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

by Lee Bond

  Chez busted out a curt nod. “Oh, aye. Quite a bit of a surprise, underneath that old hood, hey? ‘course, I have adopted the tendency to avoid your lot more than ever now because of it. There’s this,” the Englishman fought to find the right words, “curling hunger somewhere down ’round my spleen, wants me to have more. But I resist, as between those bits and the Wayfarer bits, there are concerns that I might not wind up being me any longer, and I am sorry to say, I like who I am far too much.”

  “You are a true chimera.” Samiel hated to admit it, but if only he’d known about Chezzik’s absolutely unique nature sooner than this, he would’ve leaped at the chance to conscript the assassin. Wayfarer and ODDity DNA combined with then-bleeding edge technology merged with whatever else had cropped up in the man’s life? What a miracle.

  Ah well. What’d been done had been done and there was no other way around it; none of the other Samiels wanted to deal with Chezzik, and the chaotic pressure-emotions from Ultimate Samiel himself truly did not want to take the risk of dealing with any transitional conversations happening at any other point in his own Line than right that moment.

  It was to be Chezzik, in the past, and nothing else. The repercussions of ... 'conscripting' the assassin at this point would surely unspool the entire Line…

  “So what’s the job, squire?” Chez politely stifled a yawn behind a gloved hand.

  “There is a man in the 21st century by the name of Garth Nickels.” Frustration had the man’s name out of his mouth like a curse.

  “You don’t say.” Chez was startled, but he recovered quickly enough. “What’s he done? Why d’you want him kilt?”

  “He is interfering with my efforts. That’s all you need to know.” Samiel wasn’t too surprised that Chezzik knew of ‘Garth Nickels’. By now, the man’s name was a household word in the 21st century. “And I don’t want him killed. He can’t be killed, as far as I can tell.”

  “Psht.” Chez slapped a hand on his blades. “Anyone can be killed.”

  “Chezzik Elteren, when I tell you a thing cannot be done, rest assured that I have squandered more years in trying to accomplish it than the world itself has ever seen. The man claiming to be Garth Nickels cannot be killed. But,” Samiel licked his lips, “I do believe he can be contained. And so that is what you are to do for me. Capture him. Contain him. There, in the 21st, for as long as it takes.

  “Contain." The word fell from disgusted lips. "I do not contain. I kill. I assassinate. I murder. I do not contain. This meeting is at an end." Chez angled himself for one of the few apertures leading into and out of the wider-on-the-inside control room, fully intent on not dealing with Samiel and his delusions of grandeur. “Contain.”

  Contain. What a ridiculous concept. One hundred percent ridiculous all the way around it and back again for a second look-see.

  "What," Samiel's raspy voice filled the room, "is the one thing you want more than anything else? For payment? For the risk of traveling through time, keeping my foe alive and out of the way, until I contact you that things are over?"

  Chez's outstretched foot froze over the threshold. The assassin looked over his shoulder at Samiel, still bound down to his giant, rickety chair like a massive human-shaped dirigible. "What are you suggesting?"

  There were a lot of things Chezzik wanted. Not all of them were easily acquirable by a measly assassin, nor were all of them strictly feasible. He'd been all over the world and knew of quite a few things as were hidden from even expert scrutiny. Oh, the things he wanted, the trinkets and fantasies that would make his life more interesting...

  But there was one thing over all, one mistake he'd made early on.

  "I am the master of Time, Chezzik." Samiel didn't even bother trying to hide his smugness. The power he held was unlike any other, by anyone, ever. "Anything you want. From the early 21st century to far-flung points in the future. Imagination is your only barrier."

  "Well, mate, there isn't anything in the future I could even imagine I might want, but there is summink in the right here and the right now that I've always ... hungered for." Chez strolled right back into the control room, big and bold as brass tacks.

