24:01 One Minute After

by Eric Diehl

  He hoisted the Sceptre in his hand, feeling its weight and thinking of how its blunt heft might facilitate this eventuality all the more quickly; all the more satisfyingly. There was just something about the thudding impact of a heavy weight on yielding tissue and bone. He sighed and lowered his icon of office—one thing he had learned through his misadventures was that it was sometimes necessary to follow rules, even as he made them up.

  There was a young man strapped to the metal table in the center of the chamber, with a copper manacle tightly clamped about his throat and beads of blood marking the circlet of barbed electrodes pressed through the flesh of his shaved scalp. Ralf leaned toward him, trembling with premonitory delight when one of the barbs pricked his own thumb while pressing the halo down firmly to ensure good conductance. The young man screeched in pain and Ralf smiled consolingly, tasting coppery blood as he sucked at his thumb.

  The blanched fellow’s eyes were filled with terror and mortality, with the knob in his throat bobbing up and down and his mouth working silently, pressing tiny bubbles of saliva out between trembling lips. He had been an early recruit to the Prophesy, and Ralf had waited patiently for him. It had taken little effort to entrap the young man in a contrived grievance—Ralf had laid no shortage of temptation at the poor boy’s feet, and had simply watched until he succumbed to one such enticement. The wheels’ of the Prophesy were properly greased, and now the poor lad was figuratively lashed to the tracks before an irreversible neo-spiritual locomotive.

  “Deland Gaunt,” rumbled Ralf in his somber, prophesorial intonation. “You have committed dire heresy against the True Prophecy, and will suffer due penance. How, and to whom, might you plead?”

  The young man could do nothing but gabble his lips while slobber drooled down his chin, and Ralf was disappointed with that. What would there be for him, for Ralf, after this was finished? With this sublime revenge complete, what would come next?

  “Contrary to a long-ago threat from a derailed future,” murmured Ralf softly, shaking his head above a frantically distraught Deland, “It appears that it will be you who awaits me in the fires of perdition.”

  The time-space transmutation of ephemeral souls—or ‘energy signatures’, to phrase it at a distance from emotion—would never come to fruition in the absence of one Albert Forquessas. But knowing that that would be the case, Ralf had painstakingly worked to ensure that capital punishment was not so readily frowned upon in this reshaped reality.

  A slight smile curled Ralf’s lips—he had considered the notion that in truth he should be thanking this poor initiate for the actions that he would have taken some years hence, in a future not-to-be, as that act had been the only reason that Ralf had been enabled to careen lustily through these past centuries. But an expression of gratitude would certainly not do, of course, nor even be understood, and as for Ralf’s future endeavors—there were few limitations on how he might now direct the course of the all-powerful Prophesy. And though Ralf had never been a student of history, it was undeniable that he would soon cross over the timeline where he had ceased to exist in the disjointed future, and so would soon adventure into the genuine unknown. His smile broadened as a thrill quickened his heartbeat, and he nodded his satisfaction.

  The red light pulsed brightly on the panel of dials and gauges, and as Ralf raised his hand toward the button the young man began to keen in a piercingly high warble. Ralf could not resist, just once, thwacking his scepter against the man’s skull—not enough to relieve the poor bastard of consciousness but enough to feel a meaty thud vibrate through the shaft clenched in his fist. As always a thrill coursed through him, and he bared his teeth in a nasty smile and raised the staff even higher for a second blow. But then he stopped, the sense of imminent closure weighing down. He sighed and pressed the button, and to the accompaniment of a sizzling electrical hum and dimming of lights the wailing abruptly ceased.

  Ralf felt his hair rise in the charged air, and he began the process of restoration, pondering the mystery of his next pursuit. In the warm knowledge of trespasses both past and future he breathed deeply of the scent of charred flesh, and he smiled, building in the temple of his mind what would was to come.

  The End

  The Roots of Fate

  Ilian snorted and stamped a hoof, startling Shara under their shared harness, and the hulking Catoga wagon lurched forward a fair yard. From the rear bed of the wagon Jeeter shrieked.

  “Aiieeeee! It’s on me foot! Get it off! Get it offa me foot!”

