by Welcome Cole
An instant later, something released a wretched shriek.
Beam grabbed Prave’s sleeve.
The cage jumped and rocked violently. Remnants of the burning yellow fluid splattered about the darkness as the cage thrashed. The man backed away, a hand raised to block the flying droplets from his face. The screaming quickly swelled, rising to a horrifying pitch. Just as the sound became unbearable, something clanked inside the cage and the voice fell silent. A tiny arm fell through the bars and dangled lifelessly over the edge of the cage.
The man stood in silence as the last of the yellow liquid dripped limpidly from the arm hanging between the narrow bars. He remained there for a time, watching the cage slowly rock, watching it in silence until it at last settled into motionlessness. Then he threw his head to the ceiling and released a horrifying wail. He grabbed the injecting device from the table and heaved it off into the shadows. As the instrument shattered somewhere in the distance, he at last turned away from the cage.
Beam told himself to breathe. His heart pounded hard enough to leave a mark.. He turned to ask Prave about the mortifying scene, but the mage was already walking toward the laboratory. Beam rushed forward and grabbed his sleeve, whispering, “Wait!”
Prave stopped and looked back at him. His expression betrayed his impatience.
Beam leaned in closer to him. “Look… Prave… I have to ask. If… if I needed to, you know, prepare myself for anything? I mean anything… you know, unsavory? You’d warn me, right? Not like back in the town? I mean to say, you’d tell me to brace myself, wouldn’t you?”
Prave studied him a beat too long. Then, as he turned away from him, he whispered, “Brace yourself."
Beam seized the caeyl on his sword’s pommel and squeezed back his aggravation. “Thanks, Prave. Glad I asked! Would it kill you to volunteer that kind of message once in a while? Damn me to hell!”
He threw a glance back toward where the cave’s door had been, but found only darkness. Cursing, he turned and followed Prave.
They rounded the end of the long center table and walked down the length of the side table, passing unnervingly close to the now still cage. The last of the glowing fluid still dripped lazily from the tiny fingers, gently plinking into a small, glowing puddle on the dark floor below the cage. Beam gave it a wide berth.
Still, as he passed, he couldn’t resist a perverse urge to look. It was definitely an arm dangling through the cage bars, but it wasn’t from anything living. It looked like the arm of a marionette, made from pieces of stick tied together with twine and smeared with something that looked and smelled like tar. He thought about the hideous scream from moments ago and hurried past it.
He met up with Prave on the other side of the long flanking table directly before the hearth. “Prave,” he whispered, “What was that thing in the cage?”
“A vessel,” Prave replied without looking at him.
“A vessel?”
Beam looked back at the macabre arm and the tiny wooden fingers still glistening with the remnants of the glowing fluid. As he studied it, he realized the black, tarry substance wasn’t just carelessly smeared on. It was tapered around the long sticks and joints like sinew and muscle on a living creature.
“A vessel for what?” he asked as he studied it.
“Forget his toys, Be’ahm. You’d do well to focus on the man.”
The words landed like a kick in the gut. Beam was pretty sure they were meant to. Prave wanted his unwavering attention, which could only mean that another maddening episode of questions were about to be served up for his aggravation.
The silhouetted man was just a dozen feet ahead of them. He stood before a smaller iron forge set to the right of the hearth, shoveling coal through a small door. He was a huge man, easily eight feet tall, but with the wide frame of a young Baeldon. He wore a frayed leather robe with dirty fur lining the collar and sleeves. His hair was thick and black as night and folded into heavy braids that slipped down well past his shoulders like tentacles.
“Don’t tell me,” Beam whispered to Prave, “Paex Gael’vra, right?”
Prave nodded.
“Well, he’s certainly grown into a big boy.”
“His mutation continued to progress well over a hundred years after the energy of the off-colored caeyls died out.”
Beam thought about that. “You’re saying the bad caeyls are gone?”
“Ay’a.”
“And the victims?”
“Most are dead now. This is one hundred years past your visit to the infirmary. Only the descendants of those who underwent the caeyls’ endurable changes live on.”
“Like him?”
