The Memory
Page 6
‘Ruin is an Operator,’ Aranfal said. He felt himself backing away from the shadow man.
The creature nodded. ‘Yes. And something has happened to him. Two of these children of ours – the lady of Dust and the Bleak Jandell – built something, in our heart, a little while ago. It is a terrible thing. They placed Ruin within, but they did not know what they were doing. They have made him stronger than he ever was before. He is now greater even than us: than the Old Place. That, torturer, is a power to be feared.’
The great rumble came again.
‘What is Ruin doing to you? Are you dying?’
The creature shook its head. ‘Not yet, not yet. But that child of ours knows so much about us, now: he has sat in our heart for so long that he knows all our weaknesses, all our soft spots. He knows how to use us as he wants. He is so very powerful! Soon he will take us over. Soon he will become the Old Place. Ruin, the god: within all memory, and all memory within him.’
The shadow man began to grow, darkening the room. As he did, the other Operators faded away, and the Eyeless One began to tremble.
‘Only one thing can stop it. It is a memory, filled with such power that perhaps not even Ruin could stand against it. The object of the game, Aranfal: the First Memory of the Old Place.’
‘Then give it to me! Or give it to one of the other players. Or use it yourself. Whatever it takes.’ He looked at the shadow man, who was now as tall as two people, standing one on top of the other. ‘Forget the game. That thing will destroy us all, if you let it. I can feel it.’ He stepped forward towards the shadow, and some giddy part of him wanted to run inside it. He knew this was only a ghost, only a dream of the true creature known as Ruin, yet still he could sense its strength. ‘It must be stopped.’
The Eyeless One gave a little giggle. ‘Ah. There is the problem, our Aranfal. We have lost it. The First Memory. We have lost it.’ The creature laughed louder. ‘We lost it, just after the last game. We used to treasure it so carefully. But when the Machinery was made, during all that upheaval … we lost it.’
It clicked its fingers, and the images of Operators faded away, along with the ghost of Ruin.
‘Then let me look for it,’ Aranfal said. ‘Point me to where you last saw it.’
‘Point you? Hmm. We wouldn’t know where to begin.’ The creature seemed to think this over for a moment. ‘There are so many places it could be. Here, in the Hallway of Regret – we are sure we had it here, once. Or perhaps in Chaos. Or was it in the Hopeful Chambers? Yes, we are sure it was in one of those places. We need mortal help, Aranfal. Your eyes see us in such a different way. Yet you cannot look through all of those places by yourself: not before Ruin comes.’
The creature grinned.
‘It is lucky that there are two more mortals here, is it not?’
It reached up, gestured with one of those odd hands, and the floor opened up. Two people appeared from below, glancing around in fear and confusion.
It was Aleah and Brandione.
CHAPTER 8
The mountain was not what Brandione had expected.
‘This is a surprise,’ he said, as he found himself face to face with Aranfal, the pawn of the Strategist.
Aranfal nodded at Brandione, an uneasy smile on his lips. There was a change in the Watcher, and it wasn’t just that his mask was missing. There was something new in his gaze, in the way he held himself. Hesitation. And something more: a lack of that hardness that had made him such a powerful force in the Overland. Is this still the torturer from the Bowels of the See House? Or another man? But Aranfal was not the only one who had changed. They all had. How could they not, when the world had fallen apart around them, and reality had collapsed into a dream?
There was a woman at the Watcher’s side. The Watcher Aleah, pawn of Shirkra. She wore a faintly tattered black cloak, in stark contrast to Aranfal’s brilliant aquamarine garment. She glanced around the room with a hungry gaze.
And then there was the other thing: a creature with oversized hands, long limbs, and a vicious red smile. It had no eyes, but he knew it was watching him all the same.
‘You,’ said Aleah, pointing a finger at the creature. ‘You took us here. What do you want?’
The creature giggled, covering its mouth with one of its odd hands. ‘What do we want? We only want what all things want – we only want to live in peace!’
