Incarnation

by Kevin Hardman

  “Okay,” I said after recovering from my surprise, “this discussion seems to be going nowhere, so I’m just going to be blunt. Gamma’s dead, and someone at this table killed her — sans yours truly, of course.”

  “That’s something we’ve already established,” Static chimed in. “I thought you were here to provide new information about her death.”

  I didn’t respond to Static immediately. Instead, I found myself intrigued by the fact that I was picking up emotional vibes from him: sadness and melancholy, but also confidence and resolve. It was in stark contrast to the other Incarnates, from whom I didn’t detect anything at all on an empathic level.

  “He’s got to ask questions before he gets new information,” Rune said, somewhat coming to my rescue. “You can’t expect miracles. After all, he’s not an Incarnate.”

  This got a few laughs from those gathered, and bought me time to come up with my next question.

  “When I mentioned enemies a minute ago,” I noted, “I think Endow pointed out that it’s not necessarily someone who wants to do you harm. It can also be someone competing with you.”

  “You mean like a rival?” queried Pinion. “Again, Gamma was a Chomarsus. She didn’t have any.”

  “But who stood to gain from her death?” I clarified.

  “No one,” Rune stated, shaking his head. “At least, no one here. We don’t inherit the sivrrut of our deceased fellows or anything like that.”

  “So is there anyone who isn’t here who benefits from her dying?” I asked.

  Mariner let out an exasperated sigh. “Is that really important? I mean, we’ve already determined that the killer must be one of us. Why does it matter if someone not at this table derived a benefit?”

  “Because typically when there’s a murder, there’s a motive behind it,” I explained. “If you find the motive, you oftentimes find the killer. And it may not be about who gains from her death. Maybe it’s just plain old revenge?”

  “Revenge?” Reverb repeated (although the voice seemed to come from Rune’s chair).

  “Yeah, revenge,” I reiterated. “Maybe she stole someone’s boyfriend. Maybe she filched your grandmother’s cookie recipe. Maybe she hired away your pool boy. Maybe she…”

  My voice faded as a new thought popped into my brain.

  “All of you have laamuffals, right?” I asked.

  “All but the Inscrutable,” Static confirmed, inclining his head toward Rune. “Before you, that is.”

  I didn’t bother correcting him. Instead, I focused on the issue that had sprang into my head.

  “So if that’s the case, where’s Gamma’s laamuffal?” I asked.

  There was silence for a moment as a number of those present exchanged glances.

  Finally, Endow spoke, saying, “We’re not sure. He vanished around the time of Gamma’s death.”

  I frowned. “Why is this the first time I’m hearing this?”

  “Hearing what?” asked Reverb.

  “That there’s another suspect besides you Incarnates,” I growled.

  “I don’t think anyone ever viewed him as such,” Rune said.

  I looked around the table incredulously. “Gamma’s killed, and at the same time, her servant goes missing,” I grumbled. “And none of you felt that was suspicious? Have you never heard the saying, ‘the butler did it’?”

  Pinion let out a bark of laughter. “Ha! He was a laamuffal and she was an Incarnate! Do you investigate fleas for the murder of a human being?”

  I pointed a finger at him. “See, that’s the problem right there: your arrogance.” I then let my gaze go from face to face, declaring, “It’s not lack of experience that’s resulting in your poor deductive capabilities. It’s hubris.”

  All of a sudden, Pinion pounded a fist on the table — in anger, I initially thought, and then I realized he was laughing.

  “Ha!” Pinion belted out. “I like this one, Rune! He’s funny. You should have brought him around ages ago.”

  Assuming that he was probably construing me as a laamuffal, I was mildly irked. One day, when this was all over, I’d have to find a way to bring all these Incarnates down a peg or two.

  All these Incarnates? I thought as a crucial fact unexpectedly dawned on me.

  “Hey,” I began, getting the table’s attention. “Where are the rest of you?”

  “The rest?” Static echoed.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Rune said there are about a dozen of you, but there are only six around this table, so where are your other compadres?”

  “They won’t be joining us,” Rune answered. “They weren’t here when the murder occurred, so they aren’t suspects.”

  “And with Permovren sealed off,” Reverb added, “there’s no way for them to enter now.”

  “Not that they would want to,” I noted. “I mean, who would want to be locked in here with a killer, right?”

  That particular commentary was greeted with nothing but silence and blank stares.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I still don’t understand why you people are having such a tough time cracking this case. I mean, you can warp reality, bend time and space… Why can’t you just go back in time and see who the killer is, send Gamma a warning, or something along those lines?”

  “You’re forgetting that Permovren exists outside of space and time,” Rune chided. “There’s no time here for us to go back to.”

  “Well, there’s some form of time here — even if it’s only subjective,” I insisted. “We’re not all frozen in stasis.”

  “Yes, there is a sequential flow of events here,” Endow said, “but it’s not time as you understand it.”

  I gave her a perplexed look, clearly conveying my incomprehension.

  “Let me see if I can explain this in a way you can grasp,” Pinion interjected. “Imagine you have two temporal distorters.”

