Construct

by Luke Matthews

  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  CONSTRUCT

  by Luke Matthews

  Developmental Editor

  Annetta Ribken

  www.wordwebbing.com

  Copy Editor

  Jennifer Wingard

  www.theindependentpen.com

  Cover Artist

  Carmen Sinek

  www.toomanylayers.com

  For Christina—

  Without you, there would be nothing to write for.

  CHAPTER ONE

  * * *

  Images crashed into him, lifting him and roiling like the drag of storm-swelled surf, like memories but somehow foreign. Amidst the turmoil, some few stood out, splitting through the morass of pseudo-remembrances, plastering against his waking mind.

  • • • • •

  Cold eyes bore into his, so close he can see nothing else. Their color could be grey or blue, but reflect a silver sheen in the dim light. The voice coming from beneath them is little more than a whisper, forming words laced with malice. “You made it too easy, canner. You denied me my challenge, and I can’t abide boredom.”

  Fingers press against his chest, and coldness rushes into his core. Blue light floods his sight and extinguishes as fast as it came, leaving only darkness. Numbness replaces the cold, and his hearing falters. In his last moments, the distant murmur of conversation echoes somewhere above him, a second voice chilling him even through the spreading numb. “There’s too much. They’ll figure it out, and we’re out of time here.”

  “Then burn it. Burn it to the ground.”

  • • • • •

  He lay paralyzed in the coagulating gore, unable to tear his eyes from the grisly scene. Her name eludes him, but her face…he can’t forget her face. Where has he seen her before? What had she looked like alive? Memories of fleeing this place dance at the edges of his consciousness. What drew him back? His limbs betray him, stripped of real strength.

  A noise pulls his attention, someone at the door. Thoughts of the consequences of being found here begin to erode his paralysis. His fingers twitch. Knocks at the door become more insistent, the urgent calls of the men outside unintelligible. Willing himself mobile, he manages to roll, still burdened with agonizing weakness. As he gains his feet, knocks transform into crashes, and the door bursts inward.

  Raising his hands to protest his innocence, his voice fails. Something strikes his shoulder, a ripple of weakness crashing through to his feet, driving him to his knees. Fires of hatred burn bright in their eyes as they continue hitting him, each impact sapping his energy—his life—away.

  His face comes to rest in a cool, sticky pool of drying blood. Again he sees her face, her eyes still pleading with him for help, just as they had in the last moments of her life. Another strike; everything is gone.

  • • • • •

  The pleasant scent of wood-fire drew him back to consciousness. It reminded him of some far-off place, a distant memory he couldn’t quite grasp. When his vision returned, he couldn’t focus, the jumble before him a confusion of flotsam. Disorienting weakness hindered his movement, and a weight bore down on him that was not his own.

  An arm lay across his chest, disappearing under the heavy form of a downed bookshelf. The hand at its end was supple and young with fingers bearing scars of light burns, like someone who works with wax or molten glass. A pair of silver rings, together forming the image of two winged serpents locked in mortal combat, wrapped the middle two fingers. The cuff of a simple tunic was buttoned tight around the wrist. Past the cuff, the white cotton changed, sewn or dyed with a random pattern.

  The hand on his chest was nothing like his own. Softer and more delicate, it bore an extra finger opposing its thumb than the three that adorned his. His own hand was worked metal of burnt orange, like armor of copper or bronze, but his fingers moved with a subtlety an armored glove would not allow. Searching for any memories that would help him discern where—or what—he was, he found only a yawning void. Even his own name eluded him.

  He turned his head to take in his surroundings. Clutter dominated the small room, tables and shelves overflowing with books, parchment, glass vials, small dishes, and unfamiliar tools. Haphazard piles of items littered the floor. One of the worktables had been upturned, its contents a shattered mess beside it. Something obscured the tops of the bookcases at the room’s periphery. The ceiling itself roiled as though insubstantial, more gaseous than solid. Panic strummed a discordant note, shocking his senses back to focus with a terrible realization: The building was on fire.

  Smoke poured down the walls. Flames licked at the borders of the room, the crickle-crackle of dry leaves crumbled in calloused hands. He sensed the heat. His vision dimmed and his head thumped back to the wooden floor. Strength receded from him like a wave, then crashed back to wash away the weakness. Fear took over. I have to get out of here.

  Scrambling to free himself he found his left arm useless, offering no leverage. With what strength he could muster, he managed a roll. The dead man’s hand slid away from his chest and landed behind him with an unexpected slap on the wooden floor. A still-expanding pool of fresh blood seeped from beneath the bookcase. The pattern on the sleeve was not dye after all.

