She’d been buried like that, and the Father had been disturbed by Teague’s insistence that no-one see her before she was placed in the coffin and the lid nailed down. Teague had done that himself, of course. No-one could ever know.
On the night of this latest transformation and the uncountable nights since, he found families that were bound by love, and then tore them apart one by one, gorging himself on anguish.
~
As Charos led the third Teague through the Courtyard and past the wall, he felt the experiences of his other soulforms. One stood by a huge black wall, like the one Charos was opening for him now; another was led up some black stairs that were strewn with living corpses, other tortured souls like himself, and led to the tower of the Lustful; and a final Teague was surrounded by inky water, a Teague whose fear was beyond that which his other selves experienced. He was somewhere else entirely.
Now the third Teague was rowing, his innards hanging on the outside, his oars made up of his own bones. He took himself across the dark river Styx, toward another tower, a third.
He was dragged inside the Round Tower, the tower of the Wrathful, and thrown against a stone wall made of compressed human flesh. It pulsated, still alive somewhere in its bruised cells.
Beside him, Charos spoke:
Remember … Remember your sins and be penitent!
~
A year had passed since the death of his mother. The month before, he had dug up her grave, torn open the coffin in a rage and bundled her bones into the handkerchief, still encrusted with her dry blood. It was the same rag she had been dabbing her bleeding gums with the day she had died. The bones barely fitted inside it, but he tied it securely and hung it from his shoulder with a length of string, before heading out from the town.
Behind him his house was burning. Great red flames reached for the stars while the gasoline Teague had scavenged from some unused vehicle maintenance shack fuelled the inferno. The roof caved in with a fountain of ethereal sparks that rose in the hot air, and a supporting timber crashed through the front wall into the cobbled street. People stood, gaping.
But that was a month ago, and Teague now lived in the forest between Niu Correntia and Pirene, to the west. Three nights a month he feasted on the flesh of the townspeople, taking them drunk from the alleys beside the inn, or from their beds if they lived alone, or off the streets at night. He dragged each one to a secluded place just outside of town by lifting them onto his shoulder, or simply carrying them in his claw if that particular meal was a child.
They paid for his pain. He tore them open, still alive. He ate them as they died, some screaming, some already too weak to voice their agony, and swallowed each organ only after chewing it to paste. The skin he saved until last, a sack filled only with blood. He finished his meal and left the bones, along with whatever other useless bits that remained, in a bloody heap somewhere in the forest.
Each week he took normal food from Pirene to sustain himself between the real meals. A few months later, after numerous deaths, Joseph Gabel would travel there during his monster-hunts and warn the people, give them the monster’s description. Then Teague would have to move farther and farther out from the town, but would always return for the kills during those nights when he was his complete self.
Teague had killed forty-six men, women and children, and eaten most of them. One of the first was Lucia, the daughter of one of the poorest council members, who had tasted particularly sour.
~
As Teague felt himself pulled apart by Charos in the courtyard, all he thought about was pain. While each soulform was taken away, worse than a condemned prisoner, the final Teague stood in the courtyard, feet burning, smoky skin bright with pain. Charos stood before him, grey and malevolent.
‘What about me?’ he asked. ‘What place in this dimension is fitting of my sin?’
Charos looked at him and then surrounded him, turning to black smoke that clogged his lungs.
Your sin is the worst. Its very essence goes against your God. Do you believe?
‘It’s hard not to whilst being tortured in Hadentes.’
His bones grew spikes and his whole body shook with pain as muscles were torn to ribbons. His skin cracked in several places and he began to fall to his knees, bleeding, before Charos wrenched him up.
You would think all mockery would be gone from your head after what you are experiencing!
Teague certainly had cleared his mind of all jokes. He had never known such excruciating anguish.
Your sin takes you to a place different from here.
‘What place?’