  I frowned. “You mean time machines.”

  “Sure,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “Now let’s say one can slow down time until a second feels like hours or even days. The other can take you back in time — real time, not subjective — exactly one minute.”

  “Okay,” I mumbled, nodding.

  “So let’s assume you’ve played around with the first temporal distorter and stretched a second out until it subjectively felt like half a day,” Pinion said.

  “I’m following,” I replied.

  “But now, you want to use the second temporal… uh, time machine, to go back one minute within that subjective time frame.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “So in real time only a second has gone by, but subjectively — from my perspective — it’s been twelve hours, and now I want to go back one minute within that twelve-hour, subjective time frame.”

  “Yes, that’s the scenario,” Pinion said with a nod. “But you won’t be able to do it because the second time machine only goes back one minute in real time. It can’t take you back within your subjective time frame, because only one second has passed.”

  “So you’re basically saying that time here in Permovren is like the one second that’s subjectively stretched out into a longer time period,” I summed up. “And the ability of the Incarnates to go back in time is akin to the second time machine, so that you can’t go back in time within this place.”

  “Exactly,” Pinion declared.

  “Hmmm,” I muttered. “I hate to say it, but that actually makes sense.”

  Chapter 16

  My meeting with the Incarnates broke up shortly after Pinion’s explanation about time. They really didn’t have much more to impart, although they did agree that I could talk to their respective laamuffals.

  After they were gone, Rune brought our original furniture back with a wave of his hand and we both sat down.

  “So,” Rune began, “initial thoughts? Impressions?”

  “Honestly, my first thought was that, despite all the time you’ve spent on Earth, you’ve never seen a cop show,” I groused. “Don’t you know that you
aren’t supposed to question suspects together?”

  Rune chuckled. “These are Incarnates. They were going to give the same responses regardless of anything else, and I figured this would save you time.”

  “Oh, you mean the time that doesn’t exist here? That’s what you were trying to save me?”

  He just stared at me for a moment, then muttered, “Ever the wise guy, I see.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’m shocked none of you considered Gamma’s laamuffal as a suspect. What was his name, by the way?”

  “Cerek,” Rune replied. “And again, only another Incarnate could have done this, so we eliminated him as a suspect.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have eliminated him,” I stressed. “I can see a guy flippin’ out after millennia of servitude. In fact, I can see all of your laamuffals having a bellyful of kowtowing.”

  “Simmer down, Spartacus,” Rune said. “No need for a slave rebellion just yet. Besides, as I said earlier, laamuffals aren’t these sycophants you’re portraying them as.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “No?”

  “No,” he insisted. “They’re more like…familiars.”

  “Familiars?” I repeated, skeptically.

  “Yeah, like a wizard’s owl, or a witch’s black cat.”

  “And you think that’s better?” I asked. “Are you listening to yourself?”

  “It’s certainly better than this master-and-slave interaction you keep describing.”

  “Fine, it’s not master and slave,” I growled. “It’s more like Dracula and Renfield.”

  My comment caused Rune to burst into laughter, and a moment later, I joined him. He and I didn’t have quite the same banter that I enjoyed with my mentor Mouse, but it was close enough.

  “Honestly,” I said after the laughter died down, “with everything you Incarnates can do, I don’t know why you need servants in the first place.”

  “Well, sometimes you just need someone to bounce ideas off of,” Rune said. “Or, after you’ve done something, to tell you whether you did as good a job as you thought.”

  “In other words, what good is it to be all great and powerful if there’s nobody to appreciate it.”

  “That’s the sycophant argument again, and I’ll stress — as I did before — that you’ve got the wrong idea. It’s not really about having a servant. In fact, sometimes it’s just about having someone to talk to.”

  “Because it gets lonely at the top, right?”

  Rune simply gazed at me for a moment, then said, “Are you sure you’re not an Incarnate? Because even with my full slate of powers, I couldn’t manage to be as cynical as you about everything.”

  Now it was my turn to chuckle at Rune’s comment. I had to admit that, although we obviously clashed on some things, I liked him.

  “Hey,” I intoned, “I’ve got a question for you — a little off-topic.”

  “Shoot,” Rune said.

  “A couple of times now I’ve heard you referred to as ‘inscrutable.’ Why is that?”

  He nodded, seeming to ruminate momentarily before answering.

  “You’ve probably noticed by now that we Incarnates tend to have names that highlight our attributes,” he stated. “In my case, even among Incarnates, much of what I do is mysterious or unknown. On top of that, I tend to eschew traditional Incarnate conventions, like having a laamuffal — even though I defend the practice. As a result of all that, I’m occasionally referred to as ‘The Inscrutable Rune.’”

  I thought about this for a moment, then asked, “So does that mean that the duties of the other Incarnates are well-known?”

  “Not really,” Rune admitted. “For instance, I’m not sure I know anything about Static’s obligations — for all I know, he does nothing. However, he wields the power of an Incarnate, so I don’t question it.”

