Tar

by Taylor Hohulin

  His god had found a god.

  12

  At first, Marcus only gaped at Brendan, staring in awe at the throne towering over him. Then he fell to his knees and held out his arms in a plea for mercy. As Brendan stared down at him, he noticed infected bodies swirling around the column of tar he was now sitting on. To generate enough of the writhing black substance, these horrible creatures contributed the tar running through their own long-dead veins. Brendan hadn’t commanded them to do it. He’d only imagined what he wanted to happen, and everything with a drop of tar in it came to his aid.

  “What...who...are you?”

  Marcus’s voice trembled. He was no longer staring at Brendan. He was bent in on himself, head between his knees.

  Brendan didn’t respond, but not because he was hiding anything. He didn’t know the answer to Marcus’s question. He didn’t know why he could do what he could do, or why the tar refused to harm him. All he knew was he’d never dreamed of having this much power.

  And a dark part of him wondered how much more awaited his discovery.

  “Asmodeus didn’t take you. He...he obeys you?” Marcus said, never lifting his head. “I’m sorry—I didn’t know! I only know he does not come for me as long as I keep the offerings coming.”

  Curious about the extent of his power, Brendan called forth a tentacle from the tar beneath him. It stretched out, bridging the gap between him and Marcus. He guided it toward Marcus, lapping the air in front of his face. The pitiful man stiffened. His breathing turned to quick, urgent hisses. His ears flushed bright red.

  But Marcus wasn’t the only one affected by Brendan’s gesture. He sensed the hunger of the tar. It was already burning when Brendan plunged into its inky maw, but now it grew into roaring desire. It wanted to fill Marcus’s body, to consume his life, to gain a new servant.

  But Brendan held the tentacle back.

  Marcus trembled, the tar burned, and Brendan reveled in his power.

  “There...there is another offering,” Marcus said through chattering teeth. “The two you came with. I could bring them to you, and so many others besides. I’ve been bringing offerings to Asmodeus for years. If you take me, who will do it for you?”

  The fact was Brendan had no interest in feeding the tar. It gave him no pleasure to watch humans become infected. What intrigued him, though, was the chance to develop his power. Whatever Alicia did to him in the darkness of the tar opened something inside him. She’d unlocked so much power that the things Brendan had done before seemed like parlor tricks. The only way he would learn the true depth of his power was if he used it.

  And Samson would never allow that.

  The old wizard with long gray hair and torn jeans only wanted to use Brendan’s power to destroy its source. And what good would that do? The tar’s impact on the world had been catastrophic, but what if Brendan harnessed that power? All forms of power, if unleashed without control, were destructive. And clearly, whatever happened with Samson and his friends two thousand years ago had unleashed the tar with no control whatsoever.

  But Brendan could control it. He’d held the tar inches away from a human, and despite its hunger, it hadn’t struck. Brendan told it to hold its position, and it obeyed. He curbed the tar’s appetite. He bent it to his will.

  Samson wanted to eradicate the tar, but wouldn’t it be better to subjugate it? If his power continued to grow, Brendan might one day control all the tar in the world. Humanity would flourish once again, and what heights might it reach if the tar worked for it, rather than against it?

  Brendan stared down at Marcus, cowering on his knees before his new god. He quivered, waiting for Brendan’s command.

  “Bring them to me,” Brendan said.

  13

  Marcus, or some other lackey on the Hotel Shalom’s staff, had drugged Samson and Krystal. They staggered into the makeshift cathedral with hands bound, dragged by Marcus and the woman from the front desk. They were conscious, but only barely. Their heads lolled about, eyes rolling back so only the whites showed. Marcus and the woman pulled them as close to the pit as they dared and backed away.

  Marcus bowed pitifully, but the woman looked more dazed than anything else. Her hair was disheveled, her makeup all but gone. Gone was the perfect, put-together woman who’d checked them into the Hotel Shalom. While Marcus adapted easily to the idea of a new god, her entire world had been upended. There was still time. She would come to accept Brendan. She had no other choice.

