Chapter Twenty-One #4
felt a tingle in the tiny corpuscles within my cloud, and I knew I was finally
being called again. And when I answered, it was Berith who spoke. And he. . .
.”
The
cloud shuddered.
“He
told me everything. Your entire life. There was not much to tell, from the
sound of things. Just training and lessons and the sound of a cracking whip.
And after all that time and effort, after he had spent decades of his life
meeting my demands . . . he had still decided to kill you. In a few days, he
said, you would be swallowed by the desert. You would die of wyrms or thirst. Neither would be
pleasant. There was nothing at all I could do to stop it. Berith let his words
impale me. As I was numb with shock, he asked if I was proud of myself. He told
me just how long he’d been waiting to say that I was no brother of his, any
longer. He said I should’ve just accepted my death when it came, instead of
forcing him to come and finish the job.”
More
wisps leaked from the invisible barrier, twisting in the air, spreading out
into dust.
“I lost
my mind,” Caine said. “That is really the only way to put it. I snapped my
final strand. I gathered every bone I could find and, when he entered the tomb,
I lashed at him with everything I had, and it was completely useless, because
he was Berith the Bone Hunter, and he had used our family’s talent for
cross-specialization to amass an army of thralls, and even though I knew my
fate was sealed, the only motivation I had left was spite and a wounded, animal
rage, and so rage I did, to the final spitting breath. When you appeared, I
thought you were his reinforcements, or some wandering scavengers, and if I
hadn’t been concentrating most of my mass on Berith, I would’ve slaughtered you
without a second thought. It was only afterward, when I was listening, that I
realized. . . .”
A
high-pitched whine began to ring from the device. By now, most of the gauges
had died. The soul inside was beginning to drift apart, growing thin and
transparent.
“Oh,”
Caine said, quietly.
Isaac
clutched the device, running his hands over the dials and switches. “What’s
happening?”
“It’s
out of energy. The obelisk. . . .” There came a warbling sigh, thin and
whistled. “I think I’m losing the memories.”
“Wait,
wait.” Isaac leaned forward, tugging at the pipes below. “Is there another
source of energy? Can it transmutate, like a scroll?”
“Gods,”
Caine said, “I want to remember her face.”
“Father!”
“Isaac—”
“If I
cast some fire, there should be at least a minutiae of transfer—”
“Isaac,”
Caine said. “I’ve accepted this. It has been a long time coming.”
The whining grew louder. Pressurized gas hissed from the top of
a device, smelling of metal and lightning. Inside, the soul churned like bugs
within a jar.
“Tell
me what to do,” Isaac said. “You’ve studied this device. You must have some
notion of its inner workings, how to spin the metal a little longer. You must
know how to save yourself.”
“I have
no idea.”
“Why
not?” Isaac nearly yelled.
“Because
the last time I saved myself, it ruined your life.”
Isaac
tried to think, tried to ignore the alarms and hissing gas and the reeling of
half a dozen gauges. All his lessons on mechanical instruments fell through his
mind, like sand through a clenching fist.
“I want
you to forget about me,” Caine said. “I want you to leave this tomb and never
return. I want—”
Isaac
slapped at the buttons, hoping for some manner of reaction. Most of them were
dead or rusted shut. “Why didn’t you warn me? I could’ve tried to save some of
the energy. I could’ve done something!”
“Listen.
You have to leave. The Diet will send assassins. The treasure is below. Take as
much as you can. Use it to start a new life.”
He
rattled the metal cylinder back and forth, like rocking a vase. “You could’ve
let the Diet in from the start. They could’ve studied this instrument. They
could’ve saved you!”
“Isaac,
if there was another way, none of this would’ve happened.”
The
soul had turned from a gaseous ball into a long, spreading shape, like a cloud
drifting through the sky. The air glinted with dust and energy.
“Press
the button,” Caine said. “Please. I’m losing it all, and I want to remember.
You and her.”
It was
a large, red circle in the center of the device. There was a faint oval stamped
into the layers of dust, like a fingerprint from decades before. For a moment,
Isaac uncurled his fingers, reaching out. He stopped halfway, finding his hand
shaking.
The high-pitched
whining filled his ears. On the interface below, all the lights had died.
“I
heard you talking in the tomb,” Caine said, his voice faint and warbling.
“Follow your dreams. Travel the world. Never stop learning.”
Streams
of purple light drifted out from the device, spreading through the air in a
glittering wave.
“Don’t
let any of us keep you waiting. Do it for yourself.”
Isaac
laid his finger on the button. It was cold and riddled with dust. He could feel
the mechanism already start to give.
“I’m so
proud of you, Isaac.”
His
vision blurred. His hand trembled.
“Live
your life. Be happy.”
“Goodbye,
father,” Isaac said, and pressed the button.
There
was a mechanical shunt. All at once, the purple cloud came spilling forward,
tendrils rubbing against his robes like a fine mist, and, for just a sliver of
time, he almost felt wrapped in a hug, each of the arms made of fog and light.
An instant later, the contact began to dissipate, breaking apart into streams
and wisps, vanishing into the dust. He found himself clutching desperately at
the last little strands, failing to grasp a single solid form. In the end,
there was only dust, swirling through the eddies of air.
