Awakenings

by C. D. Espeseth

  Energy burst forth, arcing through the mix of conductive gel, broken santsi glass, his blood and his body.

  The pool of ooze, blood, man and glass sparked, flashed, shuddered and went dark.

  Silence, broken only by the quiet sounds of life and liquid flowing away over the dirty stone floor, filled the laboratory.

  Until it stopped.

  The liquid ooze stopped flowing, ceased its natural movement across the floor, and began to crawl back towards the dying man in its centre.

  The gelatinous mass flickered with light as it began to envelope Thannis.

  It crept up and over Thannis’s face, flashing brilliant white and blue in a type of hypnotic pattern.

  Thannis’s eyes shot open, and he made to scream, but instead sucked in a mouthful of the flickering ooze. His spine convulsed in a perfect blend of pain and ecstasy. He screamed as he felt the glowing liquid snake into his body.

  Within the euphoria of his pain, Thannis smiled. It was more than he could have hoped for. It was beautiful. He was dying, but it was better than he could have ever imagined. Somehow the ooze tasted of all the souls he had pulled free and pulsed with every experience he had collected into his marvellous santsi. Every flavour and every essence he had siphoned was joined together in exquisite union. His body snapped taut as his muscles almost burst in an attempt to contain the flow surging through him.

  The liquid pulses increased, and Thannis felt the energy ripping into him, reaching inside him, seeking his own essence. Of course, he thought as he died.

  It was hungry.

  It was rapture.

  It was too much to hold onto, he was going to die, he couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t care. This was his last moment before the Lady took him.

  And then it was gone, and his body went limp.

  ***

  “Thannis,” a voice said from the darkness.

  “Thannis! Get up!”

  Thannis opened his eyes and tried to focus on the figure standing over him. Had the brown coats broken through already?

  “Thannis! People are chasing you. I can hear them through the wall!” It was Dennis. “And why are you covered in bloody clothes?” Dennis asked as his hands reached under Thannis’s shirt and touched chest and stomach. “You don’t appear to be wounded. Come on, we have to go.”

  Thannis shook his head, “What?” was all he could manage.

  Dennis seemed to finally notice the broken glass all over the floor. “Did you already collect the santsi in the vat?”

  “I don’t understand – no, Dennis. They broke …” Thannis looked down at the floor. His head finally cleared of the rapturous pain, and for the first time, he noticed that there was no gel on the floor. It was covered in broken glass, but no gel, no blood. “They all broke. I–” Thannis pulled off the remnants of his shirt and looked down at himself. He wasn’t bleeding. There was nothing but unblemished skin. “I was cut, how–”

  “Look, we don’t have time for this. You’re delirious. The constables have found your tunnels and are closing in. Professor Attridge has cleared a path through the Research Wing that will get you past the constables.”

  Thannis wasn’t listening. He wasn’t hurt. In fact, he felt amazing. Thannis stretched and rotated his torso.

  Nothing, no pain at all. He felt as if he could run all day and not get tired. His hands played across the spot he had been stabbed, but there was only smooth skin.

  But, as his fingers lingered, he felt something respond.

  He looked down and saw part of his skin bulge outward slightly in response to his touch. The bulge settled back as soon as he snatched his finger away, looking once more like normal skin. Yet, Thannis had felt something different. It felt like his own skin, but with something more to it.

  He could sense it now.

  There was more to him now, and he wasn’t quite alone.

  “Thannis?” Dennis quirked an eyebrow at him. “Did you hear what I said? We have to go.”

  Thannis smiled as understanding dawned on him. There was another presence which was now part of him.

  The gel.

  It had become alive somehow, and now … it was with him, in him, was him.

  “What is it?” Dennis asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, cousin.” Thannis cocked a head introspectively, trying to get a sense of what he was feeling. “I feel fine.” Thannis laughed loudly into the hollow space. “I feel amazing!”

