Book of Transformations

by Mark Charan Newton

  Telov held the neutral ends of the chains out cautiously in front, and it was clear from his movements that his nerves were getting the better of him. She had wanted to capture Dartun for so long and now this seemed an anticlimax. Was this legendary cultist simply going to let himself be taken back to Villjamur?

  Dartun suddenly lowered his head and closed his eyes. She heard a faint drone coming from him. Without looking up, Dartun reached out to grab the chains in Telov’s hands, chains that at this frequency of energy should have given him such a shock as to send him unconscious.

  There came an electrical snap: energy was being forced back through the chains into the neutral handles – and Telov’s hands began to burn. He screamed, couldn’t let go, fell to his knees still gripping the heated handles, crying while smoke streamed from his palms.

  Papus quickly activated the Skammr and the chains were jammed and deactivated, and ancient energy, in the form of purple light, dissipated. Telov collapsed to his side and buried his hands into the snow.

  She was stunned: how, without any relics, was Dartun able to do that?

  Dartun spread his stance and, with his arms either side, his glance calm, took in the situation. Once again he faced Papus and smiled. ‘Sure you can handle me?’

  ‘How did you do that?’ she demanded. ‘You aren’t carrying any relics.’

  ‘I’m not who I used to be,’ Dartun replied.

  The Skammr should have worn off by now. She gave the signal and four of her cultists ran forwards with relics: an electrical net spurted slickly into the air, and with a liquid grace fell onto Dartun – but he simply ripped through it with his bare hands.

  How is that possible?

  Two others tried to use weapons to beat him, one a sword, another a crossbow: miraculously, with a quick gesture of his right hand he managed to bend the metal of the sword so that it had become inert, and the crossbow bolt he caught with his left hand; doubly impressive because he wasn’t even looking in that direction.

  Dartun flipped back his cloak and peeled away the skin on his arm: where she expected blood to surge and tendons to be exposed, a strange, almost white ceramic arm was in place, and it glittered with tiny webs of light.

  More of her order charged, relics in hand.

  The arm was a revolution in technology. It stuttered into life, vibrating minutely, one minute quite inflexible, the next very fluid. His face was set in a savage sneer as one by one he ripped into her order. She watched the violence in awe.

  He jumped and bent back and forth with impossible flexibility. There was so much blood and ice spraying, and he moved so quickly, it was hard to discern the action, but she saw him cleave one of her members in two, sever another’s head sending it skittering across the frozen lake.

  She was agog. Mortified.

  Soon she was the only member of her order left standing, and Papus was stunned at the carnage around her. Tears filled her eyes as she regarded her whole cult wiped out with so much ease. Dartun was hardly tired by the spectacle, panting lightly, his breath clouding the air.

  He stood to regard her, basking in the aftermath. His arm shimmered as the sun broke through, washing the scene with a pink light.

  ‘You’re . . . you’re not even human,’ Papus managed to say. She felt her stomach churning.

  Oddly, her words seemed to knock him back, and he shook his head as if in a half-daze. He suddenly stared at her like he didn’t know what he’d been doing.

  Papus took this moment of respite to survey the wreckage of her order, her life. Blood covered the narrow region of the lake. Body segments were scattered and heaped where two or more had fallen on each other under Dartun’s swift blows.

  She would not let herself die in the same way. She would, at least, honour her order. As Dartun scanned the scene seemingly as confused by his work as she was, Papus primed all the relics beneath her furs, shivering with shock. She produced an Aldartal, triggered it—

  Time froze rigid: nothing moved at the periphery of the scene, everything stopped. Except for Dartun, who sluggishly pulled himself free of the relic’s energy, slowly – as if covered in some abstract treacle – and stuttered into a state of normal time.

  ‘How . . . ? How did you do that?’ Papus asked. Her fears were assuaged by her all-consuming desire to understand what he was.

  ‘You’ll have to try harder than that,’ he muttered. There was an air of insouciance about the manner in which he moved, as if he had all the time in the world to kill her. She deactivated the Aldartal and—

  —the wind groaned once again, her hair spiralled before her face, and they were back in normal time.