  It was time to do a little … testing. As far as things were going right now, Chezzik Elteren could honestly say from the bottom of his gently whirring artificial heart that he was perhaps a wee bit disillusioned with Baron Samiel. Out there in the Wasteloads dotting the earth, when you had the misfortune to run into his forces, you were treated to quite a display of savagery and insanity, and quite often, those displays convinced a lad or lass to move into the relative safety of a Bartneric. Or, should that fail, you were encouraged to pick a better life the next time your name showed up on the Wheel.

  But Samiel himself?

  Chez allowed as how he didn’t know very much about the pressures of being in control of Time Itself, and even willingly admitted to himself –inside his own head and nowhere else, mind- that he might very well not be the best person to make any kind of sane judgments at all, but … Samiel was a caricature. A cartoon. A bloated out, stretched awry version of himself, and one far too prone to temper tantrums and mystical talk for his own liking.

  If you couldn’t strike fear into the hearts of your enemies with your presence, you had to work on your gravitas. This was a given.

  Samiel wasn’t surprised Chez was coming back to the bargaining table. They all did. “What is your price, Chezzik Elteren? What thing more than any other thing drives you to distraction? What trinket fell through your fingertips, what gem caught your eye, but never laid gloved hands on?”

  “Do you always talk … no. Never mind.” Chez shook his head at his own question before getting back on track. “As I were implying, there is something I regretted not laying proper hands on so long ago, and it is a thing you can get for me today. ‘twill be a difficult task, I think, even for someone like you.”

  Incandescent purple lightning flitted back and forth around Samiel’s body, a faint second vestment of clothes. “There isn’t anything I can’t do, given enough Time.” Then, because it was a joke that never failed to make him laugh, Samiel did just that. He laughed until his awkwardly corpulent body shivered and shuddered inside the leather harnesses keeping him inside the Ziggurat. “What is it?”

  Chez tapped his two mismatched eyes; one belonged to the unfortunate ‘loader back in the bar, the other belonged … ah, yes, one of Emperor Hirohito’s vat-grown ninja clones, yes that was right. Their onboard HUD displays were at complete odds with one another and besides all that, the colors were terribly mismatched and as much as people imagined it’d be easy for a bloke like him to lay hands on fresh eyeballs on a regular basis, it wasn’t so much as quantity that had him on the ropes, but quality.

  The assassin explained all this, finishing with what he wanted most in the world more than any other thing. “I want the eyes of a Wayfarer, Baron Samiel, Overlord of The Line. When I was still young and I took the head of that Wayfarer, a fool by the name of Too-lo-Ton, I didn’t know any better. When I et the eyes, I really didn’t know any better. They say that I’m part ‘farer myself, these days, with the DNA essence of that idiot percolating and persisting through the few organic bits that properly remain inside of me, and I’m inclined to believe the words of those cloak-wearing misfits. But what they also say is that those mystics and New World Wizards see things differently. That’s what I’d like. A, erm, fresh perspective on life."

  “The eyes of a Wayfarer.” Samiel felt all the other hims stir uncomfortably in the back of his mind.

  As with Chezzik, doubly so with those ‘cloak-wearing misfits’; long and long ago, Samiel had determined that the beings calling themselves Wayfarers and that roamed around the world doing miraculous things would likely not interfere in his dealings so long as he did the same in kind for them, and for the entire stretch of his Line –including every single iteration, since the literal beginning of his clandestine efforts to rewire the Bishop Line into something more … accommo
dating- it had ever been thus.

  Samiel liked to imagine that they were all working towards the same goal, just from opposite ends. ODDities ran afoul of ‘farers all the time, especially fresh and young servants new to their powers, and that was just fine. Their absurd deaths gave the others something to consider when they were slogging through nuclear deserts.

  But … never before had there been a Garth Nickels. Never before had any time in the 21st century been barred to his endless wisdom. Never before had Bishop been further away. He couldn’t even contact Lissande, for the love of Christ. It was a guarantee that the woman knew her job and that she’d carry through on her orders without hesitation, but … she’d never been left alone for this long; high-functioning ODDities had the most freedom and the most disillusionment over the tasks they were ordered to carry out, and the longer they were on their own, the higher the chance of mutiny.

