Killers, Traitors, & Runaways: Outcasts of the Worlds, Book II

by Lucas Paynter

  But the great city she still called home lived on. Not like this.

  “Food shall run scarce long before we make any significant headway,” Chari determined after taking stock of their supplies. They had been walking for days, and still hadn’t even reached the first crossroad.

  Poe was standing at the side of the road, peering down. “We should survey the growth below. Something may flourish down there that we can eat.”

  Flynn joined Poe, and surveyed the depths with dismay. “Looks more like weeds and brambles … but we don’t have much other choice, do we?”

  There was no difficulty in exploring Thoris’ depths. Stairways bridged the above and below at regular intervals, and Zella surmised they likely served to bring the harvest up and supplies down. As they descended, she tapped Flynn on the shoulder.

  “You still don’t sense anything?” He shook his head. She didn’t wish to comfort him, but felt she ought to. “It may not have worked out, but it was still a sound idea.”

  “It was,” he agreed. “But now all I can do is worry I’ve led us into an inescapable trap.”

  At first, it seemed like Flynn was right—there were signs that the old occupants used to cultivate this land, but barbed vines had taken over a long time ago. The crops that had survived had turned wild, looming large but ensnared in the brambles; with no other options, the companions began making trips down daily, hacking through the growth and harvesting what they needed.

  Zella didn’t like going far in. At first, it was a superficial fear, for although the livestock that once lived down here hadn’t survived the passage of time, their bleached bones remained. But she saw things in the shadowy depths of the brambles, and though they never showed themselves, they seemed to eye Zella whenever she made the descent.

  When they finally found a settlement, it proved as lifeless as the rest of Thoris. The houses were made of a reddish clay—thin walls with fine inscriptions on them—and seemed intended more for decoration than dwelling. Time had fractured them, cracked them like eggshells, and those that still stood had nothing of use to offer. There was, however, one curiosity that gave the group pause.

  In the center of this nameless village was a small shrine with a circular skylight and a shallow pool within. There was no water and the bottom was dusted with dry leaves and sand, but it seemed it was never meant for washing or drinking. A faint blue aura drifted from above and settled in the depression, forming a pond of soft luminescence.

  “Saw somethin’ like this in Renivar’s castle,” Jean said. “What’cha think they’re gatherin’ it for?”

  “Any who might have known are gone,” Zella replied. Her father gathered such energy to erode his chains; her mother sipped it like it ambrosia. Such gathering points were not simply left in the open, not even in Yeribelt and certainly not in Remonstaire. “I feel it resonating with the blood in my veins,” she confessed.

  “What’s that like?” Zaja asked.

  “Kind of tingles.”

  Poe knelt before the pool and removed one of his gloves. He hesitated for a moment, then plunged his fist into the light. It did not react, but Poe gritted his teeth and began to sweat like he’d stuck his hand in boiling water.

  He soon withdrew in dismay. “Is my soul so tarnished? Is this pain gauged by my murders, by the wages of my sins?”

  Flynn crouched opposite Poe and swirled his fingers in the light. “I don’t feel anything.” This revelation left Zella ill, for knowing the deceitful man Flynn once was, it raised the question of which was worse—to take a life or destroy it?

  “The pain burrows into the very core of me,” Poe said. “Like some part of my existence threatens to be unmade, and is scarcely held at bay.”

  “Such pure living energy is said to devastate the most corrupt of beings,” Zella told him. She glanced at Flynn, and added, “How you can touch it and feel no pain is beyond me.”

  He shrugged weakly. “Maybe the universe thinks I’ve suffered enough?” Flynn didn’t seem convinced by his own words.

  There would be several more settlements along the way before the great spire at the heart of Thoris began to reveal itself. In every one of these villages was a similar pool of light, and every time Poe tried his hand at it with similar results. Once, he attempted to strip down and meditate in one, but gave up within the hour.

  “Any difference?” Zella asked upon his emergence.

  Poe stopped to draw the Dark Sword and feel the weight of it in his hand. “Nothing consequential,” he concluded.

