Arcana Universalis: Danse Macabre

by Chris J. Randolph

  The monstrous revenant turned and looked down with the idiot eyes of a wild boar. “What you want?” it croaked, revealing teeth crooked and malformed as the makeshift shelters of the homeless.

  Caleb flexed and felt the muscles and tendons of his precision frame snap into place. He pushed the taint of fear from his eyes, pointed them up at Deak, and said, “Fight.”

  Deak laughed. The clumsy thing’s massive ribcage lurched convulsively upward with every bark, producing befouled sounds which boomed throughout the vast chamber, and soon his fool friends were laughing too. “Wee tyke wants a fight!”

  Stover had warned him to expect as much, and Caleb knew the next step. He looked up from beneath a darkened brow and struck the creature’s twisted face, not hard enough to do any damage, but more than enough to piss him off.

  Deak beat his chest and howled like a gorilla. The game was on.

  Caleb took off running. He stretched his legs stride after long stride, and dove into the pit with the monstrous revenant stomping only a beat behind him. He rolled to conserve momentum through the landing, sprang back to his feet, spun and stood at ready.

  Anger possessed his enemy through and through. Its jaw hung slack while black and beady eyes trained on Caleb, free of any twitch or sideways glance. Lock on. Muscles everywhere heaved and pulsated like a mass of ravenous maggots, and fingers curled inward forming fists like boulders.

  Deak howled again, and swirling echoes bounced everywhere within the fighting pit. The effect was disorienting; Caleb bristled at how important sound had become to his sense of place.

  “Be the forms,” he told himself, and he drew hard at the reins of his focus.

  Deak charged. Time compressed in lurches and stutters, and Caleb’s vision streaked. Titanic fists swung wide in sloppy haymakers, but with such speed and power that Caleb swore he could feel them rumbling through the air like meteors.

  Be the forms. With stolid focus, he watched the incoming strikes and he froze. Do I block? Which technique? Upper block, levered into wrist-lock, break elbow? Side-block to roundhouse kick? When the correct answer came to him, he smothered his inner voice into deadened silence. He let go of the tension which held his muscles frozen in place and bid his body react as it chose.

  Deak came forth on gnarled feet. The first meteor rumbled in toward its target and Caleb ducked lightly, then his left arm shot up to intercept the second strike.

  Thunder clash. The bones of Caleb’s arms shattered and the muscles tore free, thrashing beneath his skin like a hundred slavers’ whips. Agony.

  His focus somehow remained unbroken while his arm seized up, a ruined mass of necrotic flesh and scattered bone fragments.

  “Focus!” his inner voice screamed.

  Deak ducked back a step and his torso hunched forward, with predatory eyes still shackled to his target, and nose twitching as if just catching the sticky stench of weakness in the air. His great arms hovered before him, rhythmically dancing to an unheard melody.

  Caleb glanced down at Bibbs’ hand, its noble curves flexed tightly and ready for combat. He had no other choice.

  Deak charged again. His fist swung up and over like a trebuchet, then came back down with inhuman speed.

  Caleb trusted the forms. With artistic perfection, he darted back toward the wall and sprang forward, narrowly evading the titanic fist which struck and cratered in the hard soil.

  Caleb pressed forward, the air whistling a sorrowful tune while he channeled strength into his good fist. A pressure front swelled in front of it and his knuckles grew hot. His arm screamed through the still air.

  But before his strike could land, Deak’s other monstrous hand swatted him down. Blackness followed.

  The boy sits in lotus position, quietly sobbing just like he has throughout the day for more months than he’d care to remember. This is his life now: sitting and concentrating in a darkened chamber, waiting in perfect isolation for the ineffable to miraculously happen. There are no friends here nor enemies. There is no drama. No submission. Just deep silence spoiled by his sobbing for ten hours a day, until he’s finally released for a paltry meal and fitful night’s rest.

  The one thought he can’t escape is that he’s doing something wrong. Why else would his failure have stretched out across so many months? But it’s not as if there’s much he can do differently. He sits. He breathes. He tries to relax. He waits for something that was supposed to come naturally, but remains frustratingly out of reach.