  “Let Asmodeus feed on these.” Marcus kept his head bowed as he spoke. “Spare us, and we will bring more offerings.”

  If Brendan wanted to escape Samson’s quest, this was his best chance. Samson was disabled. Brendan only needed to allow the tar to do what its instincts already burned to do. It would hollow Samson out and turn him into a husk, and then Marcus would push the old wizard into the pit with the rest of the infected. After that, Brendan would be free to let Alicia guide him to new heights of power.

  But he could do none of this without killing Krystal.

  He supposed he could come up with some flimsy story to convince Marcus why Krystal was worth sparing. He could make her his priestess, even call her a co-god or use some other religious-sounding term—but would she go along with it? Would she want to live with Brendan after he killed the man who’d promised to save the world? Brendan might tell her he had his own plan, that he needed to kill Samson to save the world, but would she buy it?

  The more he thought about it, the more Brendan wasn’t sure even he bought it. How many of these thoughts truly belonged to him? How many came from the hungry creature beneath him?

  This power is not an ability you use, Samson had told him. It is a force that uses you. Was Brendan being used now?

  He realized he’d allowed tendrils to snake out of the inky column. They coiled around Samson and Krystal, not striking, but waiting for Brendan’s permission to feed. Shocked, Brendan commanded the tar to withdraw. The black coils unwound, retracting into the throne beneath Brendan.

  “What are you doing?” Marcus shrieked. His eyes were wide and terrified. All his dignity fell away, transforming him into a blubbering coward. He held out two pleading hands and cried, “Aren’t they good enough for you?”

  Samson stirred at the sound of Marcus’s voice. His head rolled forward as he fought the sedatives, but a gleam of understanding lit his eyes.

  And then his instincts kicked in.

  There was no time to react. Samson moved with lightning quickness and precision. No sooner had he glanced at the cords binding his wrists than they burst into fragments, dispersed about the room in answer to an unspoken command. He lifted his right arm, staring not at Brendan but at the tar beneath him, and then his short-barreled shotgun materialized in his waiting hand.

  He squeezed the trigger, and a bullet tore through the column of tar.

  Brendan shrieked in pain before realizing he hadn’t felt a thing. He knew the tar’s agony, but his knowledge was only that—knowledge. It was a knowledge so true and so close to his very core that it was easy to mistake for physical sensation, but he felt no more discomfort than he did when recalling past injuries.

  The bullet opened a hole only an inch wide, but the wound grew quickly. Some property in the bullet’s composition had poisoned the tar. Brendan knew this as instinctively as he knew the black infection’s pain. The wound spread over the black column, annihilating its body.

  Brendan’s throne collapsed under its own weight, but he remained suspended in the air, turning over the pit. When he took his focus off the dying tar, off the infected that wandered below him, he saw Samson standing at the edge of the pit. He still held the shotgun in his right hand, but now he also stretched out his left hand, palm up.

  Samson gestured for Brendan to come, and he came by no choice of his own.

  Brendan landed next to Samson as naturally as if he’d stepped off a staircase. Samson st
ooped to lift Krystal from the ground and slung her over his shoulder. As he lifted her, the bindings around her hands burst, just as Samson’s had.

  And then he turned to leave Marcus’s makeshift cathedral.

  Brendan followed Samson, passing between Marcus and the woman. He passed through the decontamination chamber, unmolested by the guard in the booth. And then Samson, Brendan, and Krystal stepped into the morning sunlight with the Hotel Shalom at their backs.

  14

  Once they were outside, it didn’t take long for the drugs to wear off. Even Krystal, who’d been especially affected, quickly returned to her usual self. They gathered on the stretch of road leading away from the Hotel Shalom. Brendan and Samson both leaned against the car, while Krystal lay beside it, propped up on one elbow.

