Arcana Universalis: Danse Macabre

by Chris J. Randolph

  The spectacle soon began to captivate him. The revs moved together, bound only by their shared choreography. They became one body with many manifestations, with arms and fists that struck as one, with liquid spines that snaked back and dove forward like the many tentacles of some swamp-dwelling beast, held aloft on two dozen legs that paced out across the floor in startling symmetry.

  They obeyed the pattern so perfectly, with such utter subservience, that it seemed after a fashion that only the pattern itself was real and the revenants were its vessel. It was a complex waveform, and they were simply the matter through which it chose to express itself.

  In the absence of his second sight, Caleb was beginning to see even mundane martial arts in terms of thelosophy, and he took that to mean he was reaching all new heights of mental illness. Madness not withstanding though, he was also gaining a new appreciation for fighting arts that had otherwise escaped him in life, and he’d need just that if he wanted to earn his green hood.

  Meanwhile, time became strange. Without even his breaths to mark one moment from the next, he was rather oblivious to time’s passage, and though it felt as if he’d been watching for hours, it could just as easily have been days or weeks. He would never grow tired, never need for sleep, and even boredom seemed a distant concern.

  Maybe Driscoll was right. Being dead may not be all rainbows and daisies, but it really wasn’t all bad.

  At some point, Caleb began to wonder if he was truthfully enjoying some new insight or just suffering long-overdue mandala blossom flashbacks, and it was around then that Driscoll finally returned. The old revenant walked across the open floor with a commanding stride, the sort that would inspire others to fall in behind, no matter how far his shoulders sagged from the day’s drudgery.

  “Watching the forms? Good. You’ve everything left to learn yet.”

  “I’m getting there,” Caleb said. “Listen… if I wanted to practice without everyone watching me stumble around like an idiot, where would be the place for that?”

  “Bashful, eh? The aft cargo hold is usually deserted while we’re in transit. Spacious. Not much there you can break… well, easily. You won’t try hard to break things, will you?”

  “Wasn’t my plan,” Caleb said.

  “Grand. The last thing I need is more damned administrative work.” He let out a loud sigh, and after a pause went on. “I told the master about you wanting a green hood, and he wasn’t surprised… strangely. Wants you to get your hands dirty though, get some experience on a work detail in case you’re not cut out for combat, so I’ll schedule you for inventory in the cargo hold. You can get your practice in after hours.”

  Caleb had never imagined himself a longshoreman before. That was work for men with muscles and thick skin, not twiggy scribes with spectacles… but he wasn’t twiggy anymore. Now he had skin like baked clay and an over-abundance of muscle. It seemed that death was making even the ordinary possible, when it had always been so far out of grasp.

  He nodded to Driscoll and the old rev gave him a smile then marched away, leaving Caleb to watch the third group just beginning to practice.

  Book II:

  Fifth Fragment

  By the third day on cargo detail, Caleb had seen everything the job had to offer. The work didn’t require a large surplus of brains, consisting as it did mostly of inspecting containers to ensure their contents agreed with the newest scribbles on endless manifests, and the occasional shuffling around of materials that might have disastrous reactions if left in one another’s company too long. The list of such volatile materials was larger, more complex, and infinitely more worrying than Caleb might have originally guessed, but none of it required his own input. He just followed directions and moved crates to their new homes.

  The work was self-directed so Caleb and the four other revenants didn’t see much of one another, except on the rare occasion when a container was too heavy for someone to move alone. Otherwise, they went about their business in isolated silence throughout the long day.

  When their work was done, the others ambled home while Caleb ducked into an isolated corner of the cargo hold where he’d cleared a small bit of floor, and there he practiced everything he’d absorbed back in the cohort’s roost.

  He was so embarrassed in the beginning he could hardly move an inch without erupting in laughter, but that didn’t last long. He quickly became exacting in his practice, obsessing over every spare fraction of an inch as he tried to replicate the dead men’s dance. He became so totally absorbed in it that he didn’t stop until the other revenants arrived for the next day’s work, and he did the same the following night, the next one, and on like that for more than a week.