  The chamber is small, just barely large enough for him to sit cross-legged inside it without butting up against its strangely angled walls. He examines those walls often, puzzling over the purpose of their sharply sculpted edges, odd protrusions, spiraled cavities. After all this time, he figures he could probably replicate the entire structure from memory if he had to, down to the smallest, most seemingly insignificant detail. He’s even starting to understand the theory behind it, he thinks, the way those walls would reflect and amplify eddies and tides of invisible energies.

  The walls tremble and then he sees a spark. A glimmer. A fissure. It’s like a glowing dandelion seed twirling in the air, and he’s utterly mesmerised. It takes several long minutes of staring for him to realize his time has finally come.

  Caleb awoke in the tank once again, listening to the gurgle of blue fluid rushing through a labyrinth of tubes. That sound was soon accompanied by a tink, tink, and he turned to see Stover rapping knuckles against the glass.

  Caleb waited and allowed his mending limbs to float free while the grey flesh did its disturbing work. He wasn’t in any rush, and he thought the dreams deserved a bit of thought. They were beginning to get to him, not just because their very existence defied common wisdom, but also because of their specific content. These weren’t ordinary dreams, with strangely familiar geography stitched together out of old fears and desires. No, every time he went dark, he found himself reliving parts of the life that left him behind. All of his most desperate moments were coming back to haunt him, and he wanted to know why.

  To his growing anger, only the absent necrontier was likely to have any answers, and that was the last person he wanted to share any more secrets with.

  Caleb surfaced and sucked in a lungful of air, which felt comforting even if completely unnecessary. “You said I could beat him,” he said, and shook some of the viscous fluid from his skin.

  Stover smiled. “I lied.”

  Caleb lifted himself up and out of the tank, and glowing mists swirled around him. He planted his feet on the ground and stood, then glanced over his body to make sure everything was where it belonged. “Why?”

  “I suppose I could have fed you an easy victory, but there was something I thought you should experience. When you smacked Deak in the face, I’m betting you felt something you’ve never felt before.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Fearlessness. Unfettered freedom. It’s a damned fool thing but it’s a rush like a drug, isn’t it? And afterward, when the brute was all done thrashing you apart, you discovered the horrible truth of our condition: that the reckoning for our idiocy is pretty much nil. Sure, we can die if our enemy is determined enough… or if the master wills it… but otherwise, we take our whippings, we blink, then we wake up all Chipper-Charlie, good as new.”

  Caleb didn’t quite understand what was so horrible about that, but Stover felt it was of utmost importance, so it must be worth some thought. Every revenant had his own share of secrets and sorrows that he kept close to his chest, and Caleb suspected that Stover hid more than most.

  Stover continued. “This little adventure also dragged your feet back down to the ground. You’ve been focusing on technique, as if perfecting forms is a shortcut to becoming a great fighter. That didn’t work out too well, did it? Having the tools is great, but the only way you’ll master them is by throwing yourself into the fire again and again. The only practice for combat is combat. Follow?”

  “Yeah. I think.”

  Stover smirked.
“Not to mention, jumping head first into a grinder like that has bought you a reputation. Everyone saw you pick a fight with Deak, and now they’re convinced you’re a crazy idiot… that’s not such a bad thing in a crowd like this.”

  “Better an idiot than a coward,” Caleb said.

  “Exactly. So, what do you say?”

  Caleb looked down at his mismatched hands and deliberately worked his fingers. Chipper-Charlie, good as new. He looked to Stover with a wry grin and said, “Yeah, let’s do it again.”

  Stover slapped him on the shoulder. “Now that’s the spirit!”

  Caleb was knocked senseless five more times before he finally overcame the beast.

  Revenant cheers sounded out like the roar of a thousand hungry locusts. Caleb circled, his bare feet lightly touching compacted soil as he danced around the pit. Across from him, the revenant called Piaven did the same, using nimble footwork to constantly change the parameters of the fight, testing Caleb’s aggression with advances measured in grains of dirt.