  A wave of sorrow and targetless remorse cut through his confusion. Was he a victim or an assailant? He shook away the thought—answers were for later. Fumbling the serpent rings from the dead man’s hand, he found they were connected in a single unit fitting over both fingers. Maybe it would help him identify this person and discover his own identity.

  His immobile arm thudded against his body as he rose, swinging from a crippled shoulder. He balanced above his feet, his stance weak. His movements were jerky and stiff; his joints creaked like a warped door on rusty hinges.

  The fallen bookcase blocked access to the room’s only door. Hooking the fingers of his good hand under the blockage, he widened his stance and pulled with every ounce of might he could gather. A subtle shift but nothing useful, the movem
ent due more to the softness of the support beneath than the result of his efforts. Damn this broken limb! With two good arms I could make a solid effort at it. But like this…

  The floor floated and bucked beneath him as he swooned again and pitched forward to his knees. Tipped onto his good right hand, his defective left thunked hard on the wooden floor. The serpent ring skittered out of his grip. A haze slid in around his mind like the incoming tide, draining him, drowning him. He retrieved the dropped ring, clinging to the idea that it was important.

  He powered back to his feet. A heavy cloak hung on the wall near an upturned worktable. Fumbling it around his shoulders, he dropped the serpent ring into an interior pocket and donned the hood, clutching the cloak closed at the neck. Not much protection against fire, but there weren’t any other options.

  A tendril of the ever-lowering smoke caught his attention, twisting downward to slink away between the bookcases at the rear of the room. He lunged for the corner, probing the fingers of his right hand between the shelves, looking for anything leading to the opening that pulled at the smoke. When nothing obvious presented itself, he grabbed the edge of the corner bookcase and pulled.

  It moved.

  The bookcase did not fall as he expected, but swung outward on hidden hinges. Planting his foot against the neighboring support, he heaved. The effort produced an opening just wide enough to see into.

  Behind the bookcase stood a small chamber, no more than three feet to a side, with a low, angled ceiling and no doors or windows. Over his shoulder, the door had caught fire, hungry flames licking upward. Tentacles of heat writhed across the ceiling to consume the books on the top shelves opposite. The wood-fire smell now carried the sweet scent of cooking meat as the tumbled bookcase began to burn and its prisoner along with it.

  Inside the corner chamber, the smoke settled, drawn between the cracks in the chamber floor. He pushed inside, splintering the old wood on the backside of the bookcase with his metal shoulder. One of the floorboards ended short of the rest. Near the board’s end, metal glinted through a split in the wood. The split hinged open to reveal a large ring beneath… A trap door!

  A loud crash startled him as the walls and supports of the room, engulfed in ravenous flame, began to collapse. He lurched up, spreading his feet off his glorious escape door. Grasping the iron ring, he gave as mighty a yank as he could muster and… nothing. The tide of weakness betrayed him and the iron ring held fast, the wood of the false floor barely creaking under the feeble pull.

  The inferno clawed at his back as he moved in for another try. Shelves fell to the floor as their supports burned. Glass melted atop worktables that had become elevated pools of fire. Glowing embers of paper swirled in the superheated air of the oven-room. Flames touched at his face as the moving bookcase caught. He flinched away and dropped into a crouch.

  Gripping the ring tight, he uncoiled his legs and back. With a creaking sigh, the trapdoor swung upward. Elated at his success, he braced himself over the open space. The darkness beneath gave no hint to where he would end up. Couldn’t be worse than here.

  Even so, he hesitated, looking one last time back to the burning room into which he had been born. He felt distant, spying the flames through a looking glass, and his thoughts fell into a murky weariness. Slipping downward, he dropped into the inky blackness below. The trap door slammed shut as the room above collapsed into flaming debris.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  Colton sat astride his horse under what passed for an eave, on the driest piece of dirt he could find in the grassland village. With a subtle shift of the reins, he sidled his horse closer to the building, hoping to move out of the nagging drizzle leaking from the blanket of grey overhead. It was mid-afternoon and already darkening, the failing light compounded by autumn rainclouds. In spite of the dimness of the afternoon, bright golden-orange light danced along the alley wall, not from any sun peeking through, but from the raging inferno devouring a building across the street.

  A fire of this magnitude in one building was a danger to the whole village, which consisted of perhaps twenty buildings all told. The humid air and light rain offered only marginal help, so most of the villagers formed a fire brigade. Attempts to douse the fire itself had been for naught, so now they worked to prevent it from spreading to nearby buildings. Colton’s partner sat a few strides ahead of him, watching it all with morbid amusement.

  “Shame,” the man said without turning back toward Colton. “I rather liked Ferron.”

  “You don’t like anybody, Bales.” Colton replied. “We should go. We can come back in the morning, but we shouldn’t just stand around.”

