I had to stop him.
Somehow, I had to find Evan Burl and warn him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Evan
Thursday
6:33 am
40 hours, 16 minutes until the Falling
The affliktion had taken Pearl; it was even worse than I feared. Her skin was clawed and scratched; her fingers sticky and red. Blood covered her chin and lips.
My blood.
I remembered her teeth clenched into my shoulder; her little mouth tearing flesh from bone.
Just the night before, I'd given her a skull pendant to keep her safe. Afterward, those same lips that were now covered with my blood, kissed my cheek goodnight.
When she was younger, I taught her to tie her shoes. I used to let her win when we raced in the courtyard.
She was my friend.
Now she wanted me dead.
My whole life I'd been afraid of the evil prowling outside the castle's walls. But I should have been worried about what was lurking inside.
My shirt felt suddenly heavy. I realized it too was soaked with blood. Something nearby crashed and I startled. Before I realized what was happening, I was on my feet. In one clasped hand was the cuff of someone's shirt. My other fist was raised to strike.
"S-s-sorry," Ravenna said as she ducked and covered her face with an arm. She had tripped and knocked over a rack of tools.
I dropped her and backed away. That's right, little girl, I thought with a sick feeling. Don't upset the monster. I couldn't believe what I was turning into.
I looked over at Pearl, still lying on the ground. She looked peaceful, asleep. I stepped towards her, fighting back tears. She was so small, and kind. She never complained. She didn't deserve to die. Why was this happening to her?
Ballard approached and was about to pick her up when her eyes popped open, locking in on me.
"Take. It. Back." Her voice sounded deep and unnatural. Her eyes never blinked.
She pushed herself off the floor, her skinny arms shaking. Rising slowly, she grabbed me, but Ballard wrapped his huge hands around her from behind and strapped a gag in her mouth.
She squirmed and fought, but Ballard was too much for her. Within seconds, he'd pinned her to the ground, bound her feet and hands, then slung her over his shoulder like a rolled rug.
Mazol looked confused for a moment, but recovered quickly and jerked his head towards the door, like he and Ballard had planned the whole thing. It seemed the only instructions Ballard needed was to get on with it.
Pearl fought and wriggled off Ballard's shoulder, but he caught her. I saw a raw patch on her throat where the chain that held the skull pendant was digging into her skin.
She was yelling into the gag and just before he carried her out, I caught one word. Her eyes piercing me.
"Murderer."
Everyone was staring at me. The monster. I had used sapience to throw a twelve-year-old against a stone wall.
"There's no way you could have known," Henri whispered, reading my mind.
"What?" I snapped.
"That it was Pearl," she said more kindly than I deserved.
I didn't say anything. I was still trying to make sense of what happened. Henri leaned over and asked the question I was dreading, "What was that anyway?"
I avoided making eye contact with her, hoping she'd drop it. She touched my arm reassuringly, but I pulled it away from her.
"What stopped her from attacking me?" she asked, undeterred.
I still didn't answer.
"Does it have something to do with your bloody fingers?"
I wanted to tell her, but I couldn't bring myself to admit it out loud. I just needed more time. I needed to figure out what I was dealing with first.
I thought of what Pearl said.
'Take it back.'
'Murderer.'
I shivered. Why was she saying those things?
No one could answer that except Pearl. I recognized a feeling I should have been used to by then—the feeling of trying to put a puzzle together without all the pieces. It was the story of my life.
I looked up and noticed Mazol staring at me. And Yesler. I expected them to be angry, but they weren't.
They were wide-eyed, as if they'd just been bitten by a snake.
They were afraid.
I have to admit, for a brief second, it made me happy. After all those years of being beaten, mistreated, abused—the looks on their faces were priceless.
And at that moment I knew what it felt like to have the heart of a monster beating inside me. Because I wanted more. I wanted them to fear me. I wanted to hurt them. I didn't want to stop hurting them until there was nothing left of them to hurt. I wanted it more than anything.
More than protecting the fallings.
I took a step towards Mazol, not caring what I did to them or what the consequences were. This was the moment to strike, while they were still surprised by my power. But then I remembered Pearl, how I hurt her. And the fear I saw in the fallings' eyes, even Henri, when they saw what I had become. They would hate me for what I had become, but I didn't have a choice. It was the only way to save them. I'd help them all one last time and then I'd disappear.
I had just made up my mind when Ballard burst back through the swinging door, carrying one of the small chests we found the fallings in when they first came to Daemanhur. Ballard whispered something in my uncle's ear. I couldn't hear, but I knew it was bad. My stomach twisted into a knot.
As I watched my uncle's face, I thought back to his reaction when Pearl attacked me. He seemed surprised at the time, but not anymore. Ballard finished whispering and Mazol's mustache twitched, ever so slightly. It was the kind of twitch I'd seen before. It meant my uncle was pleased.
It meant Mazol was behind the affliktion.
Part of me wished I hadn't seen it. That I could pretend my hunch about him was still wrong. But I knew my uncle was who we all needed to fear. I might be a monster. Henri might worry about me going crazy. My friends might accuse me of being a killer. But Mazol was the real murderer.