  “A revelation for the ages, I’m sure.” Dennis shook his head, angrily. “Can we get going now?” Dennis sounded exasperated and more than a little worried about Thannis’s mental state.

  A dog barked from the direction of the hole in the wall. A man’s angry voice could be heard yelling from a not-so-far distance behind the wall.

  Thannis’s first instinct was to push aside the cabinet and the desk he had placed in front of the tunnel and wade into the brown coats, tasting their souls as they fled their corpses. He would revel in a hurricane of blood and flesh. His heart pounded louder at the prospect, and his skin began to tingle with warmth and excitement.

  Thannis laughed again looking at the skin on his hands as if for the first time.

  And in a sense … it was.

  He had a passenger with him now. An essence which was not his own but had joined itself to him. They were two yet also one at the same time, and this new part of himself also wanted to kill; to rip open throats and feel the bridge between life and death.

  His hands felt for his long knives and found them. He was glad he hadn’t lost them in the chaos after he had been shot. He gripped the horn handles with a mix of excitement and rage.

  “Thannis?” Dennis asked anxiously. “You can’t kill them all. Even you aren’t that good.”

  Thannis looked at Dennis with his predator’s eyes, and Dennis put up his hands.

  Thannis shook himself. No, now was not the time for carnage. He had somehow escaped death, and there was still so much work to be done. He had a second chance, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

  Professor Attridge hurried towards them from between one of the aisles of glassware.

  “Dennis is right, even if you could do it, we don’t have time to kill them all. We’ve been flushed out of hiding and need to move. The city is in chaos above us, and besides,” Professor Attridge said flatly, but with a wry smile, “we don’t have enough globes for you to fill.”

  Thannis’s mind finally cleared the last of the cobwebs and realisation came to him. They knew. They knew about all of it.

  “We have no time for being secretive, Your Highness,” Professor Attridge continued as if he were lecturing. “Yes, we know how you fill the globes. The timing and frequency of murders within in the city correlated very strongly with many of your off-duty excursions, and the subsequent completion of filling one of the new santsi globes, despite your attempts to hide it.”

  The professor’s old eyes looked incredibly clear right now, and it was the odd and somewhat cold clarity of those eyes which stopped Thannis from pulling his blades.

  “Give me some credit, young man. I’m old, not oblivious.” The professor curled his lip in derision. “Plus that Vinda witch who has been following you around paid me no attention. I’ve dealt with their kind before. Did you manage to get rid of her?”

  Thannis was shocked. All this time, Professor Attridge and Dennis had been playing coy. He had underestimated them both, and subsequently, it made them both far more interesting.

  “Yes, Your Highness.” The professor’s now sharp eyes were latched onto him. “You guess my game now, don’t you?” The professor smiled at Thannis, a smile which Thannis recognised all too well.

  “I’ll explain, but first–” Professor Attridge pointed at Dennis, “Dennis, fetch the Romak hot pepper extract if you would and then coat all of the things Thannis has touched with it. Shame about the dogs who will sniff that extract, but we can’t have them following us now can we?” Professor Attridge gave Thannis a conspira
torial wink.

  Dennis quickly obeyed and found the correct jar from the shelves and set to work coating surfaces with the extremely hot pepper paste.

  Professor Attridge continued, “We don’t have time for me to explain all of my justifications or rationale right now, but, suffice it to say, a few paltry lives are easily worth the advances we are making here. What you have discovered in the past few months has pushed our understanding of santsi and siphoning decades into the future. Not to mention the technological advances you and Mr Sanders have rediscovered.”

  “You’re not bothered by the deaths of those people?” Thannis asked, not quite trusting what he was hearing.

  “People die every day! And quite habitually their passing does the rest of us very little good,” Professor Attridge growled. “At least these ones died for a purpose. Their deaths will do something for the rest of us.”

  Thannis couldn’t quite believe it. He had allies.

  A dog barked.