Charos swallowed him up in smoke, and Teague felt the smouldering ground beneath his feet vanish, and he knew he was somewhere else. But he couldn’t see through the smoke; Charos bound itself tightly around him, and became like a thick chain of fog that pressed his limbs to his body. His knees were bent so that his ankles were strapped to his thighs. He couldn’t move.
‘Where are we going?’
Charos didn’t answer. Teague felt himself being pulled somewhere, felt a sudden change in pressure around his body, an intolerable heat blasting upon his essence. Still he could see nothing through Charos’ smoke.
‘Tell me, Charos … Where are we going?’
Now Charos answered, and its voice was so baneful that it made Teague shudder, despite his restraints.
We are going to the place of the Heretics, the Cavern beneath the Courtyard, it explained. Where the greatest heretic of all awaits.
*
Eight
FLAME-PALMED MAN
Caeles sleeps. He knows he sleeps because there are things all around him that don’t exist anymore, that haven’t existed for decades. They are made of silvery chrome and gleam all around him, a thousand shining objects in an otherwise dark place. Steel ribs form a domed ceiling above him. Sleek metal arms ending in silver digits all gesture for him to move, to walk on. Skulls without jaws stare at him with black, hollow sockets as he passes, rivets in their steely scalps.
He can tell from the wall panels and the frayed, exposed wiring that he is in a defunct starship. He senses that the air in here is fake – like his bones – and stale. The air had been recycled by a thousand pairs of lungs over a hundred years.
And the chrome ushers show him the way. A door swishes smartly open for him, and, confidently, he steps through.
The dream-room is cold, and this time, here, now, he can feel this chill. Not sense, but feel; experience; know. In this dream, Caeles is back in a time when he was real.
A man sits on top of a toppled computer work station, swinging his legs and whistling cheerfully. He sees Caeles enter and grins, shakes his head furiously as if to clear his mind.
‘My eyes!’ he cheers. ‘My eyes are seeing things! Has it happened? Tell me it has, oh tell me!’
‘Has what happened?’ Ceales replies. ‘You. I know you.’
‘Me,’ the man mocks. ‘You know me.’
He jumps down from the computer terminal and brushes down his white lab-coat. He shakes his head again, and his wild white hair ripples like a lion’s mane. A dozen kinds of madness are ripening behind his expressions.
‘Uh oh,’ he says. ‘Yeah, it’s happening all right. I must be crazy. Here is John Parland, military call-sign Caeles. More machine than man – in the real world, at least. Was it worth it? Having your flesh and organs stripped away so that you could fight someone else’s war in a radioactive battlefield?’
He takes a step closer, and suddenly his face is alive with rage. His body visibly shakes as he hisses: ‘It’s about time, John!’
Caeles, uncharacteristically, takes a step backward. ‘It is you. You can’t be real.’
‘Took the words right out of my mouth,’ the white-haired man says, walking circles around him. ‘Man, you’re old.’
‘So are you. Tan Cleric.’
‘He remembers!’ he cries, throwing up his arms. He claps his hands, performs a strange little jig on the tips
of his toes. ‘Oh John, I thought you’d forgotten me, I really had.’
‘Get out of my dream.’
The walls sneak up on them, but the ceiling slides upward, ascending into darkness. And, somewhere inside that thick obscurity, something is coming.
Tan Cleric looks afraid. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘It sounds like…’
‘Are they wings? Are they beating wings I can hear? It’s an angel,’ he says, suddenly desperate, grasping at Caeles’ clothes. ‘The Angel of Death! This proves that you’re in my dream. I’ve dreamt of those beating wings for years … in my sleep and in my waking hours…’
‘Maybe we’re both dreaming,’ Caeles replies flatly, pushing Cleric away and staring up into the abyss. ‘Maybe you are still alive.’
‘You sound confident. Are you sure you’re not dead?’
‘If you’re alive,’ Caeles warns, ‘I’m going to kill you.’
‘You’re welcome to try.’ Cleric makes a cavalier gesture. ‘I’ll either complete my work or die trying.’