‘Its name is the Eyeless One,’ Aranfal said.
‘A bit on the nose,’ said Aleah. She sounded braver than she looked.
Brandione felt a well of deep power in this creature, greater by far than that of the Queen, but somewhat diffuse. He sensed that its powers were vast, but lacking in focus. It was an endless, placid ocean, while the Queen and the others were furious rivers.
‘You are the Old Place,’ he said.
The creature turned to him. ‘We are many.’ It grinned. ‘You are the soldier and the scholar. The Last Doubter. Our first child sees great things for you. We hope you can achieve them. We hope that one of you can achieve them.’
‘You want the First Memory to be found?’
‘Of course! We need it, you see. You know why, Brandione.’
The General nodded. ‘Ruin.’
The creature clicked its fingers, and a great shadow in the shape of a man appeared in Brandione’s mind.
‘Ruin is a creature,’ he said with certainty. ‘Ruin is an Operator.’
The Eyeless One gave a frantic nod. ‘Yes! Of course! A demon child of ours, who will soon take us over, unless the First Memory is found.’ The creature sighed.
‘The game has changed,’ the Eyeless One said. ‘The old games were for our amusement. This one is for our survival. You must help us find the First Memory. You mortals can see things here that we cannot. Do you understand?’
‘Where is it?’ Aleah seemed disappointed. She was enjoying the game, perhaps. I wonder where it took her?
The Eyeless One raised its hands into the air, and wriggled its long fingers. ‘We don’t know where it is. We lost it, a while ago.’
‘Ten thousand years ago,’ said Aranfal.
The creature nodded. ‘Yes. Not long. But now Ruin is coming!’
Aleah took a step towards the Eyeless One, who turned on her with a grinding smile. ‘Ah yes, we know you. Ambitious, yet frightened. Very good!’
Aleah nodded. ‘Perhaps.’ She took another step forward. ‘Let me get this straightened out, in my ambitious, frightened mind. You want to find the First Memory. And you want us to help you.’
The Eyeless One nodded.
‘What do we get in return? I know what happened to the people who played the game in the past. What’s to say you won’t do the same to us, even though we’re helping you?’
The creature shrugged.
Aleah’s eyes widened, and she turned to Aranfal. ‘We shouldn’t help it. It’ll kill us, or hold us here forever. Maybe they don’t die, the ones it keeps.’ She glanced around the room. ‘I don’t know which I’d prefer.’
The Eyeless One tutted. ‘There are worse things than us in this world. Ruin has already gained so much power. Soon he will become us. Then you will have a very different god: a demon of memory, holding sway over the ever-growing past. He will seek out his favourite memories, and drown you in them: the nasty, horrible ones. The ones that you hide away. Forever.’ The Eyeless One covered its face with its hands. ‘Only the First Memory can hope to stop him. And we have lost it.’
‘If we help you, you’ll need to free us,’ said Aranfal. He was unsure of himself, Brandione knew: making it up as he went along. ‘We don’t want to stay down here, and we don’t want to die.’
The creature removed its hands from its face and scratched the underside of its chin with a yellowing fingernail.
‘We promise to release you,’ it said. ‘And never play a game again.’
There was silence for a moment. The three mortals exchanged glances. Brandione could not say why, but he believed this creature.
Aranfal winced.
The creature spread its arms wide. ‘We are a child! When a child loses its favourite toy, what does it do?’
‘Asks for help,’ Aranfal said. ‘From its parents.’
The creature nodded. ‘Yes. That is all we are doing now. We are the God of Memory: but memories come from you, from all of you. You hold such powers, and only some of you have even begun to use them.’ It waved its hands at them all. ‘You can look at this place with different eyes. That is why you are such fun, in the game. We marvel at you. In the past, some of the players came so close. We need you to do that again. This time, though, we will not interfere. And when one of you finds the First Memory, we will marvel at your glory.’
Aleah’s eyes were saucers. She was coming round to this new proposition, Brandione realised. She liked the idea of finding this memory, and having the Old Place marvel at her glory.