“Ay’a.”
“How old is he now?”
“It’s of no importance.”
Gael’vra angrily tossed his shovel back onto the coal pile. He turned back to the long center table as the shovel clanged into the darkness. His back glowed eerily against the greenish blaze of the fire. His face was lost in shadows. He opened a small metal chest parked near the middle of the long main table, pinched a few fingers of glowing yellow dust from it and sprinkled it into a mortar. Then, using a pair of tongs, he took a small glass flask from one of the burners and tapped a few drops of the bubbling red fluid into the mix.
As the man ground the concoction, Beam leaned into Prave. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s creating your future.”
Your future. Here it comes. The Lesson. They always began with riddles. “Any chance you might flesh that thought out a bit?” he asked sarcastically, “Maybe give me something to work with? Guessing has been a perfect waste of time these past years, so how about you just tell me?”
“It’s been long since his first exposure to the fouled crystals at the God Caeyl’s crater. He now understands caeyl energy better than any living mortal, save me. And yet, despite all he knows about the perils of the Fire Caeyls, he continues to experiment with them.”
“To what end?”
“He was the first to embed a caeyl sliver into his skull, a Fire Caeyl sliver. The results forced his flesh out of synch with the mortal timescape.”
“He’s immortal? That’s what you’re saying?”
“No, not immortal, but he can live for centuries this way, just as all the great Caeyl Mages did in the epochs that followed. Yet, he remains unsatisfied. He wants ever more. Despite the fact that the off-colored caeyls have all long since died, their effects continue to grow in him. He continues to change. They’ve driven him slowly and thoroughly mad.”
Gael’vra poured the thick, glowing orange mixture from the mortar into a heavy stone bowl, added a few drops of shimmering, colorless liquid from a flask, then mixed them thoroughly with a long metal stir. Then he strained the concoction through a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth into a squat glass flask with a wide, gaping mouth. Using a small silver ladle, he then spooned a bit of the shimmering fluid into another metal tube. This cylinder was narrower and shorter than the one he used to inject the marionette, and it had a finer needle at the tip. Once filled, he twisted a plunger into the end of it and squirted a fine line of the glowing purple fluid into the darkness as if testing the apparatus.
“He’s abandoned all hope of reverting the mutations,” Prave said, “The original victims of the first endurable changes have bred and died, passing their mutations on to their children and their children’s children. The youngest of these new races have never known another life. In their minds and hearts, they have never been Vaemyn. They are only the people they are now, unique and perfect in their reflections.”
“Then what about him? If he’s not trying to revert the mutations, what exactly is he doing?”
Prave seemed to shrink back from that question.
“What’s is it now? What did I say?”
“He’s long since abandoned the hope of doing any good for his people. He’s now obsessed solely with his own immortality and with raising dead souls into material vessels to serve him. He’s been w
orking for decades to find the Eternity Solution, but he’s ever evaded by success. The prison cells lining the bunkers deeper within this mountain are crowded with the remnants of his… experiments.”
Beam envisioned the horrors that must lurk in those dark chambers, but that effort only pulled up the memories of the monstrous infirmary. He shook away the dread images and looked back at Gael’vra.
“In the past few years, he’s changed his tactics. He began his work using fresh corpses, but his attempts only led him to abject failure. He’s long since abandoned that original work. He no longer searches for a means to possess the dead or to pull demonic forces into the assembled parts of the dead.”
“Assembled parts of the dead? Are you serious?”
“The Fire Caeyl has granted him abilities we could never have dreamed of in the early days of our caeyl experiments. The flesh of the dead proved too weak, too unsubstantial to serve as fitting vessels for his experiments. In his madness, he’s shifted his goals. He has now become fixated on filling the shells of golems with the souls of the dead. Of the dead or… or worse.”
“Worse?” Beam looked over at the tiny mechanical arm hanging pathetically from the cage, and in that instant suffered a spark of terrible lucidity. “I… I think I remember,” he whispered.
“Tell me.”
“He… he thinks…”
“Tell me, Be’ahm. Tell me what you remember.”
