Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  “Just when I thought this place was getting as boring as.” Chez strolled over to the bar, patted poor old dead Hammic’s collapsed skull sadly, then dropped a few hundred DSB dollars onto the counter. Whoever decided to claim the bar as their own could use the money for cleanup and body cartage.

  It was the only gentlemanly thing to do, right?

  ***

  Amazon Basin.

  One of the last green places on the world that'd once been referred to as a small, blue green planet in the back end of nowhere, it was the pet project of perhaps one of the weirdest Wayfarers Chezzik had ever had the misfortune of meeting. Many people went their entire lives eking out a miserable, misbegotten existence, literally living hand to mouth and sometimes staring up desperately into an uncaring sky and demanding answers from a God who did not exist, and sometimes, when Chez found himself living his own life, he sometimes dearly wished he was living one of those lives instead of his own.

  Because when he was walking about, doing his thing, he genuinely seemed to have more than his fair share of encounters with the odd and the bizarre, and frankly, there wasn't -in Chez's opinion, which was very well-informed indeed- anyone weirder than the Wayfarer calling himself Bombatom.

  Chezzik was many things, but willing to put up with Bombatom was not one of them.

  Unfortunately, when wanting to traverse the wild green strip of land that was the Amazon Basin, you kind of had to, unless you felt like having your arms and legs pulled off by treants, or have your guts swallowed up by what-the-fuck-ever other odd shite the Wayfarer spent all his time cooking up.

  "Took you long enough." Bombatom fiddled with some of the branches twined into his hair, certain that they weren't sticking right. It was difficult. His inner nature, that of Wayfarer, was and always would be permanently inclined towards cloak wearing, face obscuring, and heavy staves or delicate swords.

  "Yep, well," Chezzik dandled his legs over the crevasse that overlooked the one empty spot in all of the Basin. A hundred square miles of barren emptiness, surrounded on all sides by luscious green shit that'd kill you stone cold dead if Bombatom took a disliking to you, "some of us is having to walk everywhere, you know what I'm saying? I was in bloody Downtown Singapore Barternic, mate. 's a long ways away from here, right? Had to boat across with some ‘loaders, of all things."

  "How many did you kill?" Bombatom asked, dropping heavy hands away from the twigs. He was going to have to go out into the Wasteload proper soon, work out the demands from being a Wayfarer so he could go back to being who he was on in the inside.

  Chez hawked a gob of spittle over the side and listened for the splash. "I let a few live. Caught a few trying to rifle through my things. Not terribly gentlemanly."

  "You are an assassin renowned for both your vicious, violent streak and your habit of killing many more people than is strictly necessary in the enforcement of your adopted duties." Words wanted to burble forth from his mouth, the forthcomings of a rede, but Bombatom -like the others- knew better than to even start. The one and only time … well. They were stuck with the oddity calling himself Chezzik Elteren and that was that.

  "There are common criminals and proper villains." Chez replied stridently. "And I am a proper villain."

  "Ah. A fine distinction, to be sure." Bombatom's outer skin trembled as faint stirrings of a most unfortunate arrival slithered through the world. "Shaal-Riya is very upset with you, Chezzik. She found your behavior unacceptable."

  "Yeah, well, she was being a cunt. Three times to get her name, Bombatom. Three times. 's a bit rude, isn't it?" There were many things Chez was willing to ignore in light of the fact that merely existing these days was proving to require quite a bit more effort than ever before, but keeping oneself to a higher level of civility should always remain at the forefront of every decision and every action.

  Being a cunt just because you didn't like someone wasn't proper etiquette.

  "You may not be entirely aware of this, Chezzik, but you are not a Wayfarer." The Baron's presence impinged just that much more on the edge of visible Reality. Bombatom really didn't like Samiel, loathed the effect his Ziggurat had on the surroundings, but the two of them had come to an uneasy armistice; he would park his massive time-traveling craft in a single spot only, and the forest would not encroach. "That entitlement belongs only to peers."

  Chez spat again. "Parts of me are most definitely Wayfarer. That counts for something."