He, however, was growing impatient.
‘How is this going to work?’ he asked. ‘Where do we begin?’
The creature grinned. ‘We think we remember seeing it in a few different places before we lost it. Three places, to be precise. Lucky there are three of you here!’
‘Yes, very lucky,’ said Brandione, who did not believe in luck.
‘This is the Hallway of Regret,’ the creature said. ‘We think that … you should look here.’ It jabbed a finger at Brandione.
‘As for you two – where to send each of you?’ It jerked its head from Aranfal to Aleah, as if it was really looking at them. ‘You,’ it said, pointing at Aleah. ‘You are the pawn of Shirkra – perhaps, then, you should go to Chaos.’ It clicked its fingers, and the floor opened, swallowing up the female Watcher. ‘And you – the Hopeful Chambers is the place for you.’ It pointed at Aranfal. ‘Be sure that you look very carefully, and mind your step.’
‘Hopeful Chambers,’ Aranfal whispered. ‘Sounds like it could have been worse.’
The creature grinned. ‘Don’t read too much into the name.’
It clicked its fingers again, and Aranfal disappeared.
The Eyeless One turned to Brandione. ‘Last Doubter: welcome to the Hallway of Regret.’
Brandione glanced once more around the room. As he looked, he saw the hall change. The ceiling began to rise, gradually becoming more distant until it was no longer visible. The doors at the side of the hall were joined by thousands more, row after row, level after level, ever on and upwards, up into the darkness above. They were now no longer in a hall, but at the base of a vast, hollow tower. As he gazed at the ceiling, he thought he could just make out the faintest glimmer of light: lightning in a distant sky.
Brandione remembered, then, a place he had once visited with Wayward, back when the courtier was his guide through the madness of the Dust Queen’s world.
‘I’ve been here before,’ he whispered. ‘Wayward said it was a vision of the Old Place – his vision.’
‘No,’ said the Eyeless One. ‘This is no vision. This is the Hallway of Regret.’
‘Why would he lie?’
‘Perhaps he sensed that you would come here, one day. Perhaps he wanted you to see it, but did not want to scare you, when there was no need.’
‘I am not scared.’ It was the truth. Brandione was not someone to hide away from fear. Fear was such a useful tool, if used to sharpen the senses. But he was not afraid, here, with this eyeless thing, among a hundred thousand doors. He was becoming more accustomed to the Underland. In a strange way, he felt it had grown used to him, as well.
‘No,’ said the Eyeless One. ‘We sense that, in you.’ It gestured to its right. ‘We saw the First Memory here, in this place, we think – before the Machinery was made. We are sure of it. But then, we are sure we saw it in other places, too.’
‘Where do I begin?’
The creature grinned. ‘That is your path to walk, Last Doubter. I would not know.’ The Eyeless One was now directly before Brandione; the former General felt the creature peering into him, if that were possible without eyes. It began to speak, but this voice was different than any the former General had heard before. It was not a voice at all, but a rabble of different voices, sometimes speaking together and sometimes individually, a young girl one moment and a group of men the next.
‘You are the pawn of our first child: The Dust Queen. She was born in a dark time, born of desperation, a weapon pulled from the shadows. She is fire, and anger, and beauty. She sees great things in you; she believes you will wield the First Memory, and destroy Ruin.’ The creature seemed to physically deflate, and it began to back away from Brandione, before speaking once again in its own voice. ‘But we do not know. All of it remains to be seen. Nothing is preordained.’ It shook its head. ‘Prophecies – what are they, but lights in the fog? Who knows where the lights may lead? Often not the way they promise.’
‘You are a god. You can stop Ruin alone.’
‘No. Ruin is … too powerful. We tried to make him happy, long ago. We created a being for him to love – the One for him. But it was not enough.’ The creature shook itself. ‘What did we just say?’
Brandione screwed up his eyes. ‘Do you not remem—?’