“He’s bringing back his dead comrades,” Beam whispered as the truth slowly unraveled in his mind, “No… no that’s wrong, isn’t it? He thinks he’s bringing the souls of his dead back to inhabit new shells. But he’s completely wrong. Nothing he can do will ever raise the dead. He’s summoning something else, isn’t he? He’s… he’s guiding demons into our timescape, isn’t he? Damn me, he’s pulling them through to our world. He’s creating a wyrlaerd!”
“Ay’a,” Prave whispered, “This is the very moment that changes everything. This is the moment in which he unwittingly opens a portal through the Caeylsphere, a passage between our timescape and the Wyr. Here is when he loses the lasts crumbs of his humanity. This is the moment in which he achieves clarity. This is the moment when he sets his sights on much, much darker endeavors.”
Beam felt a rush of nausea, then a moment’s disorientation. He understood that Prave was pushing them through time again. When the sensation parted, they were in exactly the same space they’d been in moments earlier. The scene before them was nearly identical.
Gael’vra was still there, though he now stood before a more elaborate cage sitting on the long main table. Its bars were composed of a yellow-hued metal like pale bronze. This cage was strangely bound in silver chain. The tumblers clacked dramatically as the man keyed open the lock, then dropped the chain and lock carelessly to the floor. He opened the cage door and reached into the darkness with both hands and carefully pulled something out.
When he returned to the wide main table, he set a human-like figure down across it, laying it against the stone as gently as if it had been a living child. He carefully adjusted its position, steadying its head and aligning its arms and legs, then tenderly stroked its face.
Beam crossed around behind the table so that he stood directly across it from Gael’vra. The body on the table resembled a ghoulish marionette. It would’ve been three feet tall had it been standing. Its limbs were composed of metal rods and twisted wire carefully sculpted with tar, much like the tiny arm dangling from that first cage in the distant past. The torso was long, narrow, and encased in tiny squares of tightly linked metal plates. The head was also tar, and was similarly enclosed by a fused metal helmet that cupped it from behind so that only the makeshift eyes were exposed through a narrow strip. The eyes glowed with the eerie light of tiny Fire Caeyls.
Gael’vra placed a lamp on the table beside the golem and turned up the flame. As the light fully exposed him, Beam realized the man’s mutations were far worse now. His eyes were bulbous and oversized, set nearly at the sides of his head. His mouth was too wide by inches. The bottom jaw was filled with thick, jagged teeth that displaced his upper lip. And what Beam had first thought was a short thick beard turned out to be a brush of tiny tentacles that writhed beneath his chin as if alive.
He picked up an injector similar in appearance to the tubes he’d used before, though this one was more sophisticated, made of glass and bearing marks and numbers along its length. He gently inserted the needle-like nozzle into the helmet’s narrow opening, slipping it deep into the tar between the golem’s glowing eyes. Then he very, very slowly depressed the plunger so that not a drop was lost to waste. Once finished, he laid the cylinder off to the side.
He stood over the table, studying the puppet for several interminable minutes. Then he picked a long, slender knife from a line of them carefully laid out on a white cloth beside the doll. He examined it a moment, testing the edge against his thumb, then very deliberately slicked it along the length of his ring finger. He put the knife back on the table, then held his finger over the helmet’s gap. Several blood drops pattered against the tarry surface within. Apparently satisfied, he held his cupped hands just over the golem’s face, closed his bulbous eyes, and began to chant.
His chanting was low and monotonous, as persistent as a light summer rain. Time, or what passed for time here in the caeylsphere, slipped tediously by. Nothing continued to happen.
Beam looked over at Prave, who only held up a finger of patience. Irritated, he shrugged in resignation and turned back to the events at the table.
As he waited, he found himself thinking about Chance and the Vaemyd. He wondered if she yet lived, and if so, how she fared. For the thousandth time since his interminable incarceration in the caeylsphere, he surprised himself by hoping she actually was still alive and recovering. There was something peculiar about that one, something intensely familiar, though he couldn’t say why he felt so. Maybe it was because, in many ways, she reminded him of him. Strong, compelled, not easily persuaded… she was complicated… in an interesting way. Perhaps if they’d met under different circumstances—
The golem’s arm twitched.
