Time of Breath

by Paul Mannering

  “Really? I could have sworn it was some kind of whistle.”

  Nonce stared at me with an adze-worth of flint in his glare. “Erksine, we are leaving,” he announced, and vanished up the passageway to the surface.

  Uncouth hesitated as if he wanted to apologise, explain, or invite us to a kitchenware buying party; instead, he gave a whimper and scuttled after Nonce.

  “Well, that was unpleasant,” I said. Drakeforth was now on his hands and knees, seemingly measuring the floor with his fingers and blowing dust from the fine gaps between the heavy blocks of sandstone.

  “We should get out of here, immediately.” Eade stood and in an ultimately futile gesture, she dusted the dust from her knees.

  “Agreed.” I started for the door and the lights went out.

  Chapter 33

  “Morning!” Goat said cheerfully in the dark.

  “Eade, do you happen to have a light?” I asked, not daring to move.

  “You know, I told myself before I left that floating shack earlier, the last thing I must do is leave my phone behind.”

  “And?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  “It was actually the second to last thing I did.”

  “Wonderful.” I did have a mobile phone. Somewhere. I tended not to carry it with me in case someone tried to call me on it.

  “What can I get everyone for breakfast?” Goat burbled. “Sorry, there’s not much variety.”

  “Drakeforth?”

  “Yes, Pudding?”

  “Did they close the door to the pyramid, effectively sealing us in here and leaving us to die slowly of asphyxiation and dehyd­ration?”

  “It seems like the simplest solution to their problem,” Drake­forth replied.

  “Real go-getters, those two,” Eade said.

  “Drakeforth, is there some way I could die now and save the wait? The idea of three days listening to Eade makes me long for the oblivion of death.”

  “You sure that death and oblivion are the same thing?” Drake­forth sounded closer. I wanted to reach out and find him, but the thought of actually touching someone unexpectedly in the dark made me recoil internally.

  I stiffened as Drakeforth clamped a hand around my arm. “Come with me,” he said.

  “You’ll have to guide me. I seem to have forgotten how to open my eyes.”

  Drakeforth pulled me forward several steps, Then shuffled me sideways, and finally we turned ninety-degrees.

  “You dance divinely,” I said, grinning in the dark where no one could see.

  “Next time you can lead,” Drakeforth replied. “This is the spot. Do your thing.”

  “Which thing?”

  “We are standing on top of a large reservoir of unrefined double-e flux. I would like you to encourage it to blast a hole in the side of this fabrication of fraudulence.”

  “Right, now how should I do that?”

  “You did it before.”

  “That was a different circumstance. Our lives were threatened.”

  “What makes you think our lives aren’t threatened now?” Drakeforth asked.

  “My sense of urgency is not feeling it.”

  “Have you tried explaining the gravity of our situation to your sense of urgency?” Drakeforth asked.

  “I could, but it’s more of a crisis thing. Not a slow build up to worst-case scenario.”

  “How have you have managed to live this long should be the focus of in-depth study.”

  “Perhaps they could make a documentary,” I said into the dark.

  “If you’re interested,” Eade said in a tone that suggested our interest was the least of her priorities, “the stone block that was blocking the entrance is, once again, blocking the entrance.”

  “They might make a documentary about us, ‘The Mystery of the Bodies Found in the Pyramid’,” I suggested.

  “Someone will say it was aliens,” Drakeforth replied. “Can you feel it?”

  “Feel what?” The grit beneath my shoes felt like popping candy in my mouth.

  “Empathic energy. Bustling about under your feet like it has something important to do.”

  “Uh-huh.” The stone felt like hot sand. The darkness sparkled and light started glowing in a pattern across the floor.

  “We should get out of here,” I muttered.

  “That’s the plan,” Drakeforth said, stepping back.

  “Vole!” Eade yelled. “Do we simply have to die in here?”

  “Pudding is taking care of it,” Vole said. I appreciated his confidence. It stood out in stark contrast to the complete lack of my own.

  Right. Take care of it, Pudding. I tried to recall the awful occasion when the latest in a series of Godden’s despicably artificial descendants almost ruined my life. A tumult of empathic energy had poured through me in that corporate office over a production line of assimilation agents. How did you feel? I asked myself. Very angry. Very scared. Very…tired. I checked my current status. Annoyed. Uneasy and very tired.

  “How’s she getting on, do you think?” Eade asked, loud enough for the murrai outside to hear.

  “The room hasn’t exploded, so I’d say she’s still warming up,” Drakeforth replied.

  “Exploded?” Eade asked. “Why in the colander would the room explode?”

  I wanted to yell, “Because you won’t shut up and you are annoying the tardigrades out of me!” Instead, the floor collapsed and I fell into a whirlpool rainbow of chaotic emotions.

  Chapter 34

  The idea of an afterlife is a cornerstone of many religions. It’s the faith equivalent of “eat your vegetables, and you’ll get something nice for dessert”. Drakeforth, of course railed against organised religion. He went out of his way to accost and annoy his own followers, and if he met anyone with a different system of belief, he would probably unload his insults on them, too. I wondered if he would show respect to the actually deceased. He would probably appreciate that they didn’t interrupt him when he was ranting.