  Durstan lifted a puzzled gaze from where the huge log had rolled off his wedge bar, and he peered at his friend overtop the section of trunk nearly the diameter of his full height.

  “Eh?” he queried.

  Jeeter’s eye’s were nearly popping from a beet-red face, and spittle sprayed from his lips.

  “Whaddayer mean ‘EH?’ It’s squarshin’ me toes like kernels on a grist-mill! Git it off! Do it Do it Do it NOW, ya freakin’ baboon!”

  Durstan dropped his tool and lurched into action, and Jeeter howled as his cohort clambered up the trunk and tumbled overtop. Durstan lumbered to his feet and darted his helpless stare from hand to empty hand, and Jeeter stabbed a finger at his own wedge bar, lying on the bed of the wagon out of his reach.

  “Use mine, ya sponge-headed lack-wit!”

  Durstan snatched up the shaft, jamming it under the log and bearing down hard, but the section of trunk barely shifted before rolling back and lifting him off his feet. Jeeter howled all the louder and slid his free foot as far back as he could, pressing his chest up against the trunk and spewing out a slew of curses half saved-up and half improvised. A revelation lit Durstan’s face and he shifted to hang bodily from the long pry bar, planting his feet against the trunk and thrusting mightily. In three building rolls back and forth, with Jeeter screeching and cursing at every reversal, the trunk finally gave it up and Jeeter flew backward, landing on his tailbone and sliding off the wagon. From his upside-down vantage Durstan watched Jeeter’s feet disappear over the tailgate, and he thudded to the floorboards as the log rolled off the his bar.

  “Jeeter?” Durstan crept to cautiously peer over the tail of the wagon, and he flinched away from the flung handful of dirt and gravel.

  “Ya dim-witted scatterbrain—ya gots less smarts than a bucket a’ dirt!” Jeeter rocked back and forth on the ground, both hands clamped around his throbbing foot. “If ya had t’ make yer mark you’d puzzle over how t’ spell the letter ‘X’!”

  Durstan looked offended. “You knows I knows no letters.”

  Jeeter shook has head, but a gravelly voice from the door of the nearby workshop cut short his retort.

  “Ah… I see that the ferrymen of buried mystery have made their way back to my desmesne. And so—what have you brought for me to reveal?”

  Jeeter rolled to his knees and scrambled upright, gingerly hopping on one foot while nodding his regards. “H’lo, Master Haeg’scorn. How fare ye today, good S’ar?”

  Remus Haegerscorn chuckled and turned back to his shop, waving Jeeter and Durstan in behind.

  A Single Moon Previous

  There was yet another light clattering at the window and the innkeeper finally looked up from where he stood polishing the railing of a mahogany bar burnished by decades of planted elbows. He scowled and reached for a broom, plodding heavily out from his bastion of amber liquors, sweet and pungent wines, and frothy draughts.

  “Dim-damn jaybird,” he grumbled. “Sees hisself in the pane o’ glass, and decides they’s no room for both him and his struttin’, cock-rooster reflection.” He shook his head. “I jus’ cleaned those wind’rs—jus’ last year.”

  He’d made his way halfway across the creaky tavern floor when Caleb LongShadow, peering intently to the window, raised a hand. “Hold on there, Beric.”

  The innkeeper stopped, looking on in a puzzle as Caleb set down his stein and unfolded himself from the stool where he’d sat pondering whatever perplexity he was wont to
study over. Caleb’s open long-coat fell into place mid-shank of his woodsmen’s boots, and it flowed with his purposeful stride to the window, his movement somehow reminiscent of a breeze through the leaves.

  The jay ceased its animated attack on the pane of glass and turned its head sideways, training an eye on the approaching woods-sooth. Caleb pulled a chair up to the window and settled down, and the bird again began to chirp, hopping from one side of the ledge to the other and occasionally pecking or tapping at the glass with its beak.

  Caleb sat with his chin planted in one hand, nodding from time to time, and after a lengthy listening he shook his head, pressing a breath out through pursed lips. “Those are grievous tidings indeed!”

