The Artifact of Foex

by James L. Wolf

  “Now you’re abusing time with your carnal urges,” Fenimore said in his ear. “To use your singular word, fuck time, boy. Fuck it.”

  Abyss, how had Fenimore figured this out? How had he known that Chet had always had a love affair with time itself, with the past? He was too good a listener. Chet couldn’t help it. Aroused beyond reason, he let loose a wordless yowl as he came, squirting like a fire hose, pumping his juices at the cabin wall. It took a surprisingly long time to empty out as Fenimore milked him for everything he had. Then Fenimore sped his own pace and came deep in Chet’s ass.

  “Look what you’ve done, boy. At least I am circumspect as to where I deposit my seed, whereas you have sown it far and wide.” Fenimore slapped his belly in mild reprove. “Is that something an object would do?”

  “N-no sir.”

  “Clean it up. With your tongue.”

  Chet knelt over and lapped up his semen. With it came grime, sand and dust. Tears slid down his cheeks as he followed orders without recourse, the fog thick within his head. Forcing him.

  Chet was permitted to visit the bathroom and clean up before returning to the passenger cabin. In fact, he was compelled to return to the passenger cabin. There was no choice in the matter.

  The Flame were back from wherever they’d been; the dining car by the conversation they were having. They were clearly in a cheerful mood, relaxed, their footwear off. Journey was reading a book she’d picked up at the train station while simultaneously shaping her fingers and toes. It seemed like some kind of exercise: she shaped long, short, long, short. Knife was painting his toenails—his toenails!—dark green. It was the color of mourning in Tache, Chet recalled. A tribute to Aureate? Fenimore was still reading the paper, clearly for show.

  He beckoned to Chet and whispered in his ear, “You are to be silent about what has happened, my flaxen catamite.” Chet nodded glumly and sat beside Journey.

  “Secrets with Fenimore?” she asked lightly. “Chet, you’re still not looking well.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Fenimore caught his eye and smiled, then went back to his paper.

  Chapter 22

  Dreamtime

  By the next morning, when they arrived in Saene, Chet was delirious. He only knew they’d left the train because he had to walk. Journey was guiding him... or possibly half carrying him, he didn’t know which. He thought it was Journey but couldn’t quite make out faces. Everything was blurry and words flew over his head like anuros. Thoughts flickered through him, never-ending and incomplete. Chet found himself squashed with the others in a taxi, uncertain how they’d gotten there. Was Fenimore still controlling him? Chet couldn’t tell.

  Someone placed a hand on his forehead.

  “Think we’ll have to leave him in Saene? What about the Raptus?”

  “The connections are pretty loose by now. We may be able to go halfway around the world and not inadvertently pull him behind.”

  In his fuzzy suffering, Chet sunk into a more reasonable reality. Escape seemed vital, and he did not struggle against it. Better than existing in this world. Flickering hallucinations around him resolved into a more stable form.

  Chet—only he wasn’t Chet anymore, he had another name—smelled smoke and mushroom porridge. He opened his eyes. He was surrounded by a hand-hewn wooden building with opaque windows. They were opaque because they’d been covered with rice paper. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. Chet touched the rice paper; it was thin and delicate, dry under his hand.

  Someone was speaking to him. “...in charge of the ritual killing.”

  “What?” Chet turned and looked at the person.

  It was an elderly man with an elaborate combed and plated beard. He was flaxen and had honey-colored eyes. He seemed oddly familiar. Chet realized that he knew him... but the man was speaking, looking rather peeved. “I said, we must finish the ninth prong tonight, so you’re in charge of the ritual killing. Another girl.”

  Caught in the mechanics of the dream, Chet felt no horror at the idea of a ritual killing. He only felt weary. There was something tiresome about the situation as if he’d done this too often and the man was asking for more of the same. More blood. Always blood and viscera. Drugged drinks lessened the screaming and carrying on, but the blood was vital to their operation.

  He slid into the conversation as if on oiled wheels. “How old?” There seemed to be an internal logic behind his words, contextual and aligned with the reality around him.

