TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Seventeen

Eells tongue was dry. He licked his lips and tasted acrid smoke. He did not breath through his nose, not down here. From underneath the eaves of a shuttered shop he studied the the soggy list of names in his hands. Rain pattered above him, on the cobblestone around him. It fell hard, splashing his boots and staining the hem of his robe dark. He licked his lips again, tasted sweat and smog. A passerby coughed into their gloved fist—a thick, ragged sound, like a faucet disgorging sewer water.

Eells drew his tongue back in over his teeth and resisted the uge to spit.

His eyes scanned the six names again. They were all women, and they were all in Celedin. Beyond that he knew nothing. The document provided their residential districts, but not specific addresses. The interworld hub didnt have the authority or manpower to log the locations of the millions that traveled here from other worlds, especially when considering the fact that most people had no permanent address. The poor and destitute moved as frequently as the tides, wordlessly obeying the gravitic whims of economics and disease. Two of the names on this list didn’t even have residential districts—they were simply listed as “itinerants.”

He bit his lip, and looked over the six names circled in red ink.

• Aratria Geddon, Rainslick Plaza
• Tori Kebbulut, The Dregs
• Elspeth Frume, Poroncio District
• Therazine Morlo, Itinerant
• Xian Xiozu, Marrock Hill
• Dramm Ofthezeg, Itinerant

No other information. All women. None of them were nobility or prominent businessfolk. All of them had come from Lormian. His target was one of the women here. Primio had made certain of this, as his last act in the Real. The two itinerants would be most difficult to track down. The others would not be simple in a city that was brimming with over a billion fermenting souls, but how many Tori Kebbuluts could there be in the Dregs? Or Xian Xiozus in Marrock Hill?

Eells grimaced. That last name felt sour every time he read it. That was not a Celedine name. He could practically see the pits of bubbling tar and black skies of whatever world this Xiozu woman hailed from. He imagined the pagan idols that she must have brought with her when she migrated to Celedin—skull charms, sickly glowing Aether bands, bound clusters of animal bones. Perhaps her home would be easier to identify than the others.

“Why you reading in the rain?”

He looked up and saw a woman standing in the street before him. A wet grey coat hung from her shoulders. Her knotted hair fell in fat clumps over her shoulders. Her trousers were far too tight across her bulging thighs. She wore makeup of some sort, a clear varnish over her lips that Eells did not know the name for. But she had applied it poorly—it glistened around the edges of her mouth like a new scar.

He narrowed his eyes and said nothing.

“Why you reading in the rain?” she repeated. Her brow was furrowed, and her sunken eyes were full of curiosity. She did not seem to recognize the X-shaped scar on Eells’ face. The way she stood there, watching him. It was late in the evening. Did she not have to hurry back home? No. From the way she stood, from the vacuous way she regarded him, Eells was certain that she did not have family depending on her somewhere. There was a wax wrapper crumpled in her left hand, the refuse from an unnecessary midnight sandwich; no doubt her fourth or fifth that day.

Eells felt his stomach turn and growl as he thought of food, and he felt a bloom of pride at the resiliency of his spirit to withstand the body’s incessant carnal craving for food. He briefly wondered what other vices this woman surrendered to, but the images that snuck into his mind made his skin crawl.

“What is your name?” he asked.

The woman blinked. She opened her mouth and her neck sagged with it.

“I’m Desi. Who are you?”

“Begone, wretch.”

The woman frowned, and walked off down the street. She called him some name as she vanished into the rain and crowd but Eells did not pay her any attention. His eyes had returned to his list.

Marrock Hill was far, on the opposite side of Mount Recep. Similarly the Dregs was a district adjacent to the docks, and thus on the coast seven miles to the west. But Rainslick Plaza was only the next district over from where he currently stood. On foot he could reach the center of the district in a few hours. He briefly entertained the idea of summon a coach or cab, but the thought of a Bereaver using such mundane forms of transportation disgusted him.

He would walk, and arrive precisely when he was meant to.