  The schedule was utterly disorienting, but he soon found it liberating. He could work and work without rest, never growing tired or losing focus. When he finally took a break nine days later, it was only because he’d reached the limits of working from memory alone and needed to watch the others to check his progress. Then he was back at it, revising based on more detailed observations and edging ever closer to an ideal he felt hovering just beyond reach.

  In twenty-three days, Caleb had practiced more than even the most zealous living student could in six months. It was around then he began feeling the need for something more. Progress demanded it.

  Caleb walked across the roost’s stone floor, and the fighting pit loomed ahead of him. His last venture inside had lasted only a handful of seconds before he was unceremoniously chewed up and spit back out. That was the price paid for ignorance, and he was determined never to pay it again.

  The crowd was thin that day, just a dozen revs milling about and maybe twice their number up above. As he approached, he could see over the pit’s stone lip and there he found what he’d hoped for: a single revenant practicing with a fluidity and grace that nearly concealed his movements’ martial nature. The sleek revenant—slender, powerful, with a ragged scar circling his throat—was the one called Stover.

  Caleb stopped at the ledge and watched for a few minutes. Despite whatever advances he’d made over the previous weeks, Stover’s display convinced him he still had a long way to go.

  Of course, that’s why he’d come.

  “What do you want?” Stover asked after some time.

  “I hear you’re the best.”

  “Shouldn’t believe everything you hear.” Even as he spoke, Stover’s practice never showed the slightest stutter nor misstep, never a hint that his concentration was anything less than complete.

  “I want to learn from you.”

  “I don’t teach. Especially not fresh clumsy corpses like you.”

  Caleb leapt down from the ledge and landed more quietly than a house cat. “I’ll surprise you if you give me a chance,” he said.

  Stover finally stopped and turned to face him. “Maybe. Shame I’ll never find out. Talk to Midford or Tanis. They teach.”

  Caleb took a step forward. “I don’t want Midford or Tanis. Their technique is rudimentary. It’s rote.”

  Caleb thought he saw a tiny glimmer in Stover’s eye.

  “Sabian then. His technique is exemplary.”

  “I’ve seen better,” Caleb replied. “And besides, he’s a prick.”

  This time, Stover’s smile was understated but unmistakable. “Don’t know what else to tell you, rev. I don’t teach.” With that, he melted back into his practice as if he’d never stopped, like the conversation was just some peculiar detour in an unbroken routine.

  Caleb glanced down at Bibbs’ hand and wondered what his friend would have done given the same predicament. Bibbs wouldn’t be so easily deterred. He wouldn’t sleep a wink until he was training under the best… and then it occurred to him: Stover didn’t have to teach for Caleb to learn.

  Caleb recognized the form Stover was practicing; it was a variant of one he’d learned from the others, and he’d practiced it a few times. He psyched himself up, made sure there was enough space to stay out of Stover’s way, then cautiously fell
in step, doing his best to replicate the skilled revenant’s every move. He expected Stover to shoo him away but it never happened, and they went on like that well into the night.

  Caleb stalked past row upon row of crates bathed in the golden glow of countless sunstones, his footfalls silent even to his own unusually acute hearing. Over the preceding weeks, the cargo hold had become his refuge and training ground, a retreat from the cold alienness of the revenants’ roost, where he could once again focus on study.

  In some ways, he was repeating patterns that had haunted him in life, but in death they fluoresced in a strange new light.

  There was only one task left on the day’s roster, and he approached it with the same gruff diligence he’d noticed on dockworkers back on Mydora. The manual labour seemed to exert a humbling effect on him, and through its rigour and repetition he also found an odd sort of satisfaction. It was contentment in a hard days’ work, the likes of which he’d never found with his nose buried in a book or equation.