  ‘Enough of this.’ Dartun lifted his surreal arm.

  She turned to flee. He marched after her, and she sprinted across the ice to escape him. Frantically, in her pocket she activated a Deyja for a cloak of invisibility. A purple flash – like sheet lightning – and she was gone.

  They paused for a moment, uncertain of how to proceed. Dartun tipped his head this way and that, as if trying to listen.

  Even if, despite his new-found powers, he couldn’t see her, out here it was pointless – he would easily be able to observe her indentations in the snow, her frantic scrabbling across the white surface, the scuff-marks on the ice.

  And as soon as she shifted even slightly, he clocked her.

  Dartun continued his pursuit, his arm a gleaming white stammer of vibrations.

  Something Brenna-based next, two small solid aluminium balls that she plucked from her pockets, activated, then rolled back towards Dartun. They skittered across the ice into his path and, as he stepped around one, they both exploded, aggressively spurting up fire and tiny, razor-sharp chunks of metal.

  A short scream: At least he’s vaguely human, she thought.

  Dartun stopped and flinched, as the fire ravaged his clothing. The shrapnel had shredded the skin across his face, and now, blood-streaked, he collapsed to his knees – finally! She heaved a sigh and, crawling on all fours and still invisible, she sagged tentative relief. Now to finish this off.

  Papus slipped out a dagger from her boot and stood up. She walked over to him and prepared to stab his kneeling form in the back of the neck. Suddenly he lunged up at her, his face a snarling bloodied mess. He grabbed her by the throat with his human hand. She tried to slice at it, but the other arm punched her stomach—

  And punctured it.

  Stunned, a burning pain surged through Papus’s body – and she could see her own blood flowing like wine along Dartun’s arm, down into the little nooks and crannies in the surface. Dartun was elbow-deep inside her abdomen.

  She stared into his eyes and saw something mechanical behind his glare, like a subtle functioning of relics. Then he must have clutched something inside her – oh, fuck could she feel it – and he tugged hard. Her own innards were yanked out before her eyes, flecks of her blood peppering the air.

  Papus collapsed, her head striking the ice.

  *

  Verain experienced a state of being both relieved and appalled as Dartun returned covered in blood. What horrors she had witnessed she had observed from a distance, and the details were unclear. She knew there had been a slaughter, however – that much was obvious.

  After the butchering of the final cultist, Dartun had remained there for several minutes, patrolling up and down the devastation, and she wondered what he must have been thinking. The remains were gruesome, like the despicable culling of seals that many of the tribes across the Archipelago performed each year. She could not take her eyes off the scene, even as Dartun made his way back through the thick snow, to reach the remnants of the Order of the Equinox.

  ‘I have dealt with the matter accordingly,’ Dartun announced.

  ‘You don’t say,’ Tuung blurted out from behind her.

  ‘Your face . . .’ Verain began. His skin was gently pockmarked, like a volcanic rock.

  Dartun reached up his hand to sense the details, and seemed unmoved. ‘It’ll b
e back to normal soon enough – a side effect against one of her relics.’

  ‘Are they all dead?’ she asked.

  ‘They are indeed,’ Dartun beamed.

  ‘So what now, eh?’ Tuung said. His tone was frail, that of a man on the edge. ‘We’re shattered and hungry.’

  Dartun’s expression was distant, withdrawn. Something wasn’t right, but she didn’t know what. ‘I understand your concern,’ he droned. ‘I will ensure that you are well cared for.’ Verain fell under his gaze, and she didn’t know what to think. Was that affection?

  ‘It is essential we all survive and return to Villjamur, and I must confess I have neglected your welfare.’ Dartun still didn’t seem to be particularly bothered that he was drenched in blood. She could barely look at him in this state. ‘We will get off this island and seek a town and some accommodation and some nutrition.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that.’ Tuung headed back to the dogs.

