Awakenings

by C. D. Espeseth

  Thannis could taste that soul whenever he wanted, transfer the energy through himself to another equally capable receptacle and taste it again and again for as long as he wanted. Remarkable.

  His second kill, a lonely Singer by the name of Nina Hui, whom he seduced and lead on a romantic escapade into his ‘recently rediscovered tunnels’ during his ‘anthropological studies’ at the Academy, was exquisite beyond comparison. The pure despair and depths of her loneliness was excruciatingly thick and tart as it coursed through him. She had felt her isolation with every drop of her being, it had been her singing which lifted her out of her gloom, and he could feel that undertone like sweet honey coursing through a sumptuous wine. She had let him kill her when she saw the knife. She knew what this was about, and said she wanted to be touched first, to be loved. So, he had given her that as well. He had drawn the blade during her rapture and doubted she had even felt it, as he kept his edges surgeon sharp.

  He had her essence now too. It sat next to that of the drunk on a shelf secreted beneath the Academy, only a few dozen steps beyond the entrance in Professor Attridge’s lab.

  Soon, a mere few weeks after he had learned of the marvellous new santsi globes, Thannis began to hunt in earnest, and those who hid in the quiet places and back alleys of New Toeron grew to know a new fear, a new predator, one who took their very souls.

  12 – Penance

  The Constabulary became a Salucian-wide policing force by decree of Ronaston Mihane in one of his first acts after ascending to the throne of the Nine Nations as High King. It was considered paramount to keeping the tenuous peace formed after the defeat of Navutia during the Union Wars.

  The long-established Constabulary of Palisgrad in Paleschuria formed the template for the new order, and the customary brown-coats worn by the Palisgrad constabulary were rolled out across the realm. As of the writing of this entry, most officials agree that crime rates have decreased, especially blood-feud murder rates, which have dropped significantly.

  - Chronicler Simon Rathelson in A Common History: 1851– 2850 ATC, 45th Edition, 2850

  John Stonebridge

  New Toeron, Bauffin

  It was late, and tonight the clouds had rolled in above the city coating the alleys and places of sin in another layer of darkness.

  John looked up at the inky black above him and knew there would be another murder tonight. He felt it right down to his core. It felt like those nights in those bloody mud filled ditches along the Xinnish front. It had been a different time then, the Border Wars, a time when you stopped wondering if you had a soul because all you felt was hollow and the only thing that filled you up was the panic of being attacked and killing those who were trying to kill you.

  He had known when they would try back then as well. There was a feeling in the air when the Xinnish sneak attacks would come in the dead of the night. Killers in muffled black leather armour who could somehow silently crawl over the mud between the trenches. Silent as ghosts they would come, on nights just like these.

  John’s hand went to his other pocket, the one across from his notepad and special pen. His shaking fingers found the metal flask, and he quickly got the top off. The whisky hit the back of his throat, and a small measure of relief numbed his jangling nerves.

  “Tut, tut. What would your superior think about that, Johnny?” Miranda quipped from the other side of the doorway. She was leaning on the brick wall of the Xinnish District Constabulary Office and already had her pipe lit as she too looked up into the night sky.

  When had she got there? John hadn’t heard her come outside.

  “I told you not to fucking call me that, you bloody xint,” John snarled. His jaw clamped shut a split-second later. The horrible racial slur spewing out from his rotten soul before he could stop it. Gods damn it! He roared inwardly, why did she have to antagonise him like that? Didn’t she know what that was likely to do?

  Miranda’s chuckle told him that of course, she did. She had known what reaction she would get the moment she saw him probably. The kid was damn smart.

  Miranda, still chuckling to herself, pointed up at the night sky with her pipe, “The ghosts up there have got you good, don’t they? Making your hands shake pretty bad tonight?” She turned to him with a quiet, understanding smile. “You know I don’t give a shit if you have a drink, right? I figure you know what you need to be battle ready. My nerves are getting to me too, I smell it on the air tonight. He’s out there hunting right now.” Miranda waved her pipe at the poorly lit alleys and streets.