  “Three and a half. Not one of Foex’s, I’m afraid. This one was bought from poor charcoal burners.”

  Chet felt himself sighing. “I’ll be glad when this is over and we can go back to peteinos and palaeoth. I’m tired of slaughtering children.”

  “Yes, well, magic propels us forward, not back.” The phrase seemed a pithy truth, repeated a thousand times without communicating anything.

  Chet made a face. He knew perfectly well the man was his superior, that the work they did would make the world a—different place. Not a better place. But progress, progress. Always progress. The Metacors smashed and destroyed; they were enormous and far too intelligent. Aerora sheltered the monsters she’d borne from her womb, while Foex—her second born, always striving to be first—challenged their right to exist. Terrifying creatures. Somehow Chet knew he’d seen Metacors, that he’d been killed several times by them, mauled by their tusks and flung about like a sack of rice flour.

  Endless war raged on between the Metacors and gods while humans—affiliate and unaffiliated alike—were trapped in the middle. There was only one best way to fight: create magical weapons like the one they were currently laboring upon.

  The war was a distant reality in this time and place, though. Chet watched from the back of his head, bemused, as he went about his day. He spoke to a servant, checked ongoing magical workings, and stirred something foul and herbal in a pot over a fire. Chet felt awed at the sight of wild othnielia at the gate, though his dream doppelganger apparently saw them daily. He always fed the othnielia—upright reptiles, standing only a few feet higher than men with intelligent eyes, their babies clinging to their backs—this time of year during their migration across the continent.

  Everything was vivid under his hands, his eyes. Chet sank deeper into the reality, comforted. He was deeply in love with this. It felt so right.

  Then... he laid a little girl on a stone slab.

  She was asleep. Drugged. The girl was tiny and—despite her famine-rounded belly—wonderfully perfect. She was at that phase in life when she looked more like a fairy-tale creature than a human being. He checked her eyes beneath her eyelids, mostly out of curiosity than any real need—yes, they were dark eyes. Not the honey yellow of a reincarnating Magician’s soul. He’d killed colleagues before, of course, trapped in minute female bodies; best to release them into their next life as Foex decreed. Chet sighed, knowing he needed to do this. It was necessary. He was a responsible and respected individual who did what needed to be done. Chet recited the correct incantation. He took up the ritual knife, tightened his grip, and—

  No! Chet cried out as the person—not himself, not himself—cut her throat, a swift mercy stroke. More ritual cuts. The body bled into purposeful grooves on the table, dripping into a pan at the end of the table.

  Chet lost his grip on the dream reality, panicked and screaming inside.

  There was something cool and wet on his forehead. A washcloth? But... but there were no washcloths in Crimson-Era Eicha. As if by naming the reality he’d experienced, the remainder dissolved around him. Chet felt as if he was rushing back into his body.

  Yet he'd been in his body all along.

  His confusion palpable, Chet opened his eyes. He was lying in a stranger’s bed in a thoroughly modern space. There was a high roof with exposed pipes and blocky walls of concrete. The bed itself was large and airy with a white comforter; it was set on a platform, raised above a living space below. Everything around him was pewter grey or white, with geom
etric, burgandy-and-green prints thrown in for good measure. A loft apartment? It was in an urban area to judge by the traffic noises and honking outside the frosted, sheet-glass windows.

  Chet licked his lips. They were crusty... so were his eyes for that matter. Something wet fell off his head. It was a washcloth. So that hadn’t been his imagination. He was naked below the comforter except for a pair of underwear, not his own.

  “Oh, you’re awake.”

  Chet looked over his shoulder, his neck aching as if he’d slept on it wrong. A Flame was descending stairs from a higher platform. Her skin tone was light bisque and she wore blue scrubs. Her manner was brusque and professional as she took his hand, her fingers touching his wrist. She paused, looking at the clock on the wall. Chet relaxed after a minute. She wasn’t seducing him—not that he wouldn’t mind being seduced by her, at least in her current face and figure—she was checking his pulse.

  “Who are you?” he said, his voice raspy.