  Colton pulled the reins, and his horse backed away. The mouth of the alley grew smaller, closing around the edges of the blaze until it framed a small, bright rectangle of flickering orange and red with Bales silhouetted in the middle. Colton exited the opposite end, and the despicable coldness of the grassland drizzle sneaked down his neck. He lifted his collar and turned away, hoping Bales would follow.

  • • • • •

  Colton shielded his eyes from the flat, bright light of morning as he woke; the tattered curtains in the inn room had been left open. He sat upright, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. A deep breath brought with it the musty smell of the old room, mingled with a wisp of the morning air and the faint scent of sugared oatmeal from the tavern downstairs. He rested his elbows on his thighs, hands still covering his bleary eyes.

  Standing up was more of a chore than it had been in years past. His back ached from the lumpy bed, his road-weary knees and hips cracked as he applied pressure to them. Rolling the ache out of his left shoulder drew a muffled grunt from him as the joint complained. Numbness was slowly replaced by the prickles of returning bloodflow as he shook his hand back to life.

  The morning sun hung only a finger’s width above the mountains. The washbasin below the window had been freshened, surely not by Bales, and Colton marveled at how tired he must have been for a maidservant to make it in and out of the room while he still slept. He splashed some of the tepid water on his face and washed his hands, drying off with a towel laid out on the table beside the basin. He dressed in his riding clothes and pulled on his wide leather belt, running his thumb over the shallow relief adorning the bronze buckle.

  His hands moved around his belt, checking each of the pouches hanging at intervals around his waist. Satisfied everything was in order, he slipped his weathered tricorne from the bed post and settled it on his head. Stepping to the door, he paused and closed his eyes, taking in several long breaths. Between the seemingly endless nature of their mission and Bales’s disagreeable temperament, Colton had grown weary.

  With one hand on the door, he drew a small glass vial from a pouch at his belt. Pale blue light played in a tendril of fog within the small container. Colton uncorked the vial, placed it to his lips, and drew the light into himself. It washed away some measure of weariness, and he set out with a deep, numb breath, pausing at the top of the stairs.

  The large central firepit in the nearly empty tavern still carried a small flame and red embers. Chairs stood upside-down on the few scattered tables. A hefty barmaid in a utilitarian blouse worked behind the bar, wiping down mugs with a green wool rag.

  A tavern boy knelt before the bar, dunking a scrub brush in a washbucket to his side and attempting to erase a series of black and grey scuffs from the floor. The tavern had been empty most of the night, allowing Colton and Bales to drink in peace. After the sky darkened, the tired and doleful lot of ranch-hands and dirt farmers who’d been engaged with the fire across town filtered in, drinking and eating in somber silence, saving revelry for happier times. Colton welcomed the quiet atmosphere.

  Colton spotted Bales near the front door, munching on a handful of farls. His partner’s hands emerged from the worn sleeves of his waistcoat like cave denizens, jittering as they worked to shell another nut. As Colton descended the stairs toward the main floor, Bales s
tood, grabbing his riding coat. He tossed the remaining farls into the pile of shells at his feet, drawing a look of contempt from the tavern boy and barmaid in the process. As Bales crossed the bar, clods of mud dislodged from the sides of his boots to scatter across the newly scrubbed floor.

  Bales worked his tongue around his gums, evidently clearing some detritus left behind by his morning snack. He swiped his dark hair away from his face before donning his own hat. “Nice of you to join us!” he said to Colton, in a tone too cheery to be genuine. “Can we be on our way?”

  Colton was used to this kind of reaction from Bales, but that never meant he enjoyed it. After every job, his partner—an inadequate description of their relationship—was coiled like a spring, desperate to move to the next task in their ongoing assignment. “Every moment you think of me as lazy, Bales, is a moment I find you over-eager.”

  “Be that as it may, it’s time to go.” Bales raised his voice, to no one in particular. “It’s time to put this smelly little washbasin of a town behind us.” The barmaid’s face wrinkled as though she’d just gotten a whiff of sour milk.

  “We have local business to attend to, Bales, so lengthen your nerves.”

  “My nerves are long enough, Colton,” the last words came out thick and black. “But they’re strapped to thinning patience. Let’s. Go.”

  Bales turned on his heels and flicked his coat downward as he donned it, knocking over the washbucket in the process. The tavern boy looked up from the gray puddle around his knees and began to protest, but held his tongue as Colton passed him by. Bales swung the doors outward and exited to the street without thought for his partner, who caught the swinging doors with upraised hands.

  “Will ye be needin’ the room another night?” The barmaid peered over the bar, her knuckles white around the dirty mug in her hand.