  “I’m sorry,” John said, surprising himself that he could actually say the words. Her continual forgiveness of what he said made him feel unworthy in Halom’s eyes. Constables like her are what this new world needs. Not old fossils like me.

  “I know,” Miranda said quietly. “Thank you for saying it though.” She was still staring out into the darkness, which seemed to be suffocating the city tonight. “It’s too damn quiet out there,” she whispered.

  They stayed silent and listened to the eerie quiet as clouds cleared above for a few heartbeats before the fog began to seep slowly into the streets smothering all attempts at noise even further.

  They watched and John took another quick drink of his whiskey as his hands shook from the anticipation of whatever was going to happen to just come out and happen already. The gods damn waiting was dredging up the horrors he had seen back in the muck so many years ago. He could feel the tension in the city as if it were a rope pulling tight around his guts.

  The fog grew so thick they could no longer see the end of the street, and the glow of the lanterns upon the shifting white mass began to play tricks on their minds, making them see shadows which were not there.

  “Hey! Pipe down out there!” A voice yelled from inside the office, barely able to keep itself from cracking up. “Some of us are trying to work in here.” Big Bill, as his colleagues called him, chortled along with a few other of the other on-duty constables.

  “Gideon’s balls, Bill! You nearly gave me a fucking heart-attack!” John yelled back at him.

  “Not funny, Bill!” Miranda echoed John’s shock, “it’s bloody creepy out here tonight.”

  Bill cackled to himself inside the office and went back to the paperwork on his desk, obviously pleased with startling them both. “Do you two need me to hold your hands?”

  “Shut up!” They said in unison.

  Bill’s chuckling ebbed away as Miranda rolled her eyes and John ground his teeth, and before long, the unnatural silence settled upon them once again.

  That was when they heard the scream.

  ***

  Nobody had seen anything, of course. It had been the maid’s scream they had heard, and they had run from the Constabulary office a mere two blocks to the wealthier end of the Xinnish District.

  Two bloody blocks away was all it had been. This one had been targeted to make them look bad, and John had to admit, it had.

  There had been a constable right outside the damned house, and still, the murderer had crept right past them. John was sure the killer had timed it! The constable was doing rounds, not just standing guard, but the killer had waited until the constable would hear the maid’s scream then the bastard had walked right in through the manor houses’s front gate.

  “I was right there,” the constable named Trealine said in horror. “I bolted straight up the walkway and into the house. Couldn’t have taken me more than a minute and I was here, looking at the body with the maid still standing beside it.”

  “Take her back to the station!” John snarled at Bill, who was in turn, patting Trealine on the back in an attempt to comfort his shaken comrade.

  “And keep your voice down,” John whispered harshly at Trealine, “there are lots of ears listening.” John swept a hand at the gathered servants and crowd which had gathered outside the manor house.

  “Yes, sir, sorry. I just …” Trealine tried to explain.

  John brandished a single finger cutting her off. “
Tell me back at the station, got it?”

  She nodded, and John turned back to his work as Miranda directed the half-dozen constables who had arrived just after them. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the manor house, and Miranda was having to run damage control, and by the yelling, John could hear it didn’t sound as if the Constabularies stock was doing so well.

  How can I blame them, John said to himself as he stared down at the murdered young woman with yet another set of screaming dead eyes.

  He had strangled this one, with just one hand from the look of the marks on her neck. Long purple finger marks of a large hand wound three-quarters of the way round the victims neck, which again pointed to the perpetrator being tall and very strong.

  John noted the lack of disturbance of the furniture, how the victims clothes seemed relatively unruffled, the discarded romance novel on the floor.

  I wonder, John thought to himself as he carefully cut open the back of the girl’s dress, just below the neckline.

  Yes, there it was, a significant amount of swelling at the base of the neck, along with a long wicked looking bruise crossing the swelling.

