Soultaker

by Duperre, Robert J. ;

  With great effort and gritted teeth, Abe forced his hand underneath his coat. His fingers touched the hilt of his Eldersword. The Rush entered him, slowly at first, like a trickle from a leaky spigot.

  “And so the Ancients killed themselves, and most of the world, to save humanity. The best and brightest mankind had to offer, lost beneath a surging wall of seawater. That left those who became known as the Elders…a people who’d hidden themselves away, smart folks who nonetheless hadn’t the knowledge or expertise of their now-deceased betters, those who understood so little of what their ancestors had tried to accomplish… to pick up the pieces.

  “And they almost ended it all. They didn’t recognize what the Ancients had done. They didn’t know! They took tools that had been handed down to them and put them into practice without understanding the consequences. Take the Sacred Trees—that technology had been discovered ten years before the Rising, when the first of the fissures began to grow. They are governors, if you will, creating energy fields that plug the gaps where the membrane between realities is thinnest.” He laughed and shook his head. “So in a way, you were right, Abednego. Cooper did cause fissures to open, only he did so unwittingly. By taking the Heartcubes, he, for all intents and purposes, unlocked the doors. And then…” He held his arms out wide, made a poof with his lips.

  “You were with him… the whole while,” said Abe, his strength gradually returning. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  The monster shrugged. “Why would I? We are at war! I slept for nearly eight hundred years after the Rising, and I was awoken for the simple purpose of fighting this war. More demons walking the land means more dead. The Queen of Snakes—yes, Pirie’s local legend is real, my friend—demanded as much. That was her price for allowing me to go on. To help her raise an army to destroy the devourer of worlds.”

  “That doesn’t… make sense…”

  “Sure it does. Consider it the safety measure of a safety measure, a fallback plan. The seeds were planted long ago, before the Rising, just in case the Ancients’ other fail-safes failed, which they did. I was tasked with burying remnants of their technology. Since humans will always veer more toward the mystical than the factual, I integrated my instructions in arcane holy texts. I waited for the right man to come along, with enough power, resources, and charisma to unite the people of the Wasteland into an army. That man was Cooper… but alas, he wasn’t enough. I was too late. Too few took up his cause. Too few cared about anything more than living until the next day. And it’s all the fault of—”

  He was cut off by a loud banging at the chamber’s great steel door. Asaph scowled. “Company. One of your brothers, I presume.” He looked at the bank of blinking lights. “Too little, too late, however. There are only fourteen minutes left, and that door is five feet thick. Even a weapon powerful as an Eldersword won’t cut through it in time.”

  The banging on the door ceased. Abe curled his elbow beneath his side as discreetly as possible. His heart rate sped up, feeling came back to his extremities. Any second now…

  “But enough about useless attempts at heroism,” Asaph said. “We were talking about blame, Ronan Cooper specifically. For all his talents, Ronan couldn’t unite a people as divided and backward as those who call the Wasteland home. And they are divided and backward on purpose, Abednego! Did you know that? Made that way by the very man who watches over the destruction from his secluded island kingdom in the Western Sea. The Reverend Garron himself. The prophet of Khayrat the Devourer.”

  “Lies,” Abe muttered, wishing he was strong enough in that moment to rip out the fiend’s throat.

  “Not this time.” Asaph threw his hands in the air. “You don’t even know what you are! You and your brothers… your endless supply of Knights Eternal… you were supposed to be the saviors of this world! Your order wasn’t created by the Pentus, or any other holy construct, but the Ancients themselves! But Garron took it and twisted it. Think about it a moment, my friend… why are there only three of you at any time?” He tossed aside the metal tube, stomped over to the crate Erin’s corpse stood next to, and pulled out a retracted Eldersword. He waved it in front of him, but showed no reaction to it. None at all. Abe lay baffled. “Did you know there are hundreds of these swords buried beneath the mountains? Hundreds! If there can be only three knights, then why make so many blades that a normal man can’t hold? Why is there a propagation of lawlessness in the Wasteland? Why do so many have guns? Why are outlaws so well armed that it takes you three to eliminate them? Have you ever asked yourself that?”

