Fire fully taken, his room is fast becoming its usual cosy self. There’s such pervasive warmth to it, soft flame light highlighting and detailing every little ornament, that it’s impossible to hold onto the baseless, hidden fear so easily succumbed to in the night.

  He makes his way down dark, narrow steps, lighting his way with raw fire - a patch of fireproof fabric that holds a pinch of waxed woodchips which burn with a simple, single flame that lasts just long enough for the short journey from one end of Aiden’s world to the other.

  He trips easily into the library, high-ceilinged, stacked with a hundred thousand parchments and more, tracing the ages back to their dawn, resplendent with science and fable and tales like Aiden told in his dream of ancient wars both won and lost. The scripts he’ll need for today’s study are already set out on the desk. He selects one at random and tucks it under his arm to take to breakfast.

  His tutor, Eldringham, assures him every paper, scroll and book in here exists only for him to read. Aiden has read barely a tenth of these works thus far, but trusts there’ll be plenty of time to get through them all. Life revolves around him, so of course there’ll be all the time he needs to do everything he ought.

  He’s wrong, but there it is, that’s what he thinks, as we take up his story.

  The most important thing that defines Aiden right now is his vast lack of curiosity. He never asks questions beyond his topic. He has no existential queries, no crises, no issues.

  There are five other people in his life: three elders, Miriam, Michael and Eldringham, and two companions, Selina and Alej. Aiden behaves openly as if they cease to exist when he is not in the room with them. There’s a chance he believes this to be so. He’s too busy learning to concern himself with others. They, like everything else he’s ever known, exist purely to enhance him.

  He pads his way down a corridor to the kitchen, a long, practical room, all stone on all sides, toasty, rather than damp, thanks to the ever-burning, well-settled fire, which bustles gently, maintaining a pot of hot water on one side, a pan of hot milk on the other.

  The kitchen table is welcoming, but certainly not heaped with food like the dream table. Aiden’s personal diet is simple. In front of him sits a loaf of rich, dark bread that Miriam makes every other day, with half of the heavy clove cake she makes once a cycle next to it. The cake improves each day, its earthy, savoury flavour growing darker as the cycle wears on.

  Placing his papers neatly on the table, Aiden takes his bowl (porcelain, painted with jagged red stripes, his since childhood, hasn’t sustained a single chip in all this time) from the side. He ladles the bowl full half with the milk and half with the water, then aligns it with the papers. He cuts a slice of bread, then a slice of cake. Alternating them, he tears bits from the slices, dips them into the milk, relishing the taste, which is, he’s certain, tailored precisely to his needs, exactly everything a person ought to consume of a morning, the product of generations of evaluating what the best breakfast any human could have would be.

  Really, it’s the best Miriam can do with what she’s got. These hardy foods don’t go off in the sealed castle’s turntaking atmosphere of dryness and humidity.

  Aiden is halfway through his meal when the door at the opposite end of the room flies open with a yowling creak. Michael appears in the doorway, breathing hard, his old eyes wide and his lips fishing for syllables.

  “There you are…” Michael starts, for starting’s sake, in a voice that does not sound its usual gruff, sure-set self. Michael’s voice curls at the end of every utterance, intonation rising and falling in a way Aiden can never predict, vowels ripe enough to chew on, rich as the cheeses and the dark root vegetables it’s his job to gather from wherever such things come. Aiden neither knows nor cares about where wherever might be.

  “Aiden?” Michael says, his voice as if he’d asked Aiden a question he hadn’t heard (this is, of course, exactly what has happened). Aiden blinks and squints at Michael, confused.

  On further inspection, Michael doesn’t seem right. His eyes are bloodshot and his mouth is drawn tight and concerned. A strike hits inside Aiden’s chest, a fresh repeat of the fear that came in the night making its continued presence known, ready at any moment to clench at Aiden’s heart, letting him know that for all his chants and attempts to persuade himself otherwise, today, today is definitely not a normal day.

  “Yes?” Aiden replies, eventually, an age after any normal speech convention states he should have.

  “Aiden, the gate is open.”

  Aiden doesn’t react immediately. It’s as if Michael has said “the fire is burning” or some other clear and obvious statement of fact which exists in itself without any such need for comment.

  “What should I do?” Michael presses.

  Aiden’s first response is to wonder, Why are you asking me? Michael has never asked him anything before. But, questions must be answered. This, he has been taught. Statements require memorising. Questions require reason and response.

  The gate is open.

  This is an issue.

  The gate should not be open.

  The answer makes itself known immediately.

  “Why, Michael, you should close it.”

  “Very well.” Michael nods once and turns on his heavy-booted heel without further comment. The old wooden door creaks again, tired and dry on its hinges as it closes behind him.

  Even before it shuts, Aiden has moved on with his day, shifting his focus back firmly to his parchment, determined to move on from his fear. He takes one bite after another of the dense, flavoursome bread as he scans the fine and ancient script for new wisdom.

  His heart continues to beat harder and faster than usual - his body’s message would be clear to anyone who’d felt it before: you must get ready, the time has come, but Aiden does his level best to ignore thi
s, focusing only on what he knows best: how to chew, read, swallow, and learn.

  At this point in the crinkly, rolling parchment, the Old Empire is flourishing. A different people from our own, for whom knowledge was not the greatest prize. It is both quaint, and charming, to think of such a land.