  “My name is Doyen Quor. As you are not a god affiliate, you may call me by my given name, Quor, and not my title," she said, reaching over to grab something from the bedside table—a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope. Quor fastened the cuff around his upper arm and began pumping, handling the stethoscope with practiced professionalism.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Used to be. It’s too hard to get a license these days, and I have no money at the moment. Therefore I’m a registered nurse. Just got off graveyard at the hospital.”

  Chet glanced around the loft apartment; they seemed to be alone. “Where are the others?”

  “Gone. You’ve been delirious almost two days. They left early this morning when I got home from work to catch a train to Allistair. They seemed to feel their errand was more important than seeing you well.” Quor frowned. “If you ask me, they’re acting a little strange. I’ve rarely known Journey to be so uncaring. It made me wonder if you’ve done something to offend her, and, of course, now I’m stuck with you.”

  “Abyss,” Chet whispered. Fenimore had to be in control. He grabbed Quor’s arm as she removed the blood-pressure cuff, upset beyond measure. “Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you let them go?”

  Quor blinked. “Journey and Knife? They know what they’re doing. Why should I stop them?”

  “...Never mind.” He wanted to tell her about the Raptus but couldn’t. Fenimore’s order of silence was apparently still in effect. Such a powerful tool.

  He blinked tears. Fenimore had told him to grow up, to be a man. He’d faced similar criticism all his life. Now his friends were gone, and he was alone in a foreign city-state under the care of this cold stranger. He still felt sick and weak, his body wrung out. Undone, Chet rolled over and sniffed into the pillow. To his relief, Doyen Quor set a box of new-style paper tissues on the bed and left him be. Chet snuffled into tissues, gulping sobs until they were nearly inaudible whimpers.

  Journey and Knife had left him. They’d left with Fenimore. Did they know they were the only people standing between Fenimore and full control over the Raptus, and therefore control over the people of Uos? It was too late for him to say something: Chet was sundered, rejected, left behind. He had no value. What could he do? Go home? Follow them? How could he do anything when the Raptus still controlled him?

  Quor puttered around the apartment, in earshot if not sight. He felt unwelcome, an annoyance for her. I should go.

  Though it made his head spin, Chet was attempting to climb out of the bed just as Quor popped up the stairs, a big tray in hand. “What are you doing?”

  “You didn’t ask for me to stay here. I should go find a hotel or something...” And, er, my clothes. Did he even have money? Had Journey and Knife left him anything? They were sort of being funded by Chet’s father, after all.

  “You stay put. You had a fever of a hundred and five at one point. You’re lucky your brain isn’t fried. I was all set to take you to the emergency room at my hospital when you started cooling off.”

  “Oh, wow. That explains the dream. It seemed so real.”

  “Mmm.” Quor set down the tray. It held dry toast and a big glass of lychee juice—an invalid’s breakfast. “Here, you need to rehydrate.”

  Chet sipped, eyes half closed as he tried to recall more of the dream. “It was like... I was in Eicha during the Crimson Era. There were all these little historically accurate details.” He could even remember a few that he hadn’t noticed during the dream proper: the woven rush mats on the floor, for example, sprinkled with herbs for cleanliness and good humors. The curved blade the other guy had worn, slung across his chest like Fenimore wore his hunting blade. The man had had honey eyes and had spoken to him like he was—

  “I was a Magician!”

  “What?” Quor cried out, startled.

  Chet smiled apologetically. “Sorry, didn’t mean to yell. I mean I was a Magician in my dream. This other Magician was talking to me. I, um, I killed a little girl. Pantheon, she was little: only three and a half years old. That’s what made me wake up. I couldn’t... I mean, I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, yet it was so clear. The person I was in my dream—he didn’t do it out of malice. He didn’t even like doing it, but he felt like he had to, as if it were just another chore to get out of the way.”

  “Abyss.” Quor’s eyes narrowed, and she regarded him curiously. “I understand you’re wrapped up in this business with the Raptus. Knife and Journey are both confused as to why you and the other guy, LaDaven, became bound to the Raptus.”