  It must have only been a few dozen feet from the entrance now.

  Things had taken a dramatic turn for the better. “I need you both to relocate for now. We will continue our work, but not here.” An idea began to form in his head. Yes, he told himself. “I think it’s time I started to pay more attention to the direction this family is taking, don’t you, Dennis?”

  Dennis had begun to set snares and wicked looking pressure traps around the laboratory now but paused in his preparations to look back at Thannis. “What are you thinking?”

  “We have everything we need to start a new laboratory back in Nothavre,” Thannis thought aloud. “There may be a few people who might get in our way. However, I shall handle them.” Thannis looked around and grabbed a padded santsi bag. “I need you to tell as many of the santsi artisans and people you want on your team that the Beau’Chants will pay them triple what they are making and pay for the costs of moving to Nothavre where they will be given their own house and deeds to the land. You two are to meet me in Orlane. I need to take care of a few things.”

  “I thought you might,” Dennis said as he stood and fished into his pocket. “I also thought you might want a few more of these.” Dennis handed Thannis a marble bag full of the exploding spheres Thannis had invented; complete with fuse wire, as well as a vest with half a dozen loaded pistols holstered in it.

  “How did you-?” Thannis began.

  “You’re not the only one who has ideas.” Dennis shrugged.

  Thannis shook his head. “If we get out of this alive, I am getting you in a room with Jachem Sanders to see what you two can come up with, cousin.”

  “No doubt,” Dennis said, bowing his head slightly, though he wore a smirk on his face, “however, we shall save that for another day. I believe you first need to get clear of the constabulary, so you can then thwart your father’s plans, frame said father, and somehow come out of all of this as the hero, yes?”

  Thannis laughed. He was beginning to like his estranged cousin and would never underestimate him again.

  Professor Attridge grinned and put a wrinkled old hand atop Thannis’s. “The requisition order for supplies has already been signed off. The new globes are being put into production in the High King’s own kilns. I’ll have the completed ones crated up and sent ahead of us to Nothavre, Oh and as far as the new laboratory, I’ll want at least three other laboratory assistants in my lab, and Dennis will get his own laboratory and team.”

  “Just write down what you need, and it will be done,” Thannis said.

  “Excellent, now it’s time you were away. We’ll have lots of nasty things waiting for the brown coats who get through. It’ll slow them down.” The professor flicked his hand at Thannis, shooing him away.

  “Don’t let the brown coats take you. You are needed in Nothavre,” Thannis ordered, not quite sure how to reward the loyalty he was receiving.

  “We won’t be. We’re obviously victims in all this and had no idea what you were doing. I imagine the constabulary is only now gaining an appreciation for how far behind they are in all of this,” Professor Attridge said. “By the time they get in, we’ll be cowering in one of the cupboards. Now off with you. Go fix what you need to. We’ll meet later, and then we can get back to work.”

  Thannis nodded in respect, but the professor was right. It was time to move.

  Thannis grabbed his pack, took two of the new santsi from the case outside the door, and sprinted out of the lab.

  The professor had somehow arranged a clear run back through the Research Wing, and he was able to duck through servant tunnels to avoid constables hurrying down to their laboratory. Before long, Thannis was back on the streets and heading straight for the person whom he knew his father would be after.

  He just needed to get to Keef’s before his father did, Jachem and Princess Echinni would be there, and Thannis needed them alive if his plans were to work.

  30 - Failure

  What if I had it all wrong?

  What if life is no more special than another assortment of oddities observed in inanimate objects. The dunes outside the windows of my glass cage look to be spitting granules over their crests at me when the wind blows from the west. Yet this is a type of anthropomorphism, one in which I ascribe more meaning to a phenomenon of no particular importance.

  What if life is like that?

  An anomaly? A blip on the face of the lifeless cosmos. No more important than a grain of sand rolling in the wind.