  He temporarily paralysed her from the neck down with a savage strike with the edge of a blunt object. John wrote his thought down in the notebook which he had brought into his hand without conscious effort.

  “Where is it?” John asked the room full of constables as he turned to scan the shelves of books in the manor houses library room.

  “Where’s what?” Miranda said with her hands on her hips. “That is an angry crowd out there, in case you hadn’t heard.”

  “There.” John pointed to the polished golden features of an elaborate clockwork bird on the shelf to Miranda’s right.

  “The bird?” Miranda quirked an eyebrow

  “It’s base is solid marble,” John stated.

  “And the right size for that mark you’ve uncovered.” Miranda filled in as she shook her head. “How’d he get in?”

  “Window on the floor above.” John indicated the room upstairs with a tilt of his head.

  “The third-floor window?”

  “Are we really surprised that this man can also climb up what seems to be a flat cliff-face?” John asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No,” Miranda sighed, “I’ve seen performers do it in Wadachi, speaks to a wiry strength, which is also why he seemed to have no trouble strangling her with one hand.”

  “The blow temporarily paralysed her as well, couldn’t move and just had to watch him do it.” John ground his teeth in frustration. The young woman was barely sixteen years of age. Just like Keisha, John thought, and the image of his long-dead sister snaked through his mind once again. “Gods damn it!”

  ***

  It was another two hours before they left the house. The girls father shouted abuse at them all the way to the door, and John knew he deserved it. He had failed again, failed to stop this monster and had let another innocent life be snuffed out because he couldn’t put the pieces together.

  ‘Thannis’ was the name Adel Corbin and Naira O’Bannon had given them, fat lot of good it did. There were thousands of Thannis’s in New Toeron and over two dozen at the Academy itself, but they had checked through everyone!

  John checked his notepad as he walked and rifled through some of his notes. There was the Thannis who had worked in the armoury, two Thannis’s who were fresh initiates this term, which John had thought to be promising, but neither were particularly tall or handsome. Then there had been that Thannis Euchre, the one down in the lab with the santsi globe professor. What was it he had said about that one… his memory seemed a bit fuzzy on that particular Thannis.

  He thumbed a few pages back to look at what he had written. Thannis Euchre – a tall, handsome and athletic looking young man. Strong possibility. Has an alibi for each murder, confirmed by multiple witnesses, highly unlikely…

  “Odd,” John said to himself.

  “What’s that?” Miranda asked.

  “Oh, it’s just I don’t usually cross-things out when I’m writing. Argh!” John squinted, as a sharp headache forced him to close his eyes and squeeze his head as vertigo took hold of him.

  He replaced his notepad through practiced motions and grabbed the wrought-iron rail surrounding the front garden of the house less than a block away from the Constabulary’s station.

  “Wow, easy now.” Miranda grabbed John’s other arm and helped him sit down on the front step of the house.

  John held his head until the nausea began to ebb away. It was then he noticed he had tears in his eyes as well.

  “That one really got you, huh?” Miranda patted his arm as she helped him back to his feet. “You’re not going to fall over again are you, old-timer?”

  “Still young enough to kick your scrawny ass,” John growled as he wiped the offending liquid from his eyes.

  “Pfff,” Miranda scoffed. “I’d run circles around you.”

  John tried to smile but couldn’t. “I saw my sister when I looked at her, I mean.” John didn’t know why he said it. He never told anyone about this.

  “Keisha, my sister, that is, I couldn’t save her either. Should’ve been there for her. She was murdered, when I wasn’t there, and I see her dead eyes staring back at me when I find these young dead girls. I was the one who found Keisha, the whole town had been looking, but it was me who found her body, broken and twisted in mud. Her eyes blamed me just like the eyes of those other girls do...” John cut himself off and forced his jaw closed against the lump trying to force its way up his throat. “I killed the bastard though. Eventually, I caught up with him, and I killed him.”