  *

  After weeks of travel, the spire—once just a tiny protrusion on the horizon—towered before them, casting a chilling shadow to match. The dark bronze monolith could challenge any of the skyscrapers that had survived back on Earth, and though its doors were open, nothing about it felt welcoming.

  As they looked up at the looming entrance, Chari glanced at Flynn and asked, “Any notion that we might find something within?”

  He shook his head. The lifeless road had remained so from the edge of Thoris to its very center, and all along it, Flynn’s sixth sense was silent as well. The sensation called back to the days before his transformation, when he was a different man. It was a quiet that haunted him.

  “We have no reason to tarry out here,” Poe said contemptuously as he marched in. “Let us greet the fruits of this vacant endeavor.”

  The spire’s base level was poorly lit, depending on windows that were far too high to cast significant light even on the brightest of days. The broad, shallow pools along the path would have reflected the sunshine once, but they had gone dry, save for a few sparse puddles so muddy they couldn’t provide even the dimmest reflection.

  Shea tugged on Flynn’s sleeve. “What after this?” she asked. “Long walk back?”

  “Maybe Zaja can handle getting us out by the time we return,” he suggested. “She’s had some time to recover.”

  “What I’ve seen? Don’t think she works that way.”

  Flynn reserved his response. Shea was right; he’d just hoped she hadn’t caught on to so much so soon. Even if Zaja had the stamina to bring them back to the mainland, the turbulent waves on the edge of Thoris were a far less forgiving starting point than the shore they’d set out from. There were no materials suitable for building a boat either, let alone one that would survive its maiden voyage. The rocks surrounding Thoris might have served as much to keep people in as out.

  “It’s some distance to the top,” Zella observed as they came to the center of the spire. A series of paths crisscrossed up its height before a large dais filled in the space above and blocked any view of the ceiling. “I see something up there, however. Something large.”

  “Several, actually,” Shea added. “Count four.”

  “Probably just statues of the fuckers who ruled this place,” Jean said. “There, I spoiled it. We still need to bother goin’ up now?” Poe glanced at her with irritation. “What? I just don’t wanna climb up and see ya get all pissy.”

  “It does feel like we’re just trying to stave off the inevitable disappointment,” Zella agreed. “Still…”

  “We’re already here,” Flynn finished. “Let’s just see whatever there is to see. Once our curiosity is sated, we’ll sit down and discuss our next steps.”

  To reach the paths above, the spire’s builders had foregone stairwells in favor of elevator platforms, flanked on each side by a chain and pulley system. When this place was alive, Flynn imagined the gods that came and went were hoisted up and brought back down by servants doing the hard labor, but in their absence, the seven could only count on themselves.

  Flynn surveyed the distant light above with every revolution of the chain. His hands ached as he gripped and pulled, but he couldn’t bring himself to tag out and let someone else take over. A sickening feeling assured him nothing they found would justify the months-long trip. Every decision he’d made thus far had brought them to this inevitable dead end, and it could only end with them leaving Thoris t
o find passage to another world, then cycling through the same dart-board approach of passing through doors and hoping to get lucky.

  The platform suddenly buckled as the chain momentarily slipped in Flynn’s sweaty, raw hands. Everyone was safe, but it was a jarring interruption.

  Flynn held tight and tried to retain his grip, insisting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

  “Oi! Oi, here,” Shea said, slipping under his arms to catch the length of the chain below his hands. She was pressed right against him for a moment, the scent of her hair in his face, the nape of her neck near his lips. “Got it. Got it. Let go,” she urged.

  Flynn wanted to argue, to bear this task himself in penance for all his missteps. But he knew his hands were sore, his strength tapped, and so he submitted to Shea, disengaging from her in the process. He felt her tail slide against his leg as he stepped back and wondered if it was intentional.

  “You overtaxed yourself,” Chari stated with concern as she soothed the pain in his hands.