  The bird screeched and flapped its wings in apparent agreement, and Caleb turned to the innkeeper,

  “Beric, best get word out to Jeeter and Durstan. We’ve a summons to attend to.”

  Remus Haegerscorn: WorxWood

  The rough-hewn timber frame of the hoist creaked and moaned as Ilian and Shara strained against the harness, and the chain clanked and clattered where it wound tight over the series of pulleys. The massive section of tree, still wet with sap and weighing too much and more, swayed in the chain sling with the ponderous gravity of a boulder balanced atop an eroded pedestal. Jeeter’s lips were drawn around teeth jutting in curious misalignment, and as the massive piece clanked upward he edged further backward, unconsciously reaching out to tug Durstan along. Remus coaxed the carriage horses gently, jockeying the trunk into position, and when properly set he centered the massive double-spur bit of the lathe’s headstock on the trunk’s axis, and likewise slid the tailstock into position and locked it down. He spun the hand wheel in, pinning the piece between pincers, and when satisfied he cinched it all down, released the hoist mechanism and patted the horses away.

  Jeeter marveled at the heft of the lathe, wondering at a device that looked capable of reducing a mountain down to a hummock. Durstan had been chewing his lower lip for some time, and he shifted a quizzical gaze to Remus. “Why needs be we brung ya the whole durn trunk, when yer jus’ bound ta pare it almost all away?”

  Jeeter horked and spat in the shavings. “Tryin’ ta ‘splain somethin’ t’ you is like hoistin’ a rusty bucket up from the well—water drains out jus’ as fast as it fills up. The answer is plain enuff, ya dimbulb, it’s simply a’cause… Well, it’s…”

  Jeeter blinked several times, and looked sideways to Remus. “Why don’t you ‘splain ta this plain fool the how and why of it? I’m growin’ tired a’ repeatin’ myself.”

  Remus smiled gently, and pointed to where the tailstock spur dug into the core of the tree, at the point where all the hundreds of spreading rings had banded down to a single point. “There—that is the pith of the tree, do you see? It’s the very core of its being, surrounded by dark heartwood and then softer sapwood. While the pith is not considered desirable when harvesting a tree for construction, our purpose here is quite different, and the core of this tree is essential to it. We seek the essence of the tree—that which has borne witness to grievous circumstances—and the process of turning away its outer armor is critical to manifesting its elemental strength, and some hint of its story. Any misstep and we are left with nothing but a reduced carcass, but when performed properly we will have coaxed the remaining spirit of the tree into revealing something of its plight, and we’ll be left with a distillation that might be returned to the site of the offense and renewed.”

  Jeeter looked smugly to Durstan and nodded, as if he had just been validated, and Durstan pressed a finger against the bark of the tree. “Pifth?” he murmured.

  Remus placed his palm on the cross-section of trunk and nodded to himself. “The wood is still quite wet—we should stream some fine tailings.” He hefted a large steel gouge and shooed the two young men to one side. The tool was a heavy, fluted shaft held fast in a long hardwood handle, and the light played off it in such a manner as to first lend it the appearance of gleaming platinum and then polished steel or even burnished bronze. Remus gave one more tug on the wheel of the tailstock and locked it down final, then pulled a visor down over his eyes and his great bush of a beard.

  He looked to Jeeter and pointed to the stove, and Jeeter tugged on heavy leather gloves before swinging the stove door open and hefting several more shovelfuls of coal into the glowing maelstrom within. Remus threw some valves open and with a great whoosh and a progression of building chugs the steam engine began to turn the lathe. A rising whir filled the air as the massive section of trunk began to rotate between the two deeply-sunk end-bits. Slowly Remus dialed it up, lending the appearance of a log gaining speed rolling down a steep slope, and the trunk’s form turned into a blur of motion, with shadow images marking the high and low irregularities. Faster and faster Remus spun it up, until the huge lathe began to shudder out-of-balance, setting the tins and jars on the shelves to tinkling and rattling and the very floor under Jeeters’ feet to vibrating, and Remus quickly dialed the speed back down until the shaking ceased. He then eased a heavy tool-rest in closer until it was just outside the rotation of the trunk, and locked it down. The woodturner planted the open-fluted tip of his tool on the rest at just the right angle and braced the long handle against his rounded belly while planting both feet, and he shifted his weight forward, slowly, carefully, until a coarse chatter filled the air as the first bits of bark and then sapwood began to fly.