---

Rainslick Plaza itself surrounded a large open area of land that at one point had been a park, but now was six square blocks of single-story squat buildings and fields of tents. Two short conversations had led Eells to a sore-covered vagrant who had set up his home under an ancient dead tree near the edges of the plaza. The vagrant did not consider himself fortunate enough to own one of the ramshackle huts or even the stained tents, but before he could regale Eells with his tale of woe he was silenced. Eells explained to the man that he did not care, that his plight was unimportant, and that all that mattered was that this man provide the Bereaver with the information he needed. Some gleam in the vagrant’s eye suggested he had some former schooling with the Order of Prevalistics, and that he knew exactly what Eells’ title implied. He capitulated in a stammering, apologetic way.

The woman in question, Aratria Geddon, lived in a building just up the hill. The vagrant gave him her apartment number, and her usual morning routine, and the various colors of dress that she wore whenever the rain let up, and the types of men that she invited into her home, and a detailed description of her smile and the bounce of her hair, and the special trick that was needed to knock down the ladder to the her fire escape, and the fact that the blinds to her bedroom window were bent and if you showed up just after sunset then—

Eells silenced the man again and left. He found the building—a tall, black stone structure with a crown of acid-eaten gargoyles. The streets surrounding the building were empty this early in the morning, and there were only two amber lights on in the myriad windows that covered its dark surface. The door to the lobby was locked.

He circled the building twice before finding the fire escape. The vagrant’s instructions had been accurate—with a knock from his sheathed rapier the ladder came down with a cold rattling clang. Were it not for the driving rain, the sound might have awoken someone. He climbed four stories. His hands were slick and scratched from gripping the rusted railings. A four pane window stood ahead of him. The blinds were drawn; there were no lights within. He leaned in and cupped his hand over his eyes, finding a gap in the old brown blinds and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deep darkness within the apartment.

A cluttered room. Indistinguishable art on the walls. A figure bundled up on the bed.

Over the din of the rain, Eells heard the flap of wings. Talons clasped onto the railing of the fire escape. He turned, and saw a rotcrow perched there.

“Do I even need to say anything?” Silas said.

“Begone,” Eells said, looking back at the window. “You are not needed here.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m here anyway. So, how are you going to do it? Pry the window open quietly and slit her throat? Or just bust the glass and pick her up? Maybe declare your divinity as you toss her to her death?”

“Your words won’t change anything here, Silas. I am free of conflict.”

The rotcrow spread its wings and looked back and forth. “Apparently not. I’m not real, remember? I’m just in your mind?”

“I said begone.”

“Or maybe I am real. Have you considered that? Your poor dead brother has returned from the Aether to warn you about the consequences of your wicked ways. Pretty sure mother read us a story like that when we were younger.”

“Mother never read us anything.”

“Maybe not you. But then, I was always her favorite son.”

Eells turned sharply.

“Your words,” Silas said. “Not mine.”

“Why are even here? Why are you trying to stay my hand, when it was you who has led me down this path?”

“I didn’t lead you anywhere. This is all you. I’m just telling you what I know.”

“You were the one who told me that the source of the Schism was a woman, foul creature.”

“Just giving you the facts as I know them. It’s you who is making these decisions, not me.”

“So are you or are you not trying to stop me?”

“Is that doubt I sense in your voice, dear brother?”

Eells struck out at the rotcrow, but Silas flapped and jumped to perch on the ladder above him.

“Not so loud,” Silas said. “You’ll wake her.”

“Get out of here,” Eells whispered. “Get lost, and never come back. You do nothing but cloud my purpose.”

“Maybe that’s my purpose. Have you thought about that?”

Eells growled. “Tell me what you have come to say and then leave.”

The rotcrow chirped, and a feather fell from its neck.

“It’s not her.”

Eells ground his teeth. “You can’t know that.”

“Maybe not. But that’s what I came to tell you. This isn’t the one.”

Eells regarded the window again. The blackness within, and the still form that lay within that blackness. One of six. The woman he sought was one of six.

“Then which one is it?”

“Not this one,” Silas said, rocking on the ladder.

“That isn’t good enough.”

“That’s what I have to tell you. Nothing else.”