  Abe stared at him, narrowed his eyes.

  “Because that was the plan all along! Do just enough to keep the people in chaos. If religion has always been about control, then why is Pentmatarianism such a passive system of beliefs? What does the Pentus demand of all but his most dedicated servants? Nothing! All it does is focus on the faults of others, not the ideology of itself. Preach this to the people, and some will convert, but most will simply turn a blind eye. Sending missionaries to spread the good word? Bah! Sending arms suppliers out into the badlands to provide the enemy with weapons is more like it.”

  Abe gnawed his cheek, thinking back to the run-in with the brigands outside the Red Cliffs. They had carried Sal Yaddo’s weapons, driven Sal Yaddo’s wagons, yet there hadn’t been a sign of a struggle within. It can’t be…

  “But you three,” Asaph went on, “are the most inspired act of treason of all. The Ancients set up a system where those like you and your brothers were inevitable. Your coming was written in the stars, you could say. You’re the essence of the many but one, my friend, the life forces of thousands, perhaps millions, of versions of one of the most creative individuals who’ve ever existed, from different adjacent worlds, ripped back from the ether and formed into a single, flawless organism. Why do you think I could feed off you with little harm to yourself? Hah! Yet the good Reverend tricked the system and altered your coding. He made you forget all you were! And so now you have the Knights Eternal: ignorant simpletons who follow purposefully vague instructions to all points along the Wasteland. You and your brothers are tools of a man who wishes for the end of humanity, Abednego. Nothing more.”

  “Lies. Lies. Lies!” he screamed. He didn’t want it to be true. It couldn’t be!

  Asaph squatted down before him, the retracted the Eldersword still in his grip. “So it all comes back to me, the final fallback plan,” he growled. “You see that machine behind me, Asaph? It’s a field generator, just like the Sacred Trees. An early, less fanciful model. Right now, it’s connected to the Heartcubes. Each and every one of them.” He craned his neck to check a set of blinking numbers. “In about twelve minutes, that machine will siphon all of the energy from those Cubes and release it into the world. It will create a wave of radiation that will pulse for thousands of miles. Everything in its path will fall lifeless. From the mountains to the north, to the Unknown Lands to the south, to the wind currents that will carry it across the Gulf of Torrin until it hits landfall again. Hundreds of thousands of people, dead.”

  Abe shook his head vehemently. He didn’t care that he was showing Asaph how much he’d healed already. “What you’re saying is absurd, not to mention impossible!”

  The horrific man grinned. “Oh, it is very much possible, Abednego. I experimented with a single Heartcube in Breighton, and succeeded in laying waste to an entire city. The same city whose residents now slaughter Cooper and his men… by my command.”

  “But… but why?”

  He shrugged. “Because it’s what needs to be done. I did my job in Pirie. Their king began to waver, and so I sowed the seeds of revolt and had him deposed. The people there are united, they are willing, and with a strong brute of a leader who knows what must be done. But their force will pale in comparison to what will be created here. Every corpse in the Wasteland will become a weapon under my command that I will hurl against Khayrat when he comes calling. It is a small sacrifice to make for the sake of the world’s surv
ival.”

  Abe got up on one knee, still gripping tight to his Eldersword. The strength now flowed through him as if through a sieve. Before him was a perversion of humanity, only it wasn’t Erin’s still-swaying corpse. His mind emptied of all the lies the man had told him. He braced himself to charge, but a strange thought came to mind and he hesitated.

  “Why tell me all this?” he asked.

  “Because you are my friend, Abednego. Because I’m lonely, and wish to rekindle what I had with that sliver of your soul. We could accomplish so much together. We could save the world!”

  “By destroying it.”

  “History is filled with sacrifices.”