  As the work progressed Remus shifted his hips and his shoulders, making multiple passes up and down the length of the trunk, and the harsh chattering gave way to a constant hum as all the bark was sheared away and the shape turned true. Remus pivoted to the grinder to dress the gouges’ tip, and he nodded and stepped back to his work, sliding the tool rest in colder. “Now she’ll begin to tell her story,” he murmured to himself.

  The shavings began to fly in earnest; long coiling streams of wood that lifted in an arc from the sliding tip of Remus’ gouge like a coil of rope that constantly came apart as it spun off its spool. Durstan’s jaw hung slack, and Jeeter extended his open palm, allowing the arc of shavings to fill and overflow it.

  “Stand back!” bellowed Remus, waving a meaty hand. “You’ll spoil the continuity, and we’ll be left with nothing for our efforts!”

  Jeeter scampered backward, and with Remus’ dark apron and wild bale of hair covered with curled shavings that looked disturbingly like earth worms churning freshly tilled soil, he turned back to his work.

  The coils of wood peeled away in huge quantities, mounding on the floor in piles surely too large to have come from any single tree, and as the trunk was reduced in size its shavings turned a darker color when the gouge peeled away the last of the sapwood and took to the tree’s heartwood. Jeeter abruptly caught his breath—the feeling of a presence washed over him, the intuition of an embodied aura, and he shivered as a chill coursed through from toes to fingertips. The trailing arc hung mid-air just a moment too long, as if held in suspension and struggling to take shape—a phantasm seeking to reveal itself under the streaming flow from the tip of Remus’ tool.

  The revelation was dark and somehow brooding, taking the vague form of a man. A cloaked man, it would seem, with its face mostly shielded from view under a brimmed cowl. Below the brim and the faceless void sloped wide shoulders, and as Remus tilted his gouge to redirect the flow the wet shavings seemed to better stick and mold themselves to the shifting divination. Details came into sharper focus.

  Its hands were clasped before its chest, holding something. An object of medium size, globular in shape, and seeming to be pocked with cavities. Almost like the thumb sockets of a bowler ball. Or no…. rather a, a…

  “It’s a skull!!” shrieked Jeeter, jumping backward into Durstan and taking the both of them down into the piles of wet shavings. “A what?!!!” his friend screeched, and Jeeter struggled to wriggle himself out of Durstans’ grip—a bear hug that forced the breath from his lungs. Durstan might be neither bright nor esp
ecially large, but he surely made up for it in muscle.

  Jeeter finally got himself separated and rolled up onto his knees, gasping and wheezing, only to see the lathe spinning down, with Remus trailing his fingers along a slender shaft that was all that remained of the once massive trunk. And much like the greater mass of the tree, the haunting vision produced by its tailings was lost. Remus slid back the tailstock and released the narrow shaft, breaking off either pared end and shaving the nubs smooth with a chisel, and he held it up to his eye to sight down its length.

  “It’ll warp some as it dries,” he said, holding it out to Jeeter, “but this is what Caleb will be needing.” He raised his brow meaningfully. “Along with a telling of what you just saw from it.”

  Remus was looking at him closely, and Jeeter gulped and nodded once. He climbed shakily to his feet and reached out a trembling hand for the stave.

  Caleb LongShadow: Woods-Seer

  Jeeter’s toe caught on a root hidden in the layer of decaying leaves and pine needles, and he stumbled forward into Durstan. As always, his friend seemed as planted as a hardwood with its roots sunk deep. Durstan turned and planted a palm on Jeeter’s chest and shoved hard, and Jeeter found himself testing the sponginess of the matted forest floor with the base of his spine. He scrambled to his feet, cursing and rubbing at his tailbone.

  “Whatcher doin’ shovin’ me around like that, ya dunderhead?! This ain’t no play-time at the schoolyard!”

  Durstan’s wild grin darkened. “You started it, now din’t ya? Tried ta knock me down!”