Beam stopped breathing.
Gael’vra slowly stood upright. His bulbous eyes were open and wild with anticipation.
The golem’s arm twitched again.
Beam instinctively backed away from the table.
Gael’vra reached for the golem’s tiny head and gripped the complicated helmet containing it. A soft click resounded. He opened the faceplate. The oily face within shimmied in the firelight. The features were vague: a bump for a nose, two tiny, glowing yellow stones for eyes, no mouth or ears or hair.
The little arm again twitched.
Beam’s heart was trying to escape his chest, yet he couldn’t resist his morbid curiosity. He eased closer.
As he watched, a tiny seam formed in the tar just where lips would rest on a mortal. The seam widened. The tar fell in on itself like a sinkhole. It was forming a kind of mouth. The head rocked to the side. The mouth moved. A strange sound arose from somewhere deep inside the tar, a sound like someone scraping stone against rough stone.
Gael’vra grasped his breast. “Ay’a,” he whispered, “Ay’a! Move. Move, my child. Move for me!”
To Beam’s horror, the doll was indeed moving. Small bubbles surfaced from its tarry face, popping and quickly disappearing like boiling slurry. The mouth moved more determinedly now. The macabre thing released a shrill, visceral noise that Beam felt more than heard.
The arm twitched again. The forearm slapped the table awkwardly, hitting it again and again. As he watched, Beam realized with horror that this was no random spasm. The creature was groping for support. It was trying to sit up.
The vile golem finally found purchase against the table. It pushed itself awkwardly to the side, its queer, bulbous head tottering uncertainly.
“Ay’a!” Gael’vra cried as the tiny golem labored into a sitting position, “Ay’a! Come to me, my child! Come to me!
” He positioned his hands along either side of the creature, like a parent desperately wanting to help a child take its first step, yet determined not to intervene unnecessarily.
The little monster sat awkwardly on the table, wobbling nervously. Its head wavered unsteadily. It braced the table’s edge with tiny fingers and tried to roll to one knee.
“Stand!” Gael’vra yelled as he coached the golem with his hands, “Stand up! Come to me! I’m right here! Come to—”
The creature stalled mid-climb. It trembled now. It lost its grip and fell back on an elbow. It shook so hard, a foot broke free and clattered away into the darkness beneath the table.
“No,” Gael’vra said, “No! No, don’t—”
The golem fell forward. Its unsteady head hit the table with a dull, visceral thunk, then it fell completely still. An instant later, its head simply popped, like bubble of soap bursting. Black spots spattered Gael’vra’s leather gown. What remained of the head collapsed in on itself. Tar from the head and limbs oozed lazily out across the stone.
Gael’vra cried out. He beat his huge hands against the stone table. He cursed, then shrieked, then picked up the golem and heaved it into the green flames of the forge, which belched in violent satisfaction. He grabbed the metal injection tube and threw it against the wall in an explosion of glass and purple light. He ripped down a cage and smashed it across the table, shattering the boiling vials and knocking over the oil lamps. He threw his arms across the surface of the table, sweeping the tools of his experiments in to the shadows on an explosion of glass and metal. Fire erupted across the stony surface as the madman wrought havoc on his workspace.
Prave placed his hand on Beam’s arm as the dark mage raged before them. “You’ve seen all you need here, Be’ahm,” he whispered, “Bless me, I fear you’ve seen more than you need.”
XVIII
THE BOATS
KAELIF FOLLOWED THE TORCHES THROUGH THE SILENT DARKNESS.
He paid no attention to the path ahead of him, nor to the ground beneath his feet. His mind was a brushfire, consumed with the historic duties waiting for him and his comrades in the days and weeks that were to follow. The focus of his thoughts jumped erratically from one disturbing image to the next. He thought of the clandestine meeting in the forest the night before. He thought of Graezon and the Blood Caeyl delivered by the prode. He thought of the unwanted vision imposed by the Drayma, and the terrible ordeal awaiting him and his brethren.