  “So if you don’t know what the others are supposed to be doing, how do you know they’re doing anything at all?”

  Rune seemed to ponder the question for a moment, then said, “There’s a certain level of order, shall we say, that Incarnates are required to maintain throughout the cosmos. If one of them is slacking off, we can often detect it by the amount of disorder that arises.”

  “Interesting,” I mused.

  “Now, getting back on point,” he stated, “what’s next on your agenda?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure. Normally in a place like this, I like to spend some time getting the lay of the land. Being a teleporter, I can only go to places I’ve seen, so…”

  I didn’t finish, but Rune picked up where I left off.

  “You’d like to see more of the castle so you can fully utilize your powers, if necessary,” he said.

  “Something like that,” I admitted. “Might be worthwhile to combine that with a search for Gamma’s laamuffal, Cerek.”

  “Makes sense,” Rune conceded.

  “Are there any places that are off-limits to me?”

  Rune appeared to contemplate the question for a few seconds before responding with, “Yes and no. There are places you are forbidden to enter, but with respect to those, you won’t be able to get in. So basically, any room you can get into is fair game.”

  “Is anyone likely to stop me?”

  Rune’s brow crinkled. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m new here, nobody knows me, I’ve got no credentials… I’m just trying to figure out if there’s like a neighborhood watch that’s going to call Permovren PD on me if I just go wandering around.”

  “I get it,” he said. “You want some kind of badge of authority. That’s easy enough.”

  Rune brought his hands together and held them there for a second, almost as if he were praying. Then he opened his hands up in a gesture reminiscent of someone opening a book. There, resting on his palms, was what looked like an oddly-shaped badge of some sort with a red jewel in the center and a length of chain attached.

  He handed the badge to me, saying, “Here you go, Officer.”

  Chapter 17

  I left Rune in our suite, where he was allegedly working on something related to the murder. Thus, on my own for just about the first time since entering the castle (and with my “badge” around my neck and tucked down the front of my shirt), I started exploring.

  I’d been in situations like this before — basically, unfamiliar surroundings — and my standard operating procedure was to turn invisible so I could move about while being as unobtrusive as possible. (I would typically phase as well, becoming insubstantial, so I could travel freely and unhindered for the most part.) Thus, phased and invisible, I set about trying to get a feel for my new environs.

  As I had already realized, the castle was enormous. As I went through it, I noted rooms as big as houses, hallways as wide as thoroughfares. It had been constructed on an enormous scale, as if designed to house thousands of people.

  As it was, however, I saw very few individuals. Most that I observed wore the same livery as the majordomo, Dalmion. However, I came across a small number of others, haphazardly, that I assumed to be laamuffals, if only because I wasn’t aware of who else might be in the castle.

  All in all, while I enjoyed the time I spent going through the place, my exploration of the castle wasn’t particularly noteworthy, aside from two events.

  The first was an encounter with two Incarnates — Reverb and Mariner. I had actually just come through a wall and was floating about five feet above the floor when I found myself in a chamber with the two. They appeared to be engaged in deep conversation, but stopped talking and turned in my direction once I entered the room. It was eerily reminiscent of my prior experience with Endow and Rune; although I was invisible, it was plainly evident that Reverb and Mariner could see me, as they kept their eyes on me the entire time I was in their presence — right up until the moment I reached (and phased through) the wall that was on the opposite side of the room from the one through which I’d entered. (Presumably their conversation resumed once I made my exit.)

  The
other incident that occurred took place shortly after I left the chamber where Reverb and Mariner were talking. I had just phased through a wall and found myself in a totally dark room. To be truthful, however, it could have been a broom closet or an airport hangar for all I knew, because — even when I cycled my vision through the entire spectrum — I still couldn’t see anything and therefore had no idea how big the space was. (To put that in perspective, there is always some portion of the light spectrum that will allow me to see what’s around me. Ergo, being stuck in total darkness was almost a shock.)

  The inability to see anything was unnerving enough, but in addition to that, I got the impression that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t picking up on any emotions and when I reached out telepathically, I didn’t encounter another mind. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in the presence of…something.

  Finding the whole thing somewhat unsettling, I quickly moved forward with the expectation (and hope) that I would soon phase through a wall and find myself outside the weird room. It didn’t quite happen that way.

  Normally, when I phase through a wall, there is, of course, a transition through some type of building material: wood, stone, drywall, what have you. I go through something to get to the other side. In this instance, I didn’t pass through anything; I just suddenly found myself in another part of the castle. (One with adequate lighting, I might add.) I frowned, thinking how bizarre my exit had been. It was less like I’d left the place, and more like the room had just dumped me out.

  I didn’t have time to dwell on the incident, however, because I’d been in my current location only a few seconds when Rune materialized in front of me.

  “Where have you been?” he almost demanded.

  “Exploring,” I replied.

  “Exploring where?” he asked. “I couldn’t find you.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like these rooms have name plates or placards next to them.”

  Rune groaned in agitation.

  “Come on,” I remarked. “I wasn’t gone that long.”