  TWELVE

  On one of the central sections of Villjamur, beneath the disused aqueduct, a short walk from the corner of the long street called Gata Sentimental with its narrow, five-storey buildings, and under the subtle night shadows caused by a bold stone bridge, two men in hooded tunics and thick overcoats were navigating their way across the vast, empty iren, avoiding the patches of moonlight. A pterodette lunged down, inches from the cobbles, hunting bats, before it scaled one of the numerous, crenellated towers of the city at a high velocity. A sharp air pervaded the scene, and a fog was beginning to roll in from the sea, bringing with it a deadly evening chill.

  ‘There’s a foul air tonight,’ one of the men muttered.

  ‘Quit your fairy talk, Liel,’ sighed Brude, a barrel of man. Stubble smothered his face, and his small, beady eyes examined the distance for signs of life. Satisfied, he regarded his companion. ‘You’ve been spurting all sorts of shit since the banshees stopped their keening, and tonight’s no different from any other. Or have you been hanging around with kids and reading too much MythMaker, eh?’

  ‘No,’ Liel replied. ‘But them banshees going all silent just ain’t natural, I can tell you that much. Word is, someone’s got their tongues.’

  ‘It’s easier, idiot, because who’s now here to scream for the dead? No one, that’s who. There’s less fear when you’re murdering someone, so it makes life easier. Now, stop being so pathetic. You should be more like your mate, Caley – he’s not chicken shit and he’s years younger than you.’

  Liel squirmed a nod.

  Brude couldn’t stand the scrawny man being so paranoid. He was eighteen, slow for his age, and his incessant paranoia was infectious. Brude turned his furtive attention to the edge of this iren, one of the largest in the city, where a few glass shopfronts were glittering like starlight.

  Among them he searched for a name . . .

  Granby’s Gemstones.

  There it was, a decorative and faded green facade, its square sign creaking gently in the wind. In the daytime, people of the city would mill about outside this shop and goggle at the metallic trinkets and precious stones beyond the glass.

  Shalev’s instructions were, as always, to the letter. Forty days had passed now since she’d been working with them – the anarchists. Forty days of furtive undertakings, though strictly speaking, they wouldn’t ever call it work; they wanted to refer to it always as a collective. Work was still a form of wage slavery, they claimed. Work was getting grimmer and grimier, poor conditions forced upon people by propagating the fear of how bad the ice would become. Other folk felt they wanted secure jobs in such conditions, despite the poor pay and treatment. They wanted to remain in their front-room cloth manufacturers, labouring under restrictive conditions by the underground docks, but Brude wasn’t into such self-abuse. Rumour had it that the Freeze was destined to keep the ice here for decades, so he was fucked if he was having any of that.

  Shalev had given them hope . . .

  Caveside was a different place now and it had all happened quite suddenly. Two months ago the enormous but overlooked sector of the city was practically a slum, an enclosed shanty suburb that housed the majority of the population. There was resentment against topsiders, deep unrest and petty crime had flourished.

  But now? Now Shalev was manufacturing miracles.

  First came her remarkable cultist-engineered seeds. Barren zones of land, on which nothing could ever grow, were suddenly able to support tight patches of crops. Tolerant plants could now thrive with little light or water, and what were back gardens only in name became allotments. Food bloomed in the darkness.

  Poorer smiths began to manufacture things for Shalev in exchange for food, and weapons: clubs, daggers and maces spread amongst the Caveside dwellers. But whereas once these would have been used on one another, now Shalev brought them together as a group. Connections were made externally and, somehow, surreal though it seemed, crops were being exported out from under the city to rural collectives, in exchange for their support. A barter economy, one without money, grew quickly – out of nothing – and Brude didn’t quite know what to make of it all. But what he did know was this: Granby’s Gemstones was on Shalev’s hit list. That such a place could continue to exist was a symbol of the extravagance of the upper city, which flaunted such wealth at a time where thousands of refugees were dying right on Villjamur’s doorstep. It was a shocking, garish display of crass commercialism, Shalev had said. Or rather, that’s what people reported that Shalev had said, because the level of secrecy was immense for newcomers to their circles. Given the brutal determination of the military in this city to hunt her down, that was certainly understandable.