  “I wish I knew,” Chet sighed. Aureate hadn’t been able to answer the mystery for him. Now he’d never know why he’d been chosen.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Chet, has it ever occurred to you that you really were a Magician?”

  Chapter 23

  Professional Opinion

  “What?” Chet cried, staring at Doyen Quor in shock. She sounded so certain; it was less a question and more a statement of fact.

  Quor sat and folded her hand. “You need to keep drinking.”

  Chet glared at her. “I’m not doing anything until you explain what you just said.”

  “Very well. Tell me, where do human souls come from before we’re born? Where do we go after we die?”

  He couldn’t fathom why she was bringing up these sorts of irrelevant doctrine questions now. “Is this a trick? We come from the black ether between the stars. We return there when we die.” The rote answer rose readily to his dry lips. He was thirsty at that. He self-consciously gulped lychee juice, and Quor nodded approval.

  “That’s an answer any Literati might have given me. I’m grateful you’ve not pledged to Philapo yet—” She held up a restraining hand as he opened his mouth. “Yes, yes, I know, you’re not at all interested in becoming Literati, Journey told me. In any case, I’m grateful you’re not because they’d argue about this forever with me.”

  “Argue about what?”

  “If human souls come to and from the ether, how do you explain gods like Foex and Pelin engendering reincarnation?”

  “Obviously, they catch you before you go and push you back to Uos again.” Chet licked his lips. He wanted more juice but didn’t want to end the conversation.

  Though he hadn’t asked, Quor picked up the glass and walked downstairs. Her voice called back, “Has it ever occurred to you to question how they do that? I mean, it seems a huge expenditure of energy, even for a god. There are about twelve hundred Flame who reincarnate on a regular or semi-regular basis, yet Pelin still needs to take care of other business in her life. How can she be on the lookout for dying Flame all the time?”

  “You couldn’t possibly think I know the answer to that.”

  Quor reappeared with both a glass of juice and the bottle in hand.“You’re such a good scholar. I like the way you don’t assume you know the answer when you don’t.”

  He ducked his head shyly. “Thank you.”

  “Look, I’ve been around a while. You start to notice patterns. There are plen
ty—plenty!—of people walking Uos who’ve been here before. People who are not Flame and never have been. Some were Flame once or twice but chose not to initiate again. We call them loopers. Privately, of course, as it’s not ethical to tell people this sort of personal information. Journey and Knife would never share with you what I just said. They told me they have no doubt whatsoever that you’re a persistent and voracious looper.”

  “They said what?” Chet recoiled, wishing he could pull the covers over his head. “No, wait, back up. How can there be such a thing as randomly reincarnating people?”

  “Yes, exactly. How can there be unless the gods have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it? Listen, you’ve studied the works of Magicians in detail, yes? You know something of Foex’s style. He never consciously wasted energy. He was like a card player who used every single card in his hand and wasted no moves, counting and tracking every card in the deck. What if instead of expending gregarious amounts of time and effort grabbing people before they returned to the ether, he simply utilized a natural phenomenon? Twisted it around to meet his needs. What if, instead of instigating reincarnation, he simply made his human affiliates aware of their past-life memories?”

  Chet frowned thoughtfully. “So he didn’t have to keep teaching the same people the same information.”

  “You got it.” Quor smiled approvingly at him. “Pelin does the same thing, mostly because she feels we have a right to know and enjoys deepening relationships over time. We remember our past lives upon initiation.”

  Chet lay back in bed. “So I’m a looper?”

  Quor sighed. “Don’t take my word for it.”

  “But—but you said...”

  “What possible good could come of knowing about your past? You’re in this body now. This life.”

  “I think I have a right to know.” He glared. Hadn’t she just said her goddess believed in freedom of this sort of information? “Why do you get to have automatic access to this knowledge, yet I can’t? Don’t trot out that old garbage about how you’re a god affiliate and I’m not. That’s an answer I’ve never accepted as anything but begging the question, worse than when a parent says, ‘Because I told you so.’”