He
looked down at his empty hands. His palms were smeared with the blood of his
uncle. His strength gave way, and he felt himself falling forward, his head
leaning against the cold metal of the necromancer’s device, his injuries
screaming, his stomach aching from hunger, and he was filthy and tired and
weak, and he cried until all the pains and wants became a single, large, gaping
wound.
Zaria
came up behind him. Without a word, she kneeled down, wrapped him in her arms,
and held him tight.
He
cried until the tears were streaming down his face, until he heaved and gasped,
until the noises that came from his throat were more guttural and wretched than
any he had ever made before. He cried until the pain inside him was flooding
out, raw and livid and endless, feeling as if his soul had been ripped from the
fibers of his flesh, like the innumerable victims of the necromancer factory.
He took
a clutching grip of Zaria’s arms, moaning something inarticulate. She hugged
him tighter. He stopped trying to speak.
When he
finally regained himself, the green torchlight still burned above the dais. There was still lab equipment on the benches, chemical
vials on the shelves, skeletons on the testing rigs. Dust still swirled in the
air. The skeleton of the necromancer still reclined in her chair, her skull
gaping in shock towards the ceiling, as if she could not believe that her time
had truly come.
The
only thing that had changed was the necromancer’s device. It was no bigger than
a steel cuirass, lying empty and unpowered. With his
vision still blurring through tears, he found it incredible that everything
around him had remained just as it was, because his entire world had just
changed forever, and, yet, almost nothing about the world had changed. It
seemed outrageously unfair that everything could continue to exist as it was.
Isaac
rested his head in the tufts of fur around Zaria’s collarbone, absently rubbing
his fingers along the device. The metal felt very cold.
“He
waited for you, love,” Zaria said, loosening her arms. “He waited a very long
time. He scoured every chance he had, just to give one to you.”
A sob
rocked his chest.
“You
bein’ here made him happy, for just a moment. That was enough.”
The
dust curled in the air. It seemed to twist with a life of its own. Isaac
watched the eddies and curls, remembering the way the necromancer souls had
flown through the flakes and specks, as if conducting their energy through the
strangely metallic debris. He hoped, very briefly, that his father would still
be with him, watching his son through some scattered, intangible means, gazing
on through the years, his essence contained forever in the wind and sky and
sand.
He
looked at the device, and he glanced around the dusty, gloom-filled room, and
he hoped just as quickly that his father was truly dead, that the dissipation
of the soul brought an oblivion to all awareness, because if it did not, death
would only be another cage, another torture of the mind. In this way, he could
be glad that his father had died.
The
thought gave him a modicum of peace.
“Treasure’s
nearby,” Zaria said, beginning to stand. Her large hand squeezed his shoulder.
“Gonna look. If you need something, just shout.”
He
might have nodded back. She squeezed his shoulder again, heading out through
the closest door. Only silence was left behind.
A
feeling of weight came from the walls, the heavy pressure of rock and dust and
time.
Above
everything else in the room, Isaac found himself staring at the corpse of the
necromancer. Eventually, he found the strength to limp back to her chair. He
ran his fingers along the rotting fabric of her laboratory coat. He scratched a
nail at the scorches on her ribs. He peered into her empty eyes, wondering if
he could somehow divine her name.
She had
been dead all along. He had spent his entire life training to kill someone who
had died before he was even born. If he had not been exhausted from the day’s
efforts, the irony would have made him sick.
Isaac
stared into the necromancer’s face, rubbing the flag of the stripes and stars,
his thumb digging at the few fabrics of blue still remaining around the corner.
He tried to bring himself to feel some emotion. He looked into the empty
sockets of his nemesis, and he felt nothing but a dull ache, deep inside.
“Isaac!”
Zaria shouted, her voice far away, echoing out from what appeared to be the
depths of a tunnel. “You’ll want to see this!”
He
looked over the lab equipment. The sorceress had written a journal, and the
relative lack of rot on the paper suggested it had been carefully preserved
until just before she died. He carefully flipped through the pages. As near as
he could translate, the unknown sorcerer had been expressing regret. Some words
roughly translated to gold, pillage, slaughter, and worship. The words for
remorse and sacrifice frequently appeared together. Occasionally, the word for
gold would be next to another word that he could only translate as lightning or
energy.
“Isaac!”
There
was a small apparatus hanging above the bench. It took him a moment to
recognize it as the model of a star and its planets. He noticed, immediately,
that the sun was far larger than it should be, and the number of planets was
entirely wrong—for some reason, the sorceress had placed nine around the
central star. On the third planet, fingerprints were mingling with the dust,
suggesting that she had often palmed the little metal ball, imparting it with
some lone, special meaning. Isaac couldn’t imagine why, because his own world
was only second from the sun.
She had
written a word on the third planet, scratched directly into the metal. It
translated to dirt.
Soil?
It was
something to that effect.
For a
moment, Isaac looked at the small metal ball, feeling strangely wistful.
Slowly, with no ceremony, he released his grip on the necromancer and walked
toward the sound of Zaria’s voice, leaving a wind of dust in his wake.