  Miranda nodded, not saying anything, not judging him, just accepting and sharing in his pain.

  Eventually, she said, “My sister’s not dead.”

  John scoffed, “Why the fuck do I tell you anything?”

  Miranda scowled at him and held a finger in his face. “She’s not dead, but I see her face when I look at these girls too. It scares me, knowing what this animal does and my mind always drifts to ‘what if it was Mavis laying there instead of this girl?” and that’s why I do this job, to stop the monsters out there from hurting everyone else’s ‘Mavis’.”

  They stood in silence for a while, sharing the night air.

  “Your mother named you two Miranda and Mavis?” John asked.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” Miranda nodded. “I’m sure she thought it adorable when we were young.”

  John shook his head, “I need a drink.” His hand pulled out his flask, and he took a hard pull on the whiskey. He proffered the flask to Miranda after he was done.

  She nodded and took a pull on it. “I’ve got a better idea.” She said, pointing down the street.

  “I think that tavern is closed,” John said.

  “But the church two doors down isn’t,” Miranda replied. “And I think we both need more than what your whiskey can give us.”

  John nodded, she was right. He went to put the flask back in his pocket.

  “Woah, woah. I didn’t say we couldn’t drink along the way. We have at least a good fifty paces before we hit the pews. At least two more good swigs each in my estimation.” Miranda grabbed the flask away from John with a wicked grin.

  “I bet you and Mavis got into all sorts of trouble, didn’t you,” John said with a half-hearted smile.

  “Did we ever!” Miranda grinned and gave the flask back to John. “Come on, let’s go listen to how we can atone for our sins.”

  As John walked down the street with his partner, John wondered at how easy it had been to open up to her, something he hadn’t done in as long as he could remember. Something he hadn’t done with anyone but Keisha.

  13 - Retraining

  An interesting side effect of the engineered virus is that it also can copy the host's somatic memory which the nanites within the keys have also been able to upload.

  This ability may have some unforeseen side effects within the population.
>
  I’ll have to set up a filter when Kali tries to interpret the data.

  - Journal of Robert Mannford, Day 301 Year 18

  Jonah

  Outside the city of Dawn, Kenz

  “Gods! Why do we have to be downwind of that damned thing!” Fin nearly retched as he waved a hand in front of his face in a vain attempt to clear his nostrils of the horrific stench of the yamuuk’s latest expulsion of vapours from its rear end.

  “Forget these bolt canons, Commander, just turn that great shaggy beast around and let it gas the enemy into submission,” Branson added from the other side of the hissing steam-wagon. “Awk, that is foul!”

  “Don’t listen to them, Bamu,” Sheba, the newest recruit to their merry band said patting the enormous yamuuk’s hairy neck. The huge curved horns on either side of its head swung back and forth in response. “Those two smell far worse after they get out of their gunner uniforms. Raw onions bring fewer tears.”

  “Cut the chatter, soldiers! Keep your targets. The enemy has flanked us, wheel to one-eighty! Two-hundred and fifty yards!” Commander Naseen yelled.

  “Damn it,” Jonah cursed as he scrambled to help Branson push the steam-powered grenado launcher into position. “Keep the hose to our left! Ah, shit.” Too late, the large metal studded wheel pinched the reinforced pressure hose running back to the wagon where it connected to the boiler and main pressure tanks. The hose burst and hot steam geysered out of a puncture blinding them from each other. They dived out of the way of the hot steam.

  “Get another hose from the wagon, and close the pressure valve when you’re there! I’ll disconnect it from this end!” Branson yelled over the hiss of the escaping water vapour.

  Jonah ran back to the wagon, the twin flywheels of the big air compressor kept spinning, and he made sure to keep his hands away from the belt up from the wheel on his side. Why was the damn lever for the pressure valve so close to the belt! He pulled the handle down and saw the hose going to the grenado launcher go limp. He twisted and pulled the hose off the connection on the wagon to toss it aside.