  Caleb wasn’t so easily baited. Not anymore. Not after sixty or more fights, through which pain had taught him the value of patience. Instead, he monitored Piaven’s advances, measured them and found them to be little more than probes. They weren’t attacks, nor were they opportunities. Not yet.

  The most important lesson he’d learned throughout his time in the pit was that his analytical mind could only take him so far. It needed to be coupled with an animal mind, a high-speed consciousness born of the moment and capable of seeking blood by instinct alone. It was only with these two separate pieces working in tandem that victory could be attained.

  That was the component missing throughout his childhood. He’d mistaken reason for the full measure of a man, but reason was a deliberate process. Reason was glacial drift, while instinct was a forest fire. It fed itself on a bottomless spring of self-confidence and thrived in those split seconds between reason’s slow, plodding steps. It was knowledge earned through pain and failure, a razor-sharp breed of intelligence forged within the heat of crisis.

  Piaven teased and taunted, but Caleb wouldn’t flinch. His instinct had been honed to a finer edge than that, a sharp tool that only reacted to immediate threats. Integrated with his muscle-memory, that instinct had become a terrible weapon, and he simply waited for the moment to unleash it.

  That moment came.

  Piaven grew too eager and tipped his hand. Small signs flashed across his body — a twitch beneath one eye, a previously unseen tension in the wrist, a foot placed at an unusual angle. Caleb’s reasoning mind recognized the attack while it was still nascent, giving his instinct more than enough time to react.

  Piaven led with an obvious feint, a hollow threat from the hand he rarely employed for attack, and he followed immediately with the true assault. His fist began accelerating while hidden from view, but Caleb was already prepared, reacting fluidly to a series of Piaven’s micromuscular flexions whose sum intention was predictable.

  A practiced technique expressed itself through Caleb while his mind remained blissfully silent. A deft step rotated him out of the line of fire while his hands raced to intercept Piaven’s crude advance. Iron fingers found holds in the depressions between tendon and bone, and he twisted the arm beyond its natural range of motion. Tissues ruptured with a pop, and what was once firm became limp and broken.

  In another instant, he drew himself along that ruined limb and the second technique came unbidden. One arm flew forward and then the other, striking Piaven’s grimacing face with a loud thump-thump, then his fists coiled and struck again.

  Piaven fell to the ground amid the cheers of the revenant cohort, and for just one brief instant, Caleb was at peace. Time for him slowed as if passing through a thick gel, and all was victory. All was simple joy.

  Book II:

  Seventh Fragment

  Caleb stood beside a large stone door just as still as a marble statue. Aldebaran’s mausoleum stretched out before him, empty, silent, and lit as always by a mysterious blue-green light suspended somewhere in the vaulted shadows above. Precisely how the light failed to disperse those shadows, Caleb had no clue.

  He’d been waiting at his post for countless hours with a patience unknown to the living, his time marked only by the infrequent coming and going of the necrontier’s wraithish apprentices who scurried across the floor like frightened mice. In the absence of interesting distractions, he found himself reflecting morosely on his life, his death, and this peculiar existence that bridged them. Everything had been so simple right up until he set foot on Zayin, so obvious; a path had laid out before him and all he needed do was hew to it and march forward at an even pace. His life was predictable, his future enviable, then death tossed things end over end until he lost track of which direction was up.

  The world hadn’t stopped tumbling yet.

  The only constant left to rely on was his own identity. He damn well knew who he truly was inside, didn’t he? He’d certainly thought so, but now even that simple vision of himself—buried in a book with a fountain pen in his mouth, wearing thin-rimmed spectacles, and hair styled as if teased by a mother’s affectionate hand—was eroding. Behind the façade lurked a dark figure, hard skinned, cold eyed, and hungry for the kill.

  At every step, the transformation had seemed natural enough, but it all somehow led inexorably to this instant with him standing outside the necrontier’s lab, waiting to be deemed worthy of combat or else turned away in disgrace. Taken together, the thousand small steps were more than just a simple transformation; they were a total shift in polarity. He hadn’t become this thing. It had displaced him… and he couldn’t tell whether that fact bothered him or not.