  I floated in a warm glow of feelings. The pure distillation of life. Fragments of experience. Slivers of memory. Shards of despair and dandruff flakes of joy. I did not sink, though at the same time I didn’t backstroke and squirt sparkling empathic energy into the air, either. I was a synchronised swimmer without a team. Just me and a legion of spectator moments swirling like a tornado of confused fish.

  My intake of breath sparkled and fizzed.

  “I know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t been where you are. Or aren’t.”

  I fell silent; even in conversation with the dead, my lack of social skills made me want to shrivel up.

  A tear, a freckle, the glint of an eye. An amalgam of fractal features came together. A thousand pieces of people formed into what could have been a single face. For a moment, it looked like Dad.

  “Marzipan,” he might have whispered, and the echo rippled through the ether.

  “Me?” Of course me. There was no one else here, and while everyone called me Charlotte, except for Drakeforth, who insisted on that faux-formality of calling me by my last name, I might have misheard the word. Dad had never called me Marzipan, for which I was grateful.

  The face folded into the kaleidoscope of double-e flux. If there were others, I didn’t recognise them.

  I continued doing the equivalent of treading water while I waited for Drakeforth to do something. He was probably making a rope out of Goat’s nasal hair to lift me out. I didn’t seem at imminent risk of drowning, so hanging around—floating, for want of a better description—was all I could do.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked somewhat tardily.

  Immersion in empathic energy is unlike anything else. For most people it is about as distressing as being dipped into a nightclub light show. Lots of pretty colours, but no physical effe
cts other than maybe a little retina burn.

  The fine hairs on my arms waved like sea-grass at high tide as whatever I was breathing sparkled and tingled in my lungs.

  With a burning sense of self-consciousness, I started to make swimming motions. It worked better than I had hoped, and I half floated and half swam through a glowing mist that both curled towards my full attention and recoiled from my touch. It was like moving through the personalities of cats.

  The swirling mist cleared to sparkly murk and I felt something almost solid under my feet. I experienced the total calm akin to being the only person in a bouncy castle moments before some annoying kids come in shrieking and throwing themselves into the wall.

  Landscapes require a lot of work: ask any artist or professional gardener. The scene forming before my eyes had incredible detail, from the cloud-like ground to the sweeping lines of the tree that dominated my view.

  She swept into view astride a rope-and-board swing that hung from the tree—head back, legs outstretched, black hair streaming like a comet’s tail as she arced through the air.

  I kept quiet and watched her fly, my stomach doing flip-flops as she sailed through the amplitude of the pendulum swing.

  “You’re late,” a gruff voice said.

  I jumped and felt the ground bounce gently under me. “Wha?! Oo?! Wherg?!” I babbled.

  “I said, you are late. Professor Polis Bombilate, and I’m not entirely sure to be honest.”

  “Are you dead?” The question came out before I had time to think of something more polite to ask.

  “Aren’t we all? Eventually, I mean.” Bombilate shrugged.

  “Sorry,” I apologised, realising what I had said sounded quite rude.

  “No point in apologising. You’re here now. Which is better than where you were a minute ago. With any luck you will find me and stop these fractured finger flappers before they ruin everything.”

  “Finger?” I frowned.

  “Excuse my strong language,” Bombilate said.

  “Wait… Ruin everything?”

  “Yes. Everything. You should hurry up and find me.”

  “Where are you!?”

  “If I knew that, don’t you think I would have led with it?”

  “I hardly know you! But yes! That would make sense!”

  “Good. See you soon.” Bombilate faded in a swirl of empathic energy.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d be happy to stay here!” I said.

  “Wake up, Pudding! We can’t stay here.” Drakeforth shook me and I blinked. The stone chamber of the pyramid came into sharp focus.

  “I saw Professor Bombilate!” I was yelling over the noise of the Godden engine whining as it red-lined its RPMs or whatever engines did when they made a noise like a boulder going through a bandsaw.

  “Great!” Drakeforth yelled. “It will be nice to feel we achieved something in this, the last moments of our lives!”

  “What’s going on!?” A fine dust was drifting down through the cracks, and the stones around us vibrated.

  “Well!” Drakeforth bellowed, “It’s a long story, but if you really want me to tell you, I will try to get to the point before we are crushed to a pulp!”

  Goat and Eade were pushing against a block of stone that fitted perfectly into the space where the entrance had been earlier.

  The woman with black hair stood unmoving in the centre of the room, a black umbrella open over her head as dust and gravel rained down on it and bounced away as easily as rain.

  “We need to leave!” I yelled.

  Drakeforth gave me a long-suffering look that stung worse than his anger. “You think?” He managed to shout the question and make it sarcastic at the same time.

  Empathic energy flowed around us. Every time I moved my hands or ducked under a stream of dust, everything blurred in a rainbow of light. I could see beyond the stone walls. Through the pulsing reservoir of energy that was deeper and stronger than anything I had ever seen. All the way to the shining light of the murrai. Standing outside the pyramid, the heavy stone block was now being pushed back into place by their masonry hands.