  Before Brendan chased them off the night before, the men with flashlights had slashed Samson’s tires. Fortunately, tire repair was something Krystal did often in Newhaven. She flipped back the fingers of her mod, and various tools emerged from the openings. They danced across the ruined surface of the tires, knitting them together. Where the damage was too great, Krystal pulled supplies from her bag to create patches.

  “What you really need are some new tires,” Krystal said as she worked. “We’ll still be able to drive on these, but you’re going to lose a lot of traction. If you go too much longer, you’ll have a blowout for sure.”

  “We are not far from Black Falls. Only a little farther,” Samson said.

  Krystal shrugged—not unhappily—and resumed her work.

  “So they wanted to make you their god, huh?” Krystal asked. The car hid her face, but Brendan heard the sparkle in her eyes.

  He chuckled. “I guess Samson isn’t the only one who’s never seen anyone do what I can do.”

  Krystal laughed, an easy sound that was almost jarring after what they’d been through.

  “You didn’t seriously want to do it, right?” she said. “There’s no way that ends well for anyone.”

  Brendan remembered the thoughts flashing through his mind as he rode the column of tar. His ideas seemed so twisted now, but as he’d hovered over Samson and Krystal, they’d consumed him. He’d been ready to kill.

  But he said, “No. No way.”

  Samson let out a derisive snort. “You’re a bad liar. I saw the look on your face.” He jabbed a finger into Brendan’s chest. “Understand this. I spared your life in that hotel because I had to. I cannot destroy the blight without your help, as much as I wish otherwise.” He leaned in until Brendan smelled the stench of his breath. “I can’t kill you, but I can hurt you. I can rip your flesh open and close it again. I can snap your bones in two and knit them back together. I can do it over and over and over, all the while bringing you no closer to death. I spared you that treatment today, but next time I will not be so kind.”

  He stood over Brendan a little longer, his rank breath coming in hot puffs between Brendan’s eyes. Then he grimaced and stalked off somewhere else to wait until Krystal finished her work.

  From the Book of Memory

  After fleeing the arcanum, we came to the cabin that has become our home. It was empty and overgrown when we arrived, but with a little cleaning, we made it into a workable living space.

  Only two days after the representative drove us out of the arcanum, I ventured back to the city to pick up food from the market, only to find the blight had already spread at an alarming rate. The streets were deserted, save for a handful of shambling villagers with blackened eyes and blight oozing from various wounds. I found some who were clean, and they provided the supplies I needed, but a week later they, too, succumbed to the blight.

  Every time I returned, the scene worsened. It grew harder to find survivors. I went nowhere near the arcanum. I did not wish to see what became of Merovech.

  The blight is unstoppable. Once it plants itself on the earth, a wall, or a table, there is no moving it. It grows powerful roots that cannot be severed. It can pass through any crack, no matter how small. The moment it enters a living thing, whether through the mouth, the nose, or the tiniest cut, it consumes its life force and replaces it with its own dark will. It is these poor souls who contribute the most to the blight’s spread. They are driven by the infection’s hunger, and when they feed, that hunger is not divided between two individuals, but increased exponentially among all who hold the poison within themselves.

  We cannot kill the infected. We learned it is best to refrain even from cutting them when engaging, as the wounds only create openings for more blight to reach out of the bodies. There is no gash deep enough, no dismemberment extreme enough, to still the quickening dark inside them.

  I fear we have begun a war we are nowhere near equipped to fight.

  x x x

  Our most important breakthrough came when we found a small patch of blight at the edge of town. It took root on an upturned cobblestone, but it was too small to reach anyone who kept his distance. We could approach even within a foot in perfect safety.

  Though we could not collect samples on which to perform tests, this closeness has been more access than we have ever had, and thus a boon to our research. Just as our power has enabled us to speak to the world, it has also enabled us to listen to it, and as we listened to this patch of blight, we grew to understand its weakness.

  I say we discovered the weakness, but the work was Ansel’s. It was he who created the first tryfnium blade.

  We happened upon him one morning, unconscious on our makeshift work table. Spread over the table and under his head were notes we’d scribbled in our time studying the blight. But what truly caught our eye was the slender dagger, lying in the midst of the chaos of papers.