  Before him stood one of the many reinforced crates scheduled for relocation, and it towered nearly twice his height. The manifest listed its contents as 1.4 dry tonnes of refined argentium recovered from the surface of Zayin. Argentium — the potent cousin of mundane silver, composed of the same essence but altered at the subatomic level, unlocking wondrous new properties. Like aurium—an analogous form of gold—argentium was an immensely rare metal used in the production of the most sophisticated artifacts; for dragons, it was also a nutrient needed in the gestation of their young.

  Caleb’s rough fingers caressed the surface of the crate for just an instant. This ore, he realized, was the very reason he’d died. Its presence had attracted the Eurisko to Zayin, and the Kremak blasted her out of the sky to keep the secret buried. They killed Caleb and his friends in a last desperate attempt to drive the Imperium away, so they might continue to offer the metal as sacrifice to their god, the dread wyrm.

  He briefly imagined how the crate might look through his second sight, queer luminance pulsing along its surface, rippling like waves of liquid pearl that would crash upon the other crates like the shores of distant isles. But now he was blind and numb to it, the fantastic metal reduced to a tasteless, colorless lump of nothing-in-particular. It was just another grey brick in a world of muted greyness.

  Fingers found grips, then a chain of muscles crossing his entire body heaved in unison, lifting the crate up easily from the dusty floor. As he levered his burden out of its place and began marching across the hold, he imagined himself an ant, gifted with strength completely out of proportion to his size, and yet still so easily squashed by the decrepit old man who watched over his toil.

  He found the argentium’s new home after several dozen paces and set the crate down, requiring as much effort as when he’d moved books in a past life. This spot was another temporary resting place for the argentium, and in a few days or weeks, it would be moved again to prevent resonance with its new neighbours.

  With that finished, his tasks for the day were complete. He could see the other four revs in the distance, shuffling back into the service tunnels and from there to the roost. That meant it was finally time for his practice again.

  He wandered through the crates and idly read their contents as he passed—pig iron, quartz, hardened cermet plate, assorted obsidian shards, copper filament, aurium ingots—each acquired on a different planet scattered along the Ashkalon’s patrol route, and kept in stock for unknown purposes. Most were surely for the ship’s maintenance and repair, but others were more mysterious, perhaps used for barter on less civilized worlds, or employed in the magi’s experiments.

  Caleb shrugged and finally admitted to himself that he knew so damned little about the ship’s purposes, the crew’s motivations, even how it all functioned, that there was no point guessing at the use of anything he may stumble across.

  He came to his practice ground, his private enclave, and all other worries drifted away. He paced out to the middle of the space on three long strides, bowed to a non-existent partner, and then became the forms.

  His heart lay still in his chest. Breaths came and went only as driven by the flexion of his torso, sounding out as a hollow rasp without the needful draw so endemic to the living. Muscles cycled from tense to smooth and back with intensity and precision, his body a moving sculpture of bloodless flesh beaten and moulded into shape through five-hundred hours of painstaking practice.

  In that space, Caleb became a machine animated by its own relentless drive toward perfection. One technique flowed into the next, a whole and unbroken movement tied together through subtle alterations of the form: a small flair at the end of one strike, the extra twist of an ankle in anticipation of a coming step. His exercise became more than the sum of its parts; it became art.

  More crucially, it was also escape, not only from the cruel reality of his death and the coterie of walking corpses that were now his world, but so too from the gnashing frustration that chewed up his insides. There were no reminders here of his lost life, his cowardice, his failure. There was only the dance, and in that he was momentarily complete.

  Flash. Dim and nearly imperceptible.

  His concentration shattered, and he turned to find the light’s source. There was no trace of anything out of the ordinary, no sound to be heard except the distant organic thrum of the Ashkalon’s impeller and the sorrowful creak and moan of her steel skeleton.