Knowing that only made my decision easier. It took away any last guilt I might have had for taking out my own uncle. My last real family. But there was something I didn't understand. Why was Mazol surprised Pearl attacked me? I could see the surprise clearly written on his face when we discovered who it was that almost killed me. Maybe he didn't realize the affliktion could turn a little girl like Pearl into a murderer.
I glanced quickly around the platform. Some of the girls were whispering, others were staring at me. My uncle said something back to Ballard, who left immediately. Then Mazol turned to us. I felt my moment slipping away. I didn't have the will to go through with it.
"What are you all staring at?" he said as he took a kick at Henri. "Get to work!" The girls scattered, but just out of his reach they reformed new clusters and resumed staring at me.
He grabbed me by my uninjured arm, but then, as if realizing he might not want to upset me, he lightened his grip.
"Get him bandaged," he said to Yesler. "Carefully now. The others will have to make up for his absence until he's healed up." Yesler didn't budge. He looked like he didn't want to touch me with a twenty foot pole. I don't know why, but at that moment I felt sympathy for Yesler. He was just as scared as I was.
"The book was right, wasn't it?" Henri whispered into my ear so just I could hear.
"What are you waiting for?" Mazol yelled at Yesler. "Take care of it!"
"I was right about you," Henri whispered again.
"I'm fine," I said, ignoring Henri. "I can work." There was no way the other six girls would be able to get a full day's shift done with two of us missing.
"I don't remember asking your opinion," Mazol said to me, and then added in a fake, but kinder tone, "I can't afford a doctor if you get infected."
"Tell me the truth, Evan," Henri pleaded.
But I couldn't think. Why wasn't Mazol asking me about what just happened? It was like he
knew what I was capable of. It was like I was just a pawn, and he was using me. I was a part of his plan. But of course I was. He had seen the first letter before I stole the book five years ago. He knew what I was. He expected this.
"What did you do to Pearl?" I demanded.
"Pearl is dead," Mazol said. "She died from the affliktion just after Ballard carried her from the room."
The room started spinning. Someone began crying behind me.
Mazol must be wrong. People like me and my uncle and Yesler were supposed to die. Not Pearl. She was special. She couldn't die.
I felt Yesler guiding me towards the door.
I looked back. Mazol was staring at me. He smiled again, like he had won. He was mocking me for caring about Pearl. For my weakness. For my love. For wanting to protect the fallings.
It was more than I could bear.
I snapped.
I pulled away from Yesler. He tightened his grip on my arm, but he was no match for the monster inside me.
I strode towards Mazol. My leg brace got caught on a Clanker, but even as it was ripped from my leg, I didn't slow down. The sapience coursed through my blood.
I picked up a rusted drum of oil, not even feeling its weight. I lifted it above my head, ready to bring it down on top of Mazol.
I was five steps away from him when I felt something pinch my neck. Something cracked inside my head, like lightening striking. At four steps away, my skull seemed to break in half and a pain unlike anything I'd ever imagined ripped through every bone of my body.
I turned my head. Yesler stood behind me holding a huge needle. Thick, black liquid dropped from the syringe's tip, tinged red with blood. The oil drum fell from my hands over the edge of the top floor handrail. As it crashed onto the level below, I felt my neck where he had just stabbed me.
From somewhere I thought I heard Henri's voice saying, "You're not who you think you are Evan."
Then I saw Little Sae's face. She was whispering with Mazol. He grinned at her.
As everything around me disappeared into a cloud of white, I thought I saw Henri join Mazol and Little Sae. The three of them looked at me and laughed, as if I was some sort of private joke between them. Suddenly, Henri's face turned pale and cold.
And then everything disappeared.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cevo
Thursday
9:25 am
37 hours, 24 minutes until the Falling
To me, children are like cow dung. While a necessary part of life, they are not something I am particularly fond of spending time with.
There were perhaps a hundred young children in the crowd, cuddling their mothers, yawning, rubbing their eyes—normal toddler behavior, I suppose. The older children appeared restless. I saw a dozen throwing rocks at wild pigs caught in a pen. A small group was pretending to hang one child of about ten years by his neck. A few others were chasing some smaller children with sticks.
As for the older humans, the parents, they filled the courtyard and the streets as far as I could see. Hundreds, possibly thousands of them, townsmen and travelers, shuffled about and whispered with muted excitement, waiting.
The inns of El Qįr, a large capitol city of the region with about 2000 inhabitants, had been full for days—so much so that some visitors had been sleeping in their carts and others in tents pitched along the smaller alleys of the city, which I thought suited them better. With these people, I wouldn't have been surprised to find they were sleeping with the cows.
In a few days, the travelers would make the dangerous journey home. The town would be cleaned, and life inside the city's walls would return to normal. But until then, for the people of El Qįr and the surrounding jungle villages, it was the highlight of the year.
At least that's what they thought.
That's how the festival had gone every year for decades and decades. But this year, I had arranged a few changes to the festival. This year, the people of El Qir would learn about their new calling in life. Just like the city's regents, I was going to offer the people significance.