  The door creaked open. One of Aldebaran’s apprentices stepped meekly out and the two regarded each other, Caleb looking down on him while he simultaneously stared up in fawning admiration of his master’s work. Pale faced and willow thin, the apprentice seemed a ghost of the Caleb who was, a nervous academic buried so deep in research that he’d forgotten what a sun’s warmth felt like. Was he marching down his own marked path, oblivious to the dangers that awaited him? Did he even care?

  The apprentice examined him with a thin imitation of his master’s analytical method, a superficial facsimile that aped the form but lacked Aldebaran’s hawk-like attention to detail. Still, there was an eagerness to his examination that surprised and unsettled Caleb, reminiscent of his own experience peering inside the cracked gate anchor or coming face-to-face with the damnatus.

  When the apprentice was satisfied, he motioned toward the open door and said, “The Magus awaits.”

  Caleb girded himself and marched inside.

  Aldebaran’s laboratory was just as he remembered it, a morbid workshop so steeped in death, so petrified that none of life’s machinations could disturb it. The tools of a necrontier’s art were arranged on every surface, an endless menagerie of differently shaped scalpels, forceps, bonesaws, and specimen pins lying in wait for their next victim, with various edges and jagged teeth catching flecks of flickering candlelight.

  Aldebaran was seated at his desk, looking over a fresh parchment scrawled with reddish writing that Caleb couldn’t read. The symbols were arrangements of lines, circles, and squares, another of the countless private codes rampant throughout the Imperium.

  Caleb walked to the center of the laboratory and stopped beside the chair where he’d awoken some months earlier. From this new angle, he could now see that it was an artifact of meticulous construction, covered in crests, flutings, and beastly faces like some cannibal king’s loathsome throne, and made of a dark metal that bore a dull but warmly coloured gleam. He suspected it was umbrium, a durable material with an exceptional ability to absorb energy. The armored plates of the Ashkalon’s shield arm were composed largely of the same.

  “Sit if you like,” Aldebaran said, waving his hand but never looking away from his reading.

  Caleb regarded the chair with suspicion. The manacles were warped
, and he had a strong feeling that he was responsible for the damage. He said, “I prefer to stand.”

  “As you wish.”

  Several minutes passed in silence before Aldebaran finally set his parchment down and regarded Caleb. There came a hint of something in his eye that resembled pride, but it was gone an instant later.

  “Well, then… Driscoll tells me you are ready for trial, child.”

  Caleb nodded.

  Aldebaran’s head tilted to the side like an inquisitive vulture, and his ancient eyes disassembled Caleb with a glance, making him feel suddenly naked even though he hadn’t worn a scrap of clothing for months.

  “Yessss. I see that you are ready,” Aldebaran said. “And not a moment too soon. My ranks must be at full strength in preparation for what lies ahead.”

  What exactly lies ahead? Caleb wondered, but he kept his mouth shut.

  Aldebaran raised a quaking hand and snapped his fingers. “Vinton!” he called out.

  The pale apprentice scurried in with a bundle of white cloth in his arms.

  “Vinton here will escort you to the trial. Be prepared.” Without another word, Aldebaran returned to his desk and continued to examine his papers.

  Caleb expected more and he’d obviously been a fool for it. Not least among those expectations was that Aldebaran himself would administer the mysterious trial, but that didn’t appear to be the case. Now he had no idea where he was going or what would happen when he got there… and after a moment of reflection, he sarcastically wondered which part of that was new.

  The apprentice, Vinton, had a sour look on his face. Caleb wasn’t sure if that was a chronic condition or something special just for him, but either way, he somehow doubted this new acquaintance would make good company.

  “Clothe yourself,” Vinton said with a sneer. “Be quick, revenant. We must not keep him waiting.”

  Caleb took the bundle more calmly than pride might dictate, examined the pieces quickly and slid into them. They were a ceremonial uniform consisting of a simple, loose fitting robe and a cylindrical hood with a thin slit to peer through. This was a common sight in certain parts of the Imperium, and on some planets, such uniforms were the only clothes deemed acceptable for women and children when they ventured out in public.