Eells just stared at the window. After a moment of silence, the rotcrow spread its wings and flew away into the rain.

Eells breathed in deep, tasted the smoke in the air. He smelled feces wafting up from the tent city in the center of the plaze, heard a dog growl in the alley below. There were five other names on the list. They begged his attention now. But he had come all the way here. He tried the window and found it locked. He was frustrated, but not surprised. For a few minutes he simply stood in the rain and thought. Then he hissed through his teeth and descended the ladders of the fire escape. He almost reached the bottom before he stopped.

Was Silas merely a manifestation of his psyche? A specter from his past? He knew that strange magic existed in the distant realms of the Real, and knew that the Aether could generate even more terrifying apparitions. But how was one to tell the difference between sorcery and the flickering morality of the human spirit? What part of him was reacting to his own sound judgment, and what part of him was being manipulated by the Pale Light to be thrown off his path?

He hung on to the last rung of the ladder, just above the alley.

Rambolt Eells was the Bereaver. He had been given that title because he had a gift, a sight. He could feel the fissures in reality whenever the Aether attempted to spill into his world. That was why the Council had entrusted him with his job. He could not trust his thought, but he could trust his instincts. His intuition was truth.

And right now, that truth told him that Silas was lying.

He climbed the fire escape again. His shoulders ached as he pulled himself over the fourth-story railing. Without pause he shattered the central window pane to Aratria’s black bedroom. The woman screamed, and continued to scream as he crashed into the safety of her home. The next few minutes were a blurry, adrenaline fueled haze of groping hands, banging knees, and warm sprays of arterial blood. In the panic and darkness he never drew his sword. But when the screaming stopped and he stood above her bed sweating and heaving he knew that his holy work had been done.

His eyes could not be trusted. In darkness he had prevailed. His thoughts could not be trusted. Only his intuition, his soul, would tell him the truth. One down. Five to go.

A Dirge for Life

“I have spent all of my life in an effort to live forever. I have drained the economies of entire colonies, reduced once bountiful worlds to ash and rock. Billions have died so that I may continue living. And I’d done it. I’d solved the problem of death. Through the power of suns I’ve discovered the path to immortality—at a cost so significant that for centuries I had to deny the reality of it not only to the public but to myself. But with each life that was consumed a little of that shame died. With each burned-out gas giant I hardened myself, until I was both unending and unstoppable. The human race has suffered immeasurably for my benefit. No. Do not try to tell me otherwise, Renfro. I am a monster, and I have accepted that. Were there a hell, the devil himself would have cleared a plot for me centuries ago in the deepest ice of the ninth circle. There is no punishment fitting enough for the horrors that I have committed upon my fellow man. I was certain that the sacrifice of my species was an acceptable cost for defying the very nature of the universe. What else was my eternal life, if not the mightiest rebellion against entropy?”

“But now, there is this. Behold Theia. Once a jewel of this galaxy. A world spared my vampiric annihilation because I found it beautiful. No where else in known space did humanity flourish as much as it did here. When I could walk I spent many nights walking the turquoise forests of the northern continent, listening to the songs of the insects and the howls of the nocturnal birds. Did you know that at its height it was home to more than eleven billion people? All thinking, feeling souls, living and breathing and dying in rhythm with the incorruptable serenity of this world. Ancient Earth could not have supported this many of us—it was far too small, its resources far too minimal. Mankind squandered what it had there. But on Theia, we had reached harmonic perfection with nature. Do you remember the crystaline skyscrapers of Gimultera? How they glistened. How they twinkled in the setting sun. But now Theia’s green and blue have faded. Animals, plants, man—they are all gone. No shelters could save them. No medicine, no relocation. They just began dying. First the sick and the elderly, but then the children. I have stopped receiving contact from Theia’s surface. Only the automated signals from the the weather installations feed to me now, and they all tell me the same thing: Theia is dead.”