  “Fine,” he grunted. “But what of this energy this… field generator… lets loose? If it will destroy so much for so many miles, what will it do to us?”

  “Oh, we would be obliterated. Too close to the origin. That is why I hid beneath the Great Pine when I experimented in Breighton… though I hadn’t thought the situation through completely and when the power went out, I was trapped within that room. It was all I could to send my new children away and call you knights to me… though you should’ve been here already…”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. This is what does.” He pulled the pendant out from beneath his shirt, the crystal in the center ring glowing slightly. “This disk is one of a kind. Unlike the Sacred Trees, this can create a portal to any point in time, in any world, this one or another, that I choose. If you join me, we’ll be long gone when Cooper’s Spear of God fulfills its purpose.” He squinted, came forward a step. “Please, Abednego, pull back the layers of deception and unawareness that have guided your life. Don’t be what they’ve told you to be any longer. Be what you should have been all along.”

  “No,” Abe whispered to himself. He hung his head for a moment, took a deep breath, felt a desolate wave of sadness wash over him. He couldn’t accept what Asaph said. Not for the life of him.

  “No,” he repeated, raising his eyes. Asaph retreated a few paces, tucked the pendant back into his shirt. “No.” Abe got to his feet, slowly removed the Eldersword from his belt. “NO!” He flicked his wrist, extended the blade, and charged.

  The Eldersword burned the deepest red imaginable.

  At his best, Abe was the greatest with a sword of any knight who ever came before. But he wasn’t at his best; his body still felt sluggish, his movements were a hair slower, his eyesight was blurry. That listlessness allowed his enemy the opportunity to extend his own Eldersword, which shone with such darkness that it seemed to swallow light instead of radiate it. Their blades clashed with a sound like thunder. Asaph was the stronger, shoving back against Abe’s attack and clouting him in the side of the head. Stars swam in his vision. Abe stumbled to the side, dazed, and in his weakened state never had to opportunity to spin back around. Even the Rush couldn’t help him when the demonic man’s black blade punched through his shoulder blades and ejected from his breastbone. Abe stared down at the shimmering darkness in disbelief. His entire body rocked with intense vibration, but he couldn’t feel a thing.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Asaph said, and he actually sounded distraught.

  The blade withdrew from his chest, and Abe pitched forward. Somewhere in the background, he heard the faint sound of metal clanging and people shouting. It seemed that rather than falling to the floor, he plunged through the annals of time. He lived a million lifetimes in a moment. Tiny parts of him had been a doctor, a beggar, a thief, a wanderer, a teacher, a janitor, a soldier, a peddler of poison, a great explorer. So many lives, all combined into one, all rolling out along the Wasteland of eternity.

  He had thousands of names, tens of thousands, but one rose above all others. One that stayed consistent through more than half his lifetimes. He felt the overpowering swell of music. Sometimes he lived to old age; sometimes he died young; in a few instances, he was strung from a tree; many times he met his end because of a young lady at the junction of two roads, killed by her jealous husband. But this one life, the one now fading away, beckoned him, called to him, enraptured him.

  I am one. I am many. I am clay to be molded.

  I am a tool.

  “I understand,” he gasped, and the horrific truth of it all was like the universe swallowing him whole.

  His body struck the floor.

  20

  “I THINK I’M A MUSICIAN. AM I A MUSICIAN? IS THERE SOMETHING YOU AREN’T TELLING ME?”

  —ABEDNEGO THE 24TH

  3 MINUTES AFTER CREATION

  Shade’s breath came in short bursts, his heart hammering in his chest, as the corridor lights clicked on and off behind him. His mind still felt fuzzy from alcohol, and he ripped free his Eldersword. The connection was made; the Rush boiled away the last of his drunkenness.

  Past the broken guardians and the passage lined with blinking machines he dashed, flying through the propped-open steel door and descending to the bridge across the black chasm. Faint light twinkled on the handrails, a cold breeze assaulted his face. His feet clanged on the bridge until he collided with the massive vault on the other side. He grasped the wheel that turned the locking mechanism, but it wouldn’t budge, so he pounded on the door, the sound echoing back dully.