  Samiel held up a hand wide as a flipper. “Hold for a moment. I need to consider this.”

  Chez rolled his eyes, dug through a pocket in search of a cigarette, and lit up. “Bloke can’t even do a proper bigger-on-the-inside spaceship, why am I not surprised he can’t make his mind up on his own? By all means, squire, palaver away with … whoever.”

  ***

  The internal debate raged hot and fierce. All the younger versions of himself –those encamped prior to this particular moment in the 25th century- all voted against moving on a Wayfarer, no matter how great the opportunity was; that strange clique of Wasteload wanderers had proven time and again that they’d work overtime to ensure that any being causing one of their own would suffer for generations.

  The Samiel in the middle –the poor one tasked with actually dealing with Chezzik- reminded the younger versions of himself that there was, in fact, a single entity left on the board after not only having bothered a Wayfarer, but having both removed the man’s head and then turning said head into a snack, and that that person was right that moment wandering through the endless warrens of machinery, smoking cigarettes and making glib comments to himself.

  Samiel in the Middle asked the future versions of himself it they had any input, if any of them were currently living through a Line in which they’d managed to capture and de-eye a Wayfarer as payment for Chezzik’s services.

  None of them –not even Ultimate Samiel- carried within them the slightest seed of such a Line.

  The argument against doing so received fresh fuel.

  See, younger Samiels demanded stridently, see? No memories of the moment meant no follow through, which meant that either Chezzik was unsuccessful or actions against a Wayfarer had resulted in such terrible reprisals that –like dealing with Nickels themselves- doing so simply became utterly and entirely not worth it all.

  Middle Samiel demurred politely, reminding everyone one of him that because he was more or less situated right in the center of everything, he was therefore most capable of remaining utterly neutral.

  The younger hims were continually reeling from their defeats at Nickels’ hand, the older hims were worn ragged and left thin trying to come up with new methods of counteracting the fiend’s abilities and Ultimate Samiel was too busy howling at one of the few diaphanous shreds of starstuff left in the solar system to be of much use to anyone until or unless it became evident that they were going to completely fail.

  They all of them –minus howling Ultimate Samiel- felt it would best if they simply hurried up and came to a conclusion on their own, before the most ancient version of themselves came back into his own brain and started screaming at them instead of a blob of something that might've been a planet once.

  Middle Samiel argued for a trial. A simple exercise in temporal mechanics. They’d agree to Chezzik’s terms because that was what needed to happen, and then they’d monitor his success or failure. If he failed, they’d know fairly quickly and not only would they have no need to hunt down a Wayfarer, there’d be no reason to meet with the assassin altogether, and vice versa if he was successful.

  Some few of him pointed out that as the only one in the room doing proper time travel, everything they’d just agreed to should already be known to be either success or failure because they were all outside the range of Nickels’ cunning temporal beachhead. The mere fact that they knew nothing at all of anything Chezzik had been doing in the 21st suggested quite strenuously that not only had he failed to get anywhere vis a vis containing Garth Nickels, but that Nickels was still far too successful in whatever it was he was getting up to.

  Middle Samiel put an end to the conversation with both the previous and future versions of himself. They were getting nowhere –as happened often- and Chezzik was about to poke his fingers into an engine that might either blow the man’s fingers clean off or something even worse.

  They were going to do as he insisted. He was in the middle. He was distanced from both suspicion of failure and expectation of success.

  There was no one better to make this kind of choice, doubly so now that they knew there was an Ultimate version of them all, and he truly was the maddest thing under the stars. ***

  Chez was instantly alert; senses honed from hundreds of years of living in the Wasteload coupled with all the wonderful bells and whistles he had under the hood had made him one very aware bastard, and the very second Baron Samiel’s intellect returned to the body in the chair, he was stood right there, waiting to hear the verdict.

  “Well?” The assassin asked wryly, a sardonic grin on his lips. “We all done talking to ourselves? Ourself? We-selves? You-thems? Frankly, I don't think the English language can properly support time travel. Leastways not them pronouns."