‘You killed Claire,’ Caeles is saying. ‘When we found out you sabotaged our lab. It’s your fault I had to accept the constription. It’s your fault she’s dead!’
‘Oh yes, so it is! Killing her with the same shard of metal that punctured you. Two fleshy mortals, skewered together like lamb chunks on a kebab. God, I miss lamb. What, did you think I forgot? That was the first time I ever killed anybody. Of course I remembered it. But you know it wasn’t the last time I killed.’
‘They had you in jail. You should be dead. Before I shut down, I swear I’m going to destroy you.’
In Cleric’s hand, a silver short-sword has appeared. It has the wings of an angel carved along its blade, and they gleam like the metal bones that adorn the starship’s corridor.
‘Remember this?’
Caeles holds up his hand, and the sword is in his palm. Caeles smiles lopsidedly, hefting the familiar weight of the wakizashi.
‘Oi! Give it back!’ Cleric says, snatching for it but missing. ‘That was mine.’
‘You surrendered it to me,’ says Caeles.
‘Give it back! You didn’t deserve to have that! I thought it was lost, but you took it from me, didn’t you? You should never have taken it, not without me ever knowing!’
‘Maybe I’ll tell you how,’ Caeles snapped. ‘Another time. The day I kill you.’
Caeles walks backward toward the door through which he entered, sheathing the wakizashi. ‘You should have stayed on this starship. You should have stayed dead. Because if this dream is what I think it is, it means you’re still around. It means that I can finally have the pleasure of killing you.’
The doors hiss open behind him, and he backs out. But before they close in front of him, he sees Cleric look up.
‘I can still hear the wings,’ the man says. ‘I know they’re coming. But I’ll finish what the world started.’
~
Four days after they’d stumbled upon the remnant of the old war, Gabel’s party caught their first glimpse of the great lake Lual, stretching for endless miles. It was much larger than Rowan had ever imagined any expanse of water to be – she had never once seen an ocean – and she had to sit down, feeling once again weak.
By the great lake hunkered the city of São Jantuo, whose buildings had once been large and well-built, sky-scraping. But it hadn’t survived the Conflict. In a way, Caeles knew, nothing had. Not really; himself included. São Jantuo had been kept clean and became a microcosm compared to the rest of the world, hidden away, a backwater town where laws were taken seriously and enforced by a squad of intensely-trained men and women. Caeles knew that the Squad was led by a woman who was not only a warrior trained by warriors, but also a lawman raised by a lawman; her father was the captain of the Squad before her time, and had raised her as his natural successor. Marisa de la Naja obeyed only two: her instincts and the Regent.
Caeles looked over the landscape at the vast lake and estimated the time it would take to cross it.
‘Could take a week,’ said Gabel before Caeles could speak.
‘That may be.’
‘Do you think that your enemy, this Regent Dysan, is still alive? Are you ready to face him?’
‘Yes, though I’d rather not go back on my agreement. I might get a reputation for not keeping my word.’
The cyborg was becoming less and less concerned about his word, however. He knew that there were more urgent worries, much darker villains abroad. His “dreams” had told him that much.
‘If he dies during your encounter, it wouldn’t matter much, would it?’ Gabel said.
He didn’t turn, his eyes on the sky, but said, ‘Are you suggesting I kill him if I get any trouble?’
‘Of course not,’ said the hunter. ‘But are you ready?’
The wind whipped at them, both men exposed to it from their position on the open rise, and Caeles’ hand touched the black hilt of his wakizashi. The slowly setting sun, reflected from the great lake, was cast onto his face, in his eyes. The ugly scar that ran down the left side of his cheek was a deep mulberry in the light.
‘Yeah, I think I’m ready.’
It took hours to descend the hill, and gradually the glittering Lual was lost behind the buildings of the city. The dirt path soon became a paved road – Caeles told Rowan it was called “tarmac” – which was hard and flat under their feet. The river turned sharply away, but they had no need to follow it any further; the great gates of the city were just visible in the darkness, at the end of the long black road.