  “I brought us here,” he told her. “Every mistake I’ve made since we left Terrias … I’ve alienated people, lost others entirely, and led us through more than one kind of hell.”

  “A considerable burden to place on yourself,” she reproved. “As if we had no part in these actions, no capacity to speak up or suggest different means? You wish to take credit, then, for surveying the maps and identifying Thoris in the first place?”

  He agreed only reluctantly. However he blamed himself, Flynn couldn’t take full credit. “I think Poe blames me.”

  “His tantrums are tantamount to a child not getting his way,” she muttered. “Poe’s vaingloriousness is a bitter feint to hide the fact that the boy in the woods never truly grew up.”

  “Jean,” Poe barked. “My grip weakens! Switch with me.”

  “Fuckin’ ‘please’ wouldn’t kill ya,” she grumbled irritably.

  Poe said nothing, but held the chains on his side firm until she could swap places, then returned to the center of the platform, massaging his hands. Chari glanced over, wondering if he’d heard anything, but Flynn had been watching him the whole time. Poe’s body language was as benign as before she’d spoken.

  “For all the trials and tribulations we’ve suffered—and I concur, there were many,” Chari began again. “Was there a better path before us? Most times, I think not. So I query now, Flynn, even knowing there may be nothing for us above but the possibility of hope, could you have taken any other way than to bring us here?”

  Flynn thought about it for a time. On Breth, he had declined several prospective routes for being too risky or harrowing. Here on Keltia, he hadn’t investigated a single one, hindered by means of travel and local hazard. As he looked at Shea, grunting with every pull of the chain, he knew his answer was coming from the wrong place.

  “I don’t think I could have.”

  He stood quietly in the center of the platform for the remainder of the ascent. Flynn somehow felt more effective having others do the work for him, ignorant all the while that they were just being used. He was the first to step out onto the dais and behold the four statues that filled each corner of the spire’s upper chamber.

  Three of them were of little note. All of the statues lacked color and so were devoid of a number of finer details that would have told of their likeness’ origins, but one was clearly a Keltian woman, dressed in the garb of an older era.

  “’Least one of us held office on our own bloody world,” Shea commented.

  The other two were male. One wore a bomber jacket, and Flynn surmised him to be in his thirties, though the lines etched into the statue’s face nearly fooled Flynn into thinking him older. Such blemishes suggested these gods—or that one in particular, at least—allowed no flattering creative license in their portrayal. The other man was clearly older when he was tapped, looking to be in his sixties or seventies.

  It was the fourth statue that drew Flynn in. A woman, whose features suggested she might be from Earth. She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that he could swear bore an old soft drink logo. She stood tall with a self-confident smile carved into her face. He had never seen her before—there was no memory of what she looked like, how she sounded—but she seemed familiar nonetheless.

  “You’ve been staring at her for a while,” Zaja said, voicing some concern.

  “I know her … I’ve met her. We’ve met her,” Flynn mumbled. “Something about her … no, not her face … her body.”

  “Wait, whose body?” Shea asked.

  It was starting to come back. A fleeting encounter, many months ago now. A face he had never seen, a form illuminated through silk curtains. It felt like a leap of logic; she had never shown herself and all his memory of her was in silhouette. The Goddess in Heaven. The Mystik of Love.

  “Roxanne,” he said softly.

  As he voiced his discovery, something in Flynn’s awareness was jarred. He turned sharply around and saw a man sitting at the base of one of the statues, the real life counterpart of the one with the bomber jacket. His sandy brown hair hung half over his face, and his eyes peered through with contempt.

  “Get out of my house,” he ordered.

  “The door was open,” Zaja pointed out.

  “You listenin’, short bus?” he demanded as he stood up. “This is the one place in the worlds I don’t need assholes like you fucking about. You’re gonna bring a hell down the likes this place hasn’t seen in a century.”

  “Pardon, but who are you?” Chari asked.

  “Do not do that,” he snapped. “Do not come all the way here, see me next to my own damn statue, and ask who the fuck I am.”

  “Can’t read the writing, twat,” Shea pointed out irritably.