  Samiel looked down on Chezzik from a great height. Talking with himselves through The Line had reminded him of the great and majestic things he was capable of, and it’d infused him with fresh purpose. “We have.”

  “Oh Crikey, this is exciting.” Chez clapped his hands together. “Like I’m on a game show or summink. Am I the weakest link? Will I be voted off the island?”

  “You will be given your greatest prize…”

  “Brilliant.” Chez fist-pumped. The eyes of a Wayfarer. The sights they saw would be his, at long last. “Absolutely brilli…”

  “Don’t interrupt me again, Chezzik.” Samiel’s words rasped harshly into the air, a rusty tool against rotten wood. “As I was saying. You will get your eyes. When it is proven you are successful and I am triumphant."

  “How long d‘you reckon?” Chez mulled over asking for half payment in advance, deciding against it because, well, he supposed because he was bored as balls and just wanted to get on with the job. “Not that it …”

  “Indeterminate.” Samiel shrugged, and all of him wobbled in place. “For you, no more than a few years. For me, it could be centuries. Either way, at the end of the journey, you will receive your eyes.”

  “Fucking hell.” Chez did the math. “So, like, a few months of honest fun in the 21st and then all kinds of fucking bullshit misery? I lived through the Invasion once already, mate. Doing it a second time seems like I might be taunting fate, especially whilst trying to not-murder someone to make sure they stay not-dead for your … reasons.”

  Not killing someone. It were … a novel concept, to say the least. Chez couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about not killing someone and frankly drew a blank. He suspected he’d been wishing death on people since inception.

  “Once you are in my employ, Chezzik Elteren, you will continually remain in my employ until I decide we are done. Life and death and everything in between will not get in the way of the contract. If you die during the Invasion, you will not die.” Samiel tried snapping his fingers, but failed miserably, so he instead caused a thunder crack to split the air. “Dead and not dead are easy. Will you do the job or not? We’ve wasted years talking this out.”

  Chezzik intentionally ignored the comment about how much time had been wasted. He was heading into uncharted waters now, so it was best to keep his eyes on the prize
at the end of the journey. A Wayfarer’s eyes. Inside his skull, showing him sights the world had never intended to reveal.

  “Oh aye, Baron Samiel, I am indeed on the job. Is there some sort of … pad or tube or fancy dais I stand on? Do you need to charge anything …”

  Baron Samiel commanded the temporal incongruity to reveal itself to Chezzik Elteren in all its glory; connected to a huge, flexible tentacle forged out of the toughest metals in existence, the blistering lavender stone –roughly shaped, oddly in and out of phase with the environment, spitting atoms that made no sense and particles that warbled through space- reared up behind the giant wooden chair he was mounted to, a kind of scorpion’s tail, though one of infinitely greater toxicity.

  Chezzik blinked. "'s awfully purp …"

  The big purple moon lanced forward on the end of the tentacle and smacked him right in the chest and then everything went …

  ***

  Bombatom, squatting miserably in the tall bushes that did nothing to hide him from Samiel’s impressive senses, watched on as a virulent beam of purple power laced with frothing blue and white tracers tore through the clouds above the Amazon Basin and disappeared into space.

  “Well, shit.” Bombatom counted to three. The torrent of power carrying Chezzik Elteren into the past reached maximum apex, there was a split of thunder and lightning that trembled across the land and tore all shadows into shreds. Then the beam started falling backwards to the tip of the Ziggurat.

  Bombatom’s hooded eyes tracked the falling beam’s progress, hoping with every altered atom that somehow the bead of incongruous material in the very tip of the amethyst emanation failed to …

  Contact was made.

  The essence of Baron Samiel’s power –a tiny, almost-crystalline chip of matter pulled from the temporal incongruity, blazing bright as the brightest star the heavens had ever seen- collapsed into the very zenith of the glorious red lines that sketched a mysterious design, not just across the skin of the Ziggurat, both of the entire world.