  There was no response. His mind racing, he spun in a desperate circle. “Shit!” he bellowed. The sound resonated throughout the cavernous, empty space.

  Shade’s Eldersword pulsed between yellow, red, and fearful orange, and he reared back as if it was a battering ram. Just as he was about to drive the tip into the door, the temperature dropped sharply. Suddenly it was freezing; his teeth chattered.

  “Not that way,” said a painfully familiar voice.

  He turned, chest gripped with dread, and there she stood—Vera, shimmering just a few feet away, hovering above the nothingness beyond the bridge, the bottoms of her legs ending in wisps of mist. She looked different than she had the other times she’d come to him; less real, yet somehow purer. She drifted across the black, and Shade’s breath caught in his throat.

  “That isn’t the way,” she said, though her lips didn’t move.

  “Why?” Shade croaked, though he didn’t know what, exactly, he was asking.

  “The time has come,” the ghost answered. “Follow me. Protect me. Avenge me.”

  The apparition disappeared beneath the bridge. The air seemed to grow warmer, and Shade broke from his stupor, hastening to the rail and peering over. There was a faint luminescence somewhere down below.

  “What do I do?” he shouted.

  “Follow,” Vera instructed, echoing in Shade’s head.

  A trick, the logical part of him said, but he didn’t listen. He sheathed his Eldersword, swung his legs over the rail, gripped the corner of the bridge, and slid free. He dangled over the screaming void. The base of the Heartcube-filled room was in front of him, a huge rectangle sitting atop a spire that sank deep into the darkness below. Tubes and wires dangled, and metal brackets were spaced at even intervals along the underside of the bridge, leading to where the chamber met the spire.

  For a moment he saw Vera’s face, and he swung forward, his fingers aching as he grasped one of the hanging bracket’s sharp edges. He was sure he’d lose his grip and plummet to his death, but he gritted his teeth and kept a tight hold. Hanging there by a single hand, Rosetta’s weight on his back threatened to pull him downward. With a yowl he swung up his other arm and grasped tight to a second handhold. His feet kicked beneath him, searching frantically for solid ground.

  “Shadrach, come.”

  Vera hovered twenty feet ahead, her translucent glow illuminating the platform topping the spire. Shade sucked air quickly into his lungs and swung from one bracket to the next. His fingers grew numb; the muscles in his arms and shoulders shrieked. Determined, he used his momentum to his advantage, constantly moving forward, ever forward.

  From handhold to handhold he bounded, his fear now gone as he stared at the face of his dead lov
er. Eventually he reached the edge of the platform and dropped onto a slender ledge, colliding with the thick column that supported the weight of the chamber above. Another breeze kicked up, threatening to knock him off his perch, but he held on tight. He turned, and Vera was beside him.

  Her finger, trailing mist, pointed up.

  There he saw a small hatch embedded in the underside of the main platform, a red handle protruding from it. He rose up on his toes, and when his fingers wrapped around the handle and pulled, the hatch dropped open. The drone of the massive fan inside the room of Heartcubes reached his ears, and he distinctly heard Abe’s voice. He glanced to his side in search of Vera, but she was gone.

  His whole body trembled as he jumped, grabbed hold to the corner of the small hatch, and pulled himself up. His arms were tired, so, so tired, and it took a great effort, but with eyes squeezed shut, he succeeded. He slid up and onto the chamber floor and collapsed, the cold metal sending pins and needles into his brain.

  Someone screamed, and Shade looked up to see Abe, thirty feet away, his face a mask of agony. He had his Eldersword out and fought against a bald man bearing a sword blacker than night. Abe took a fist to the face, stumbled away, and then the bald man stabbed through his back. Shade lay there, shaken, unable to move. The blade retracted; Abe fell face-first to the floor. The bald man turned, and Asaph stared at him, his eyes widening in surprise.