  And all of this was why Brude and Liel were going to filch its jewels.

  A couple of muscled lads were a whistle-call away, waiting with blades in case any of the city guard strolled by, but the added security didn’t fully reassure him. Brude and Liel flitted into the shadows as a priestess tottered across the ice to a nearby Jorsalir church, her skirts hitched up so the hem wouldn’t get wet. Once she had passed, the two men scurried along the perimeter of the open square, to the small alleyway alongside the jewellers.

  Liel stood languidly, a blade clutched in his tiny fist. Brude searched in his own overcoat for the device passed along to him from Shalev.

  Where is the damn thing, I hope I haven’t left the bugger in the caves. A-ha!

  He whipped the object out with a conjuror’s flourish. It was a small tool that utilized some form of magic to cut through glass. Brude was adroit in urban techniques, having spent years educating himself in the ways of the thief, but this was something entirely new to his repertoire. He tilted the device, a long rectangular strip of brass, this way and that in the moonlight, discerning the correct side, then pressed it against the grainy glass for several seconds. He moved it along, held it for several seconds, moved it along, and so on, until he had drawn a barely visible circle about an arm-span across on the surface of the glass. Once the ends of the lines connected, he waited. The line suddenly glowed purple, flared brightly and, with a snap, the circled patch of glass fell in one piece into the darkness of the shop, whereupon it shattered. Liel and Brude quickly scanned the area in case anyone heard.

  Liel tugged at Brude’s sleeve, and the thuggish man turned to follow his gaze.

  ‘Brude! Up there, Brude. Top of those walls, I swear I saw something.’

  ‘There ain’t a thing there, runt,’ Brude grunted. ‘Now come on.’ He heaved his boot up onto the windowsill, cleared the broken glass, then peered inside. In the near-darkness, he could see the glimmer of gemstones in their cabinets.

  The wealth here is . . . staggering. Oh my . . . emeralds and rubies . . . Praise Bohr, it’s a fucking miracle all right. And a few were his for the taking, as payment, so long as he distributed the rest to the collective.

  ‘Brude,’ Liel whimpered, ‘you really should look at this. I ain’t kidding.’

  ‘Fucksake, what is it?’ Brude demanded, turning back.

  Liel waf
ted his arm. ‘Up there, on them roofs. Few hundred yards away, a fraction left of the Astronomer’s Glass Tower.’

  From out of the sea of fog and above the crenellated sector walls, a figure could be seen gliding from rooftop to rooftop, tiptoeing across the moonlit tiles – then, seemingly, it ran through the air over a gap of at least twenty yards, its arms and legs flailing, only to push itself off another set of roof tiles with the daintiest of touches.

  Fluidly, it manoeuvred itself towards them.

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Brude placed his finger and thumb in his mouth and, very loudly, gave two sharp whistles. A moment later, boots were clattering on the cobbles: the back-up was arriving. ‘Tell them what’s going on, I’ll get some gems, then we fuck off quickly. Right?’

  Liel nodded tentatively, his eyes still fixed on the approach of this rooftop newcomer.

  Brude glanced at their comrades, three blond thugs standing furtively next to Liel, both kitted out in tight military-style clothing and both brandishing swords. Brude nodded to them, and they whispered back, ‘Evening, brothers.’

  As Liel opened his mouth to explain the situation, and Brude poked his head back into the shop, a voice called out from across the street:

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, chaps.’ He was well-spoken, whoever he was, silhouetted against the moonlit glare on the wet cobbles, with his hands on his hips. A tail swished back and forth, and for a moment Brude assumed it was an Inquisition rumel. Brude pulled his attention away from the jewellers and, standing alongside his comrades, peered through the fog that had now made itself present at street level.

  ‘The fuck are you, telling us what to do?’ Brude called back. ‘You Inquisition or something?’

  All he could see at first was that the silhouette started walking towards them. Was this the same one as the figure previously spotted on the rooftops? He couldn’t have dropped here that quickly. He must have approached from a different part of the city.

  ‘I’m one of the Villjamur Knights,’ the stranger replied.