They were half of my plan to find Evan Burl. The people of El Qir couldn't tell me where the boy was hiding, but they were going to get me there. That work, unfortunately, didn't begin until later in the morning. In the meantime, I couldn't have been more miserable.
I stepped out onto the balcony and cringed at the smell of the city floating up from below.
I hated El Qįr.
I hated the way the alleys and streets eternally stank of horse and urine. I hated the way the people sounded, with their pauper's vocabularies and uneducated accents. I hated the way yesterday's meal could always be found rotting in their teeth.
But most of all, I hated the way they laughed. They tilted their heads back, opened wide their putrid mouths, and let loose with rank, disrespectful laughter—and there was nothing I could do to shut them up. At least not when everyone was watching.
All because I had taken a vow.
It had been 22 years, 14 days since I last broke my vow.
All my problems eventually came back to the vow, but I had nothing else to live for. It was my hope, my purpose, my redemption and my prison sentence all wrapped into one simple promise. It was also why I found myself serving the people of El Qįr as their new chancellor.
I had only been chancellor for 48 hours, and already I didn't think I could last another moment. I took out a small piece of cloth, which I always carried on my person, and wiped the balcony rail before placing my bleached white alligator gloved hands on it.
The hammered-thin gauntlets cost more than most of the grimy faces staring up at me earned in a month, but fine accessories like that were worth every penny, especially in the remote, uncivilized regions of the world like El Qįr.
The sun had been up for 3 hours, but it was still low in the sky and I could see dew clinging to the grass in the courtyard lawn. No one went more than a minute or two without glancing in my direction, but they weren't looking at me. They were looking at what was hanging from the scaffolding just to the front and right of my balcony.
Two gagged and nearly naked humans were stretched in four directions, their arms and feet tied to scaffolding erected especially for the Summerend festival. Everyone loved to watch an execution, but the moments before could only be described as tense. Many of those watching seemed conflicted. It was like having a guest show up to a dinner party naked—no one wanted to stare, but no one could keep from looking either.
In a short time though, the tension would finally be cut when one of the prisoners was set free and the other torn to pieces. Then the crowd would cheer and move into the grand festival pavilian.
That was when the real fun began.
This execution was merely a technicality that stood between me and moving on with finding Evan Burl. I was ready to have it over with.
I leaned out to gather the people's attention, trying very hard to hide my disgust with them. I smiled awkwardly and made a little wave, though it pained me to do so. The only thing I enjoyed about the moment was the feeling of anticipation on the air—everyone was waiting for my voice.
"People of El Qįr," I said with perfect enunciation and deep baritone timber—it was not uncommon to hear from my followers that I had a handsome voice. "It is an honor to serve you during Summerend as your new chancellor!"
It was a small lie, so I didn't feel guilty. Serving as chancellor was a necessary evil, certainly not an honor.
"It is with deep love that we remember our great leader who is passed recently, but I believe he would have us enjoy this festival and not mourn our loss." Another lie, but forgivable given the need for leadership in that time of transition.
"The festival is almost upon us. Bring me the wine of the Jura." I had to endure the jura's execution last year, I knew how it went.
As if on que, the crowd cheered and my mood improved. Were they starting to warm up to me, or was it merely their bloodlust? I knew they wanted to see the male Jura executed, an
d I saw no reason to deny them their desire. I also knew they hated me as much as I hated them.
Everyone believed I had something to do with their last chancellor dying—I had underestimated the people's love for the fool. It had been almost two days since they'd gotten the news already. How much longer would they go on about him?
No, I was sure they were cheering out of bloodlust not love for their new leader, but that was all right with me. At least they weren't throwing things, or worse, laughing. That would have really upset me—not something that usually ends well for anyone. When I get upset, I become tempted to give myself a short vacation from my vow, and then bad things happen.
I was determined to control myself, I only had to keep it up for a few more hours.
I held my arms up high, trying to make the moment dramatic—it seemed like people liked that sort of thing—as a servant brought me a silver cup filled with red wine.
I caught my reflection in the goblet—my dark brown wrinkled skin starkly contrasted my white mustache and curly hair in the morning light. Even with as old as I felt, in all due modestly, I still cut a decent looking figure.
The crowd began to chant the name of the one they wanted released, tearing my attention away from the cup's reflection.
Her name was Hagnus.
She was a traveler, come with her family from the far east. I had to assume she was a hardy woman to survive the jungles, not very intelligent, but hardy. For the previous three weeks, she had lived with her husband and four young children inside the walls of El Qįr—a dangerous way to survive, but it was safer than living outside in the jungles and cheaper than living in the city.
Normally, I tried to know as little as possible about the people of El Qįr, but sometimes it was unavoidable. The only reason I knew about this Hagnus women was that ever since she arrived she had been begging, unsuccessfully, to see me.
"Hag-nus, Hag-nus, Hag-nus," the crowd chanted. A golden sliver of sunlight crawled over the horizon and the light seemed to shimmer. Everyone stomped and clapped and cheered, shaking the ground.
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