  "I will bring that up at the next Wayfarer Breakfast Gala."

  Chez titled his head back and let out a quick bark of laughter. "You are the oddest Wayfarer in the world, Bombatom, and a damnsight madder than anyone save me. How they let you get away with being who you are is a miracle."

  "Second oldest has it's perks, Chezzik. Now. Onto why we're actually meeting here today." Bombatom knew he shouldn't say anything, understood that doing so might cause The Lines irreparable harm, but everything about the situation felt wrong. The Wayfarer couldn't put a finger on why or even how he'd come to know this, other than to say that he did.

  "And here I thought it was out of courtesy." Chez smirked at Bombatom, dressed as he was in fine green clothes that fit really quite atrociously overtop his massive, oddly-shaped, energy-altered body. "My feelings would be hurt. If I had any worth mentioning. Go on, lad. Tell me why the second oldest 'farer in all the land has chosen to sit by my side whilst I await the arrival of a most intriguing business offer."

  Bombatom gestured to the area of the Basin where Samiel's Ziggurat would materialize. Any second now, in fact, the tremendous black stone edifice would simply be there, as if it'd always been, as it had always been. "Do not take up Baron Samiel's offer."

  "Whyever not?" Chez pummeled his noggin to recall the last time he'd turned down a job. Certainly, it'd been more than a dozen years, and even then, it’d been out of prudence and not dislike; there was no arguing the fact that the Other Guy –Baron Samiel- was often spoken of in whispers, and only by people who were dialed in to the world differently, but when you were approached to deal with someone in the man’s direct employ, you had a choice.

  Say yes, or wind up in Samiel’s crosshairs.

  Chezzik had yet to discover his limits. Chezzik was of a mind to never discover them. Going against Baron Samiel was a way to do both.

  Bombatom fidgeted in his green robes, feeling slightly foolish. Delivering warnings dressed in full Wayfarer regalia, complete with the shroud and the weapon and the eyes that loomed out of the endless darkness of the cowl … much easier.

  “The world is …” the powerful being struggled for words, finding it seamlessly funny that, as a Wayfarer, words were his weapon of choice, “the world is … not as you might imagine.”

  The stone edifice known the world over as Ziggurat loomed ever closer, setting Bombatom’s teeth on edge. Down below, closest to where the massive carved building would touch down, the trees and brush and wildlife –such as it was- trembled in anticipatory fear.

  So soon.

  “I’ve known that since the day the skies opened up, Bombatom. Since I saw my very first alien, since I was called … called back. Since I volunteered for Project Fisher King and came out the other side as something wonderful.” There was a blanket over the time he spent becoming, well, becoming a glorified version of the Fisher King, an unkillable, unstoppable knight roaming the land slaying dragons. Sometimes a few wisps snuck out around the edges, such as now, but most of the time Chezzik was free to be who he wanted to be.

  Bombatom grasped the air with a heavy hand, literally trying to pull the words from hiding. Struggling with a concept that’d never been spoken aloud before this very moment, Bombatom consigned himself to violating one of the primary laws –one of the very few laws that the Wayfarers had- and just went with it. “The world, Chezzik, is full of lines.”

  “Aw, not this shite again.” Chezzik pummeled his forehead with soft fists. “Every few decades, some poor sot with a head full of drugs and dubious lineage s
pouts off about lines crisscrossing the world, filling it with an unsubtle, fiery light ‘like unto Hell itself, with dark rubidian flames searing the souls of the unwary’. Then one of you lot show up and you is say ‘blahblahblah’ and they is go off into the Wasteload to ply their trade in stark bollocking madness or they is go off their rocker and try to do you in.”

  Of course Chez would know. It was so hard to remember that the youthful seeming man beside him was just over four hundred years old; time and cruelty and barbarity of the world they frittered away their lives in had no purchase on the Fisher King’s inhuman heart and the things he did to while away the time dripped off his soul as easily as any fluids off the immaculate EverKleen suit he wore into battle.