  - Journal of Robert Mannford, Day 100 Year 58

  John Stonebridge

  Research Wing, The Academy, New Toeron, Bauffin

  John stood in the laboratory where Thannis had been hiding and operating from ever since the bastard set foot in New Toeron, and what he saw around him positively terrified him.

  The dogs where whining still after they had been sniffing around one of Thannis’s work stations in the lab. The bastard had covered all of his things in some sort of spicy pepper extract. Some of the dogs would be lucky to escape permanent damage.

  “Get them back to the kennels, do what you can for them,” John yelled at the dog teams. “These dogs will be useless to us now. Do we have any other dogs left at the kennels?”

  “A few older dogs, sir. They’re not in fighting shape, but they can still track,” the dog-team leader called back as he tried to comfort one of the stricken hounds.

  “Get them,” John ordered. Thannis had known the pepper extract would simply delay them, but that seemed to have been the plan. “Bloody hells!” John cursed and smacked a table top in frustration.

  The gods-damned tunnels had been no better. Booby-trapped in half a dozen places. One of the constables would be lucky to walk again after stepping on a cantrip and impaling his knee on another. The damned things had been strewn across the floor and painted the same colour as the dirt.

  But the acid trap had been worse. Constable Reeves would be scarred for the rest of her life. They had rushed her back out of the tunnels as soon as it had happened. She had stepped on some sort of trigger and a leather skin, hidden in a crevice in the rock, sprayed something onto the side of her face. She had started screaming immediately, and they had watched as the skin on the left side of her face had begun to melt away.

  Bastard. Gods-damned bastard.

  He had known Thannis was smart, but the planning involved here was on another level, and as John stood in the laboratory, the intelligence level of the man began to reveal itself. He had no idea what most of these contraptions were or did, but he could tell Thannis had known. The workbench Professor Attridge had pointed out as Thannis’s was well used. Several ongoing projects were close at hand, as well as several Jendar relics which appeared to be functional.

  He’s experimenting with the ancient evils of that cursed civilisation, John thought. There was far more here than he had guessed, a side of Thannis which had only been hinted at before, and that made him doubt. How much influence had the witch had over him? John wondered because what he saw in this lab looked
to be another type of obsession. It wasn’t just about killing people, there was more to it.

  “You say he was very competent in his work here at the Academy?” John asked the two men waiting at the far end of the laboratory. One of them, the professor, had obviously cut himself to distract them. John wasn’t fooled, but the rest of the constables with him seemed to be. The other one, Dennis, appeared to be Thannis’s real-life cousin. Another Beau’Chant, and so John expected everything out of his lips to be a lie, yet so far, he couldn’t detect any deception.

  “Yes, sir, very competent. In fact, I would say he was working on projects that had the potential to change our very world,” Professor Attridge said, sounding almost proud of the man who had murdered dozens of people.

  John stared at the old professor. No lie there. He was telling the truth.

  So, he’s not just smart. He’s is a bloody genius, John thought. Great.

  “What happened here?” John pointed to the mess of glass beside one of the workbenches.

  “I’m not sure. We heard a crash in the laboratory. Dennis and I came in to investigate, as we thought we were the only ones in the laboratory. We found the cabinet knocked over, the workbench and floor covered in glass and Thannis lying amongst the debris,” the professor explained.

  Again, no lie. John knew they were hiding something, but so far they were telling the truth.

  “Where is all the blood?” John asked. “If he had been lying on the floor when you found him, there would be a pool of blood. He had been wounded badly.”

  Professor Attridge and Dennis shared a look, confusion written all over their faces.

  “No,” Dennis Beau’Chant said, “he wasn’t bleeding when we found him.”

  “What?” John stepped closer to the man and pain throbbed horribly in his leg. He tightened the belt above the wound which the new contraption Thannis had called a pistol had punched through his flesh.

  “He wasn’t bleeding. There was blood on his clothes, but before he fully came to, I checked him and found no wound.”