  He moved quickly to the crates and peered beyond but there was nothing to be found. He thought he smelled ozone for an instant, the acrid smell of spent lightning, but it was gone a moment later. Any scant traces that might have remained were lost to his dull nostrils.

  As he continued to search, he felt an itch as of someone watching him, and that itch quickly blossomed as Aldebaran turned a disembodied eye on him. Caleb’s vision took on a peculiar doubling like the offset reflections in double-paned glass, and sounds acquired a thin, haunting echo.

  That too was gone quickly once the master realized there was nothing to see. Still, it lent evidence to something Caleb had already suspected: that Aldebaran could sense when one of his revenants was alerted. It had clearly summoned his attention just now.

  The mysterious light’s source remained unknown, but he’d at least learned something valuable, and that was better than most days.

  Book II:

  Sixth Fragment

  The roost was eerily quiet, and a thin mist hung in the air like fog over a swamp. It was often like that, but Caleb had no clue as to the fog’s purpose or provenance. It could have been there to set the mood for all he knew.

  He sat on a shelf a few tens of meters up the wall, and to his side, Stover watched the goings on below with an air of total unconcern. Despite Stover’s placid exterior, Caleb knew the dangerous revenant was examining, calculating, sizing up dozens of targets with a trained eye.

  “That one,” Stover said while indicating his target with a lazy finger. He spoke the way revenants did between themselves, in a low tuneless speech totally inaudible to the living.

  They called it Corpse Whisper, and Caleb had been surprised to discover that it was an undocumented sub-dialect of standard Imperial. It was spoken in something well beneath a normal whisper, and enjoyed its own mutant vocabulary to compensate for the lack of voicing. Vowel sounds were minimized, and where Imperial might use tone to communicate emphasis, the corpse whisper instead relied on reduplication and a few novel discourse particles.

  The dialect’s origins and evolution might have made a good research paper in another life.

  Caleb located the rev in question. The creature was tall and less artfully constructed than the others, his shape robust and hinting at great strength but without the elegance evident in Aldebaran’s other work. He also had a damned goofy face.

  “With the bulbous nose?” Caleb asked.

  “That’s the one. Name’s Deak.”

  Caleb scratched his bald head. “I don’t get it. Aldebaran’s an artist. His
revenants are masterpieces, but that thing looks like the work of a drunken ape. Correction… he just looks like a drunken ape.”

  “Aldebaran and Deak…” Stover let the pause hang in the air. “They knew each other.”

  “Oh.” Caleb looked over the revenant again and realized that more than its nose was bulbous. Its entire body gave an impression of crude, lumpy awkwardness which spoke in whisper of its immense strength. This thing was stout like a mule or draft horse, with a hardy skeleton that strained against its pallid flesh, and arms long even for a revenant.

  “You’re sure he’s the one?”

  Stover nodded.

  Caleb stalled.

  “You can beat him,” Stover said. Instead of waiting for a response, he slapped Caleb on the back, sending him tumbling from their high perch.

  Caleb righted himself mid-fall and then made his way down, swinging from one horizontal bar to the next with an occasional flip improvised just for show, then landed lightly on the stone floor. The facility with which he performed such acrobatics was still amazing to him, and he supposed it was a by-product of Aldebaran’s designs. This was the sort of work his body had been tuned for and it came to him as naturally as swimming did to a hatchling shark.

  He crossed the floor and the revenant named Deak loomed up ahead of him, an artless human simulacrum like the hand-hewn fetish of some inbred backwater tribe. Aldebaran’s true cruelty came into focus as Caleb approached, written in the legion of small yet gruesome touches only available to the deft hand of a very angry and vengeful artist. Together, these small strokes twisted a dead man’s flesh into something animalistic and purposefully incomplete. The tall revenant was a portrait of torture made animate, his agony both unliving and endless.

  Caleb stopped several steps from him and felt small in a way he hadn’t since adolescence. Fear stabbed its talons deep under his shoulder blades.