But the Eyeless One was not listening. ‘Go, now. We are tired of you. Go, and find the memory of old, if you can. If you cannot, we will all suffer together.’
The creature gave a sharp nod, and Brandione was alone in an instant, without quite knowing how his companion had disappeared.
He gazed around the tower and considered the doors before him. There are memories hidden within the maze, Wayward had said. Did that mean every door held a memory, each of them tinged with regret? Was one of these the First Memory of the Old Place? Perhaps one memory can be hidden within another, over and over, until you’re driven mad, peeling them all apart …
He walked to the nearest section of the wall, feeling like a fool. Here he was, a soldier of an army that no longer existed, defender of a nation that had disappeared, and still he worried about what people would think of him if they could only see him now. I am vain. But he knew this was unfair. He had been trained, shaped, and moulded by the past, like everyone else in the world. He could not let that go, simply because the future was taking them all in a new direction.
How can I tell which door to open first? He closed his eyes and tried to sense his way around the room. But he felt nothing. He remembered, then, that Wayward had pointed to a door in this place. He glanced around, and sure enough, he saw it: light blue, with golden leaves painted into the frame. Wayward was always meant to be his guide. Perhaps he was guiding me here, too.
Brandione opened the door and walked inside.
CHAPTER 9
‘What are you doing here?’
The voice of a man? Not a man. Male, perhaps. But not a man.
‘I said – what are you doing here?’
Canning’s eyes clicked open. A red void stretched away before him, as if he had been cast into an endless, sanguine lake.
‘I’ve come to get my people,’ he said, ‘and take them back to the Remnants.’
There was silence for a moment. ‘Take them back? That implies they left. What makes you so confident we are somewhere else?’
The stranger’s voice was unremarkable, the sort one heard in a hundred places, on the street or in an alehouse or in the Cabinet of Tacticians. This red place would have been better suited to a voice like Shirkra’s, that strange mix of girlish delight and guttural growl.
‘You have trapped them,’ Canning said. ‘Let me take them, and I will not hurt you.’
Canning half-expected a peal of laughter to greet him, echoing out from the endless red. Instead there was a pregnant pause, before the voice spoke again.
‘The walls are crashing
down, my friend. You must feel it. The great divide is falling away. When Ruin comes, there will be no Old Place, and no mortal world, for he will swallow both. All will be memory: memory will be all. The memories you hide away, the ones you run from – he was born in that mess, and he will chase you through them forever.’
He? Ruin is a creature?
A black dot appeared in the redness.
‘You don’t sound happy about that,’ he said. ‘Not happy at all.’
‘There’s not much point in being happy, or sad, or anything else. It simply is. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Perhaps not even Ruin could stop it now. Perhaps it was always just meant to be.’
‘You will die, won’t you?’
‘I will die, but I will live forever: within Ruin, the God of Memory. For mortals, it will be worse.’
Canning pointed a finger at the black spot. He could feel it, the contours and edges of it, its power, its weakness. It was a thing of memory, and all things of memory belonged to him.
‘Reveal yourself.’
He gestured with a finger, and it grew before him: a patch of flowing blackness. Black paint on a pool of blood. The blackness surrounded him, until all the red was gone. It was alive. He heard a whisper in his ear, that same voice, hushed now and urgent all at once.
‘You are strong in the power of memory. You feel it, don’t you? Even when you don’t want to, it’s there.’
‘Why have you taken this form?’ Canning asked. Fear crept through him for the first time. He found his breathing was laboured. The creature was suffocating him.
A head appeared in the darkness: a woman. Canning recognised her as one of the Watchers in the courtyard, a victim of this Operator. Her face was perfectly still. Soon, her body emerged from the black, until she floated before him, a lifeless figure in a white gown.
‘Do you know who I am?’ the Operator asked.
‘An Operator,’ Canning said. ‘A parasite of memory.’
‘You do not know me. My name is the Outside. I was born just after the Absence fell, as the Old Place filled everything with its power alone. I am a power, Canning. And you dare to challenge me!’