  He began to rebut, but caught himself before the first word slipped out. The man glanced back, checked the writing, then returned his attention to them. He eased up a little. “Orick Daimous—God of Conflict.”

  “And how to know you’re really—?” Shea started.

  “He is,” Flynn interrupted.

  Orick gave Flynn a scrutinizing look, then surveyed the rest of them before settling on Poe as a new realization dawned. “Shit … shit, you’re Airia’s group ain’t ya? Which makes you—”

  “Guardian Poe,” Poe confirmed. “You know of Airia Rousow?”

  “Who do you think sent her your way, dumbass?” he snapped. “Geez … after the shitstorm that went down in Terrias, figured you a lost cause. Can’t believe Rousow wasted the last of her juice gettin’ you sorry fucks free.”

  “Even so, this is fortuitous,” Chari said. “Ours is the same cause. You can aid us—”

  Orick laughed. “If ya think I want to help, yer even stupider than ya look. Had I known the shit Rousow was about to pull? Would have said you were all dead—not like she’d be able to check. Now she’s just another pawn off a board that I’m done playin’.”

  “Then our arrival means the chance to put another piece in her place,” Chari protested. “A queen from a pawn.”

  “Am I the queen?” Poe asked, bewildered.

  “I ain’t getting caught up in anyone’s shit,” Orick insisted. “The message to Rousow was a favor, that’s it. Thought to tilt things back in a good way. Do more and I’ll get noticed, and these days? That’s what gets gods killed.”

  As Flynn’s companions exchanged pleas for Orick’s insults, he considered the man before them. Orick Daimous had the knowledge and means to help them, but his self-interest outweighed any desire or willingness to do so. His fear of being discovered evinced awareness of what had killed Yetinau Gruent, and his inferred age and connections promised far more in the way of information.

  “We’re done wasting our time,” Flynn announced.

  “Oh.” Orick seemed momentarily dumbfounded. “Well … good.”

  “Look around us,” he said to his companions. “There are three other gods depicted here. If we’ve attracted the attentions of one, another may arrive soon.” Flynn glanced at Ori
ck and drove home his next point. “They’re guaranteed to be more useful than him.”

  Undaunted, Orick crossed his arms and smirked cockily. “Long wait ahead of you, hairball. The others are all dead. I’m the last man standing.”

  “An’ yer fuckin’ proud of that?” Jean scolded. “Three of yer buds are dead and you’re just hidin’ here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Rather than bow to her chastisement, Orick stammered, “They—they weren’t my friends. I barely knew ’em—any of ’em—when I came on board. I was the kid, the new meat, and they left, one by one. First Roxy. Then they axed Lorian, and finally Lacy…!” Orick had become increasingly tense, and had to calm himself down. “Lacy vanished long before I felt her go.”

  “What dark fate befell them?” Poe asked in self-concern.

  “They meddled,” was all Orick would say. “Old man was right. Shouldn’t have meddled.”

  “Old man…?” Chari asked, as she studied the surrounding statues.

  With an agitated sigh, Orick stepped forward and pointed at the three statues, starting with the Keltian woman. “Desolation.” He moved on to the elderly man. “Renewal.” And finally, the one Flynn had identified as Roxanne. “Harmony.”

  “And you’re Conflict,” Zella reiterated.

  “I wonder sometimes, if it’s my fault,” he said. “They were fine, till I showed up. It was small talk, first, over tea an’ shit. Roxy argued that somethin’ had to be done about Renivar, that things were gonna get worse if we just sat around with our thumbs up our asses. Lorian swore the problem would solve itself, and Lacy … hell, she thought the old fuck would give up in despair.”

  “You said Roxanne was the first to go?” Flynn asked.

  “Rox…?” Orick hung on the name for a moment. “Yeah. Should have said somethin’ to her. Didn’t. Like I said, new meat. She died.” After his own experience in Heaven, Flynn questioned that. “Stupid bitch … didn’t even think about what it meant if she failed.”