  It was the purest white, from the blade’s tip to the hilt’s end. When we woke him to ask where he found this dagger, Ansel had no memory of how it came to be. He remembered nothing of the night before. The only thing he knew was the white substance was called tryfnium. The word lodged itself in his mind and would not leave.

  Though we had no proof, every one of us was certain Ansel created this dagger. As we studied the blade the same way we did the blight, we found a substance unlike any other we have encountered thus far. This was not a weapon one discovered lying about or purchased from a blacksmith. The tryfnium blade was truly unique.

  I wanted to distrust the blade. It seemed too convenient that a weapon would appear in our study and pose no threat to us, but we had grown desperate. We had tried and failed to destroy the blight in so many ways that I was willing to try anything.

  And so we took up the blade which Ansel did not remember creating, and we sought the blight at the edge of town.

  As we approached, Ansel trembled. He had been adamant that he be the one to test the knife, but now, faced with the destructive power of the blight, he lost his nerve. The blade fell to the earth beside him, and he stopped in his tracks.

  Without a word, Samson scooped up the blade. He turned it over in his hand, examining it for only a moment before gripping the handle and advancing on the pool of black. He paused at the place we had learned to be safe from the blight’s terrible reach. Samson turned back and fixed me with a gaze that burned with such intensity I felt a shudder ripple through my body.

  And then he pounced.

  There was no hesitation. As was often the case with Samson, he simply leapt into action. The blight stretched out to meet him, but he’d already thrust the knife forward. Oblivious of the danger before it, the blight met the blade head-on. The edge of the weapon pierced the advancing end of the blight, and in that instant, the fight ended.

  There was no sound, no flash of light or rank scent. The blight simply died. Its mass split where it touched the blade. The dagger opened the tiniest of wounds, but before long, the wound grew. The blight’s substance burned away, starting where the tryfnium touched it.

  It all occurred so quickly that for a moment we wondered if we had tri
ggered a worse cataclysm. We wondered if the blight would reappear, larger and more powerful, or if some new creature would take its place. But nothing happened. Defeating the blight had been as simple as touching a tryfnium blade to its evil surface. I hesitate to write this, for fear that making the thought into substance will destroy the hope of its truth, but it must be said:

  The tryfnium blade could be the beginning of our salvation.

  x x x

  Now that we knew the blight’s weakness, we planned our attack, though that proved more difficult than expected. We needed to arm ourselves with more than a single dagger, but even now, Samson and I cannot create tryfnium. We both examined the dagger Ansel created, held it, spoke to it until we understood the blade better than we did ourselves, but it has been impossible to conjure any of the substance—much less in the form of a weapon.

  Not so for Ansel. After many failed attempts from Samson and me, Ansel took the dagger in one hand, turning it over and scrutinizing it. Then he closed his eyes, holding out his other hand as if to catch a raindrop. Almost immediately, a new blade formed in his palm, knitting itself out of thin air. Even more incredibly, it did not disintegrate like every other item we created from particles of air. The weapon remains in our cabin and has not diminished at all, though Ansel is no longer focusing on it to ensure it holds its form and substance.

  But this victory carried a heavy cost. No sooner had the dagger appeared in Ansel’s hand than he collapsed in a tangle of limbs and clattering blades. Samson and I rushed to his side and revived him. When he regained his faculties, Ansel remembered none of the events leading to this latest creation of tryfnium.

  It was then that we understood the true cost of our powers.

  I have often wondered if these powers were as wonderful as they seemed. I believe no power comes without cost. Just as a roaring bonfire cannot warm a crowd without the destruction of firewood, so I reasoned our powers could not exist without destroying something.

  Ansel’s loss of memory was the closest thing to proof of a theory I will ever find, though I cannot be sure. These powers came with no instruction. There was no master to teach us. The best I can do is observe the powers and their effects closely and come to the most rational conclusions possible.