  But Chezzik was four hundred years old. He did remember the way it’d been. Cinema. Coffee. Donuts. Starbucks. Other things, like actual socks and hurrying home to watch your favorite show and then not having to hurry home because you had Teevo or you knew how to stream everything off the Internet…

  “I forgot about the Internet.” Bombatom said suddenly. “How could I forget that? All of human knowledge, stored in a single place.”

  “And let us not forget, all those tits and arses.” Chezzik held a hand against his heart in mock farewell of the most miraculous thing the Human Race had ever done. “Towards the end there, right, they was sayin’ that more pictures were taken every day than had ever been taken in history, and that that were happenin’ every day. Exponentially. All that is gone, mate. When San Francisco were rocked by nuclear explosions, we thought we were at war. Everyone lobbed their shite into the air. Then they came. Then our glorious Internets disappeared, and a darkness settled over the world. No more pictures of food on your feed, no more selfies, no more duckface. By the time them lads figured out how to switch the lights back on, it were well and truly too late.”

  Bombatom gazed stonily out over the precipice. Faint black edges were sketching themselves into the air. It was taking longer than usual, probably because of The Lines. Those brilliant red lines that plagued all Wayfarers and the occasional lunatic with a mind open enough to the cosmos to see the realer world for what it truly was were somehow much thicker, more alive, than they'd ever been before.

  Soon, it would be as if they'd been that way forever, and even they, the Wayfarers, would forget. The ‘farer wondered if Samiel in his black granite prison knew it was taking longer, or if his madness was by this time baroque enough to leave him completely unawares.

  “Chezzik Elteren, the world is full of lines. It has been since before the Invasion.” Bombatom flicked a hand into the sky, let loose a smidge of power. The Lines, incarnadine beams of solid light, rippled and shimmered from the assault, but otherwise held right where they were, forming the eternal, endless shape that none of them had ever been able to decipher. They all tried. The path The Lines –or more accurately, line, because it truly was just a single one at this point, all over the world- took was mapped, completely and fully, and all of them knew it like they knew their own souls. They followed the shocking path, over and over again, permanently on walkabout –all save him, of course, because of … reasons- hoping that the next time, or the time after that, all would be revealed.

  But to no avail. Wayfarers. Everyone thought the Wayfarers were the last vestige of sanity in the world, that their powers aided them to combat the crushing tide of bleak despair that filled the secret hearts of men and women, but the truth of it was, they were all snared in the secret puzzle of the red lines. They were all brittle. They were all ready to snap. Bombatom could draw the entirety of the path without struggling. They all could.

  They just didn’t know what it meant. Where it’d come from. What purpose.

  Or rather … hadn’t.

  Sitting there, with Chezzik Elteren, waiting for Samiel’s ship to come home to land for the first time in hundreds, possibly thousands of years, flint-colored eyes tracing the route the path took down below in the empty space of the Amazon Basin, mind filling in the gaps, Bombatom thought perhaps he understood for the first and only time what it all meant.

  In the back of his mind, the Wayfarer could feel his brothers and sisters hurrying by all means available to this spot. To witness. To behold what was coming, the fruition of someone’s lifelong plan, but they’d be too late. The edges of Ziggurat were filling in too quickly, Chezzik’s attention was too firmly planted on the slow-motion magician reveal of the largest structure the world had ever seen.

  “Lines, you say.” Cybernetic senses enhanced by mutable Wayfarer DNA coupled with hundreds of years of survival in the ‘load were picking out some lines of their own, subtly dark edges hinting at a virtual fortress, slowly materializing out of thin air. The assassin thought he might see summat more than that, some kind of … invisible pressure … extending outwards from the edges he could see, but it was more of an esoteric hint than anything tangible. “What sort of lines?”