A man on horseback trotted past them, coming in from an adjoining path. He gave a curt look, and then kicked his spurs. With a quiet “kheia!” whispered to his mount, the shape vanished between the two open gates, which closed behind him.
Clouds hung overhead, threatening more snow.
The gates were twelve feet high and made of a thick wood that Gabel couldn’t identify. They were rough and splintered, especially around the huge brass hinges that fastened them to the concrete pillars of the city walls. Gabel knocked twice, and they heard the creak of strained bowstrings above them.
‘State your business!’ called a man’s voice.
‘We wish to cross the Lual in the morning, and find a place to stay in the meantime.’ The magus had pushed in front of Gabel and was calling up to the archers, who looked down their long arrows at them.
A few private words were spoken down a line to somewhere behind the gates. One side opened and a largish man with fingerless gloves let them through. He didn’t seem threatening.
‘Come inside,’ he said amiably. ‘The inn is on your third right.’
They thanked him and found their way to the inn, one of the tallest buildings in the city with its three storeys. After booking two rooms, Gabel and Caeles stood by the door and talked quietly.
‘Beware of the Squad that patrols the city during the night,’ said the hunter. ‘The captain is especially dangerous.’
‘I understand. They were around last time I was here. Are you coming with me?’
‘Do you need me to hold your hand, cyborg?’ Gabel mocked in a hushed voice.
‘Fine, I can manage.’ He half-opened the door. ‘Just keep an eye out for trouble.’
‘Of course. We’ll wait for you in the rooms. Don’t worry. But aren’t you going to eat something first? In fact, it may be better to wait until morning.’
‘I’ll check the boat timetable. If we can wait another day, then I’ll delay until the morning to see the Mayor. If not … Well, you’ll hear news either way.’
He smiled and clapped the factotum on the back, then pulled his coat around his neck and vanished down the dark, unfriendly street.
~
There were a few streetlights, but they were unevenly widely spread, their decaying electrics poorly maintained. There were proper roads here, and the buildings were made of stone instead of wood or repurposed rubble. The whole place reminded Caeles of what cities were like be
fore the Conflict. He had an image of a mighty steel-glass building that stood tall and proud, and God knows how many storeys high.
But not here. These structures were shabby and in disrepair. Some looked all right, but Caeles preferred the house he had been living in the previous few years. Pirene was a much quieter town. And safer.
He had no intention of waiting until morning to confront the Regent. The man was old, yes, and frail, but he would want to know immediately if his old enemy had walked through his gates. Caeles was realising why the Magus had wrenched him out of his seclusion.
The city hall was wide, dome-topped and built of large white bricks. The doors were protected by two men with halberds; a few metres ahead of them stood two more guards, holding spears. Another man with impressive physique and admirable armour stood by a low wall, checking the horizon to the south, where large tree-topped hills rolled under the oppressive night sky. They looked remarkably ‘old world’ against such a modern backdrop, but working pistols and other firearms were hard to come by, and people skilled enough to look after such things even rarer.
He noticed a man walking toward him and waited for him to arrive, pulling back his shoulders.
‘What’s your business?’
‘I came with the party that just entered through your gates,’ Caeles said. ‘I wish to see the Regent to inform him of our arrival.’
‘Is he expecting you?’
‘No,’ Caeles said calmly. ‘He’s not.’
‘Then wait until morning,’ was the guard’s response.
‘He would want to know of my arrival in São Jantuo. Please send word that I’m here. I don’t want to cause any trouble.’
It came out wrong but Caeles wasn’t a man to take back anything he said. He hadn’t meant to make a threat – it was more an apology – but if it worked…
The armoured man spoke quietly with one of the guards, who went inside the hall, while the Chief watched, thick arms folded. The guard returned half a minute later, whispered back to his supervisor.
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