  “I think I can help…” My voice was blurred and distorted. The slow grind of stone machines deep in the belly of the pyramid made everything vibrate. I looked past Drakeforth, Eade, and Goat, who wore glowing auras of colourful sparks. I reached through the vibrating strings of reality to where the murrai stood, mute and patient outside of the pyramid.

  “Open the way,” I instructed. They didn’t move. “Please?” I tried again. Nothing. What was it Drakeforth said? Murrai are machines? Just because they were made to look like people didn’t make them people. They were tools. As simple as hammers.

  I mentally slapped myself, took a deep breath and punched the air. The murrai’ stone fists smashed into the rock. It cracked with a puff of dust. I adjusted my feet and struck again, slamming my fist into the wall.

  “Ow! Fruit!” I swore.

  Shaking my skinned knuckles, I struck again, careful to pull my punch this time. The murrai showed no such restraint. In two blows from their massive stone fists, the block in front of me fell apart. The force of it sent chunks of rock spinning and bouncing across the chamber floor, and dust dancing through the air. The murrai stood silhouetted in the dusk as we staggered out coughing and choking in the dusty air.

  “What in the hindquarters just happened?” Eade asked as she wiped dust from her eyes.

  “Empathic energy overload, I suspect,” Drakeforth said. “Sound right to you, Pudding?”

  “Yargh,” I spat. “The way the flux capacitor was running in there, they must be doing an emergency purge of the storage tanks and the system couldn’t handle the positive pressure.”

  “It’s not the usual reference work, but it will do in a pinch,” Goat said.

  Behind us, the machine howled and sent arcs of electricity crawling up the walls like the legs of neon spiders.

  “We should keep moving. This place could still light up like a whale full of glow-shrimp.” Drakeforth took Eade and me by the arms, and hurried down the stone steps of the pyramid.

  “I think I saw Professor Bombilate,” I said, while focusing on finding the next step down the steep slope as we rushed.

  “What? In there?” Eade half turned and looked back. The stone doorway we had just left vented an explosion of double-e flux. A tornado in metallic rainbow colours erupted out of the side of the pyramid with the roar of a volcano vomiting.

  “Kinda?” I suggested.

  “Plenty of time to talk about that when we aren’t in danger—when we are in less danger than we currently are,” Drakeforth said. He picked up the pace, and we were soon running down the stone steps. Chunks of carefully placed sandstone block crashed down around us. The smaller bits fell like rain, with the thunder of the storm behind us.

  “This isn’t like last time,” I gasped.

  “Oh? Does this happen to you often?” Eade managed to be sarcastic and pant in terror at the same time.

  “Duck,” Drakeforth announced. We did, and a murrai somersaulted over our heads, hit the steps and bounced down towards the sand, loose as a flying snake.

  In this moment of complete helplessness, I found my mind very clear. “Last time,” I continued as if Eade and the tumbling murrai hadn’t interrupted me, “there was a massive explosion, and it was relatively silent. This one is loud enough to wake the de—the very deep sleepers. I was thinking it might be due to the acoustics. All that energy pushing though a narrow hole in the side of the pyramid, blowing a lot of air with it.”

  “What the strawberry is she on about?!” Eade yelled.

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Drakeforth replied. “Empathic energy contains a great deal of quantum energy, but it’s not very reactive at a larger scale. Under sufficient pressure, who knows what it might do?”r />
  “Surely, Arthur would?” I wanted to make it sound casual, but I ran into the sand at the bottom of the pyramid and fell flat on my face.

  Chapter 35

  Goat’s airship floated in the wash of the disintegrating pyramid. We scrambled up the goat-hide ropes and cast off. This mostly involved Goat running around and pulling on levers while the rest of us took half steps and made ineffectual offers of assistance.

  “Perhaps I should make us all a cup of tea?” Drakeforth suggested.

  “Oh please… If you want us to drink it, then I’ll make it.” Eade walked off to the kitchen before either of us could compose a suitable comeback or an explanation for why she suddenly fell overboard.

  “What did you see?” Drakeforth asked, his face looking quite sickly in the shimmering glow of the pyramid that was still erupting.

  “I’m not sure. There was a lot of empathic energy. I was floating in a thousand lives. All fragments. Then I saw the tree, and she was on a swing. Then Professor Bombilate appeared and told me to find him.”

  “Excellent. Where exactly did he say to find him?”

  “If I knew that, don’t you think I would have led with it?”

  “I thought you might be working on building dramatic tension.”

  “I have no idea where he is,” I admitted.

  “What do we know? You have a fascinating ability to interact with empathic energy. You had a vision of sorts featuring Professor Bombilate and The Tree.”

  “And her,” I replied.

  “You saw some odd things while under the influence of the double-e flux, and you saw Professor Bombilate.”

  “Yes, which is odd, because I don’t know the man at all.”

  “That is odd. He is the leading authority on infornomics in the world. I thought you might have at least read something about him.”

  “I have this weird quirk where I don’t read every single article or book ever written about every single thing. Computer psychology? I’m your expert. The Cragmark film franchise? I was a member of the fan club from the age of seven.”