  “For the longest time, we didn’t know.” Bombatom admitted freely. No harm in sharing a small weakness with someone like Chezzik. After all, the assassin believed that everyone save him possessed weaknesses by the dozens, so what did it matter? “But as we sit here, as we watch Baron Samiel’s Ziggurat move down The Line from wherever it is he hides after this time, I see it for what it is. A trap, Chezzik Elteren. The world up to this point is lined with a trap. A most cunning one. A maze of lines, spanning the entire world, covering our eyes and haunting our dreams for hundreds of years. Drawing the brightest and best of us into the folds and edges, we’ve struggled with the meaning of it. Tried solving it, tried unraveling it, tried breaking it. It is what we are truly here for, Chezzik. We are called Wayfarers because we are trying to find the Way of these Lines.” A wistful, almost bemused smile crossed Bombatom’s lips. “And now, after all this time, I see we were missing the most important piece.”

  “And you do not want me to pick up Samiel’s work offer because why?” Chezzik took in the sight of the Ziggurat appearing, accepted the relative impossibility of something so large being so invisible for so long, and moved on. If you knew where to look, the world was stuffed to the tits with odd shite that’d make a man’s head go ‘round the bend and back again looking for proper, rational answers. There weren’t no percentage in trying to wrap your noodle around any of it.

  “Samiel controls time itself. This you know, yes?”

  Chez nodded, albeit reluctantly. “It is said that, yes. I’ve heard it from your lot before.”

  “Take it as true, Chezzik. If you’ve seen my brothers and sisters in combat, assailed on all sides by those with the liquid dark eyes and the blackened hunger boiling from their skin like a sickness, and seen how we survive, then accept it for true.” They were close, his kin. Would they accept his attempt to stop Chezzik for what it was, or would they choose to usher him forth? On the verge, Ziggurat grew more solid still, real enough now to push those birds and other flying things that sailed through the air to redirect their course elsewhere.

  Chez held a hand up, signaling that he would do so.

  “And the rede… the half-rede, uttered to you so very long ago. When you … did what you did next, you … know the rest of the rede, do you not?” Bombatom paused here, all too familiar with how Chezzik typically reacted when that moment from his history was brought up. When the dark-haired assassin said nothing, he continued. “’From one to another shall one come, until then, no thing undone…’. Is that not correct?”

  “Aye. And since that time, I’ve met no man nor beast capable of undoing me.” There were days when the gift of accidental immortality was a million tonne weight around his shoulders, a veritable Herculean challenge, and there were days when he strode around, light as a feather. Today, he was in between.

  Ziggurat loomed closer to the now. Almost all the edges were sketched in, and you could easily make out actual features of the edifice now.

  “You take the Baron’s job, Chezzik, your line will become recursive. No man, not even you, can
withstand that.”

  Chezzik Elteren absorbed what Bombatom was saying. It felt like a rede, only without the lightning and other sound effects that typically followed such shite. He scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. As he did so, Ziggurat revealed itself fully and then, just for the briefest of seconds, so quickly and so subtly he couldn’t even be certain his cybernetic senses hadn’t just blipped a bit because he was thinking so hard on so many different things, it seemed that the world itself undulated under the weight of the humungous stone fortress.

  “Nah.” Chezzik rose to his feet, flicked his EverKleen Suit clean of imaginary dust because it felt like the right thing to do, then clapped a momentary hand onto Bombatom’s rough skin. “I’m good, mate. Can’t turn down a job like this. Summat like this,” he pointed a manicured finger at the citadel, which seethed with hidden offers, “might very well be the last interesting thing I do in this life.”

  “You have it backwards, old friend.” Bombatom said as Chezzik Elteren jumped down into the forest canopy below. When the Wayfarer was certain the man was out of hearing, and that what he was about to say next would fall on no ears save his own, he spoke. “Lines cross on you, lines fold on you, from one to another shall one come, until then, no thing undone. When one from another comes, all things, undone.”

  The Wayfarer observed how the red lines of the world bounced and swayed as the verbal portent kicked up a small quantum squall and snapped back into place without so much as a ripple left behind. “It’s the end of the world, and I feel fine.”

  Bombatom, who wanted nothing more than to be a spirit of nature, running through forests and hills and who could swim in lakes that didn’t glow in the dark, settled in to wait for his brothers and sisters.

  It was too late to do anything else.

  With Chezzik Elteren’s eventual translation to the past, everything was now destined to unspool.