“Learning that Theia was not alone was the first time I felt fear in three-hundred years. Global death is a horrible thing to witness, but when one’s vision spans across millions of worlds one does not sweat too much over such a trivial loss. I loved Theia. I did. It was my garden world. But Theia its slow death was no different to me than watching a favored painting fall from the wall in a gallery. Anger, perhaps. Regret and disappointment. But no fear. It was when the same fate befell Tormador that I felt terror break through the dikes of my psyche. I dispatched fleets of scientists to discover the cause—an abominable new disease, or a weapon; I was certain that it was a weapon used by some crafty resurgent enemy. I had frontier worlds incinerated in an effort to stamp out imagined insurrections. New Callisto, Chadrion, Benimm’s Star. Millions consumed in cyclonic fire to simply sooth my paranoia. I was convinced that a war was coming and that I was making preemptive strikes. Imagine my embarassment when the scientists returned and told me that nothing was killing Tormador. No viruses, no radiation. It was simply dying.”

“For the first time in generations I encountered something I did not understand. Surely the problem was in the trade lines—something being transported along the space lanes between Theia and Tormador. I watched the Nimutz Trade Route anxiously, expecting to see another world die along that same lane. But then Zimaku faded into grey and darkness along the Hyperion Spine, and Ceta Centauria a thousand lightyears further away. Then the Dynas Cluster screamed its last. Nothing connected these worlds. Nothing other than them being planets where man formerly thrived, planets that I claimed. I dispatched my researchers across the galaxy on a scientific crusade—return with answers, I told them. Or do not return at all.”

“Over the next century I experienced multiple crises of faith. As my worlds—as humanity’s worlds—continued to die without explanation, I blamed outside influence. I led a war into the Dendrenian systems. You look vexed. Yes, they don’t teach of the Dendrenians anymore. Aliens, Renfro. Sentient nonhumans who once owned much of this galaxy. They aren’t to be spoken of. Would you like to know why? It is because when I thrust the head of my spear into the heart of their empire, I found nothing but the corpses of civilizations. What remained of the Dendrenians were isolated pockets of their withering government, fastened in their ferrocrete sarcophogai and hoping to wait out whatever was happening to the universe. Do you understand what I’m teling you? What was happening to mankind had already happened to the Dendrenians. Whatever this was, it had hit them first. I watched the last of their leaders die behind a metallic faceplate. If they had eyes, I would have stared into them and seen the last remnants of a sophisticated race fading into the background like radio static. They were gone.”

“I realized after that fruitless campaign that I had been blaming myself. I was never able to place why, but part of me was convinced that my manipulation of human biology had upset the circuits of reality in some way, and that we were now suffering the fallout. I had even, for a time, believed that some divine being was punishing me for my unforgivable sins. But witnessing the fate of the Dendrenians absolved my spirit, though it did nothing to sate my fears.”

“In the centuries that followed I watched thousands more worlds die. I felt it. Not just the loss of my empire and my species, but in my physical body as well. Even amidst all of this death I continued to siphon stars and planet cores for life-giving radiance. I had conquered death—I would not take my foot off of its defeated body merely because my attentions had been drawn elsewhere. But even as I sucked the life out of entire star systems I could feel it happening to me. I had legs fifty years ago. I could walk. My skin was bright and soft, my body supple. This atrophy happened quickly. Like the countless worlds before me, I was shriveling. Even you had a body once, Renfro. You weren’t ugly, but you are not much worse off now. Take comfort in the fact that you are a mind within a machine—you might be just artificial enough to outlive me.”

He turned his head, his neck popping and creaking with the effort. Renfro’s face blinked green once. He watched, waiting the three seconds for the next blink to come and tell him that his servant was still there behind the screens and steel. It blinked green, and he turned back to the canopy and beheld Theia once more.

“I found it this morning. The report. From the flotilla of scientists that I sent out oh so many eons ago. They are long since ash, but their data survived. It floated silently and unharmed through centuries of cold space. But now I have it. And not a moment too soon, I believe. Do you know what it is they discovered?”

Renfro’s light blinked once.

“They discovered a well. A fountain at the center of the universe. Imperceptable on all instruments. They had to invent new technology to find this invisible source, and when they did they practically went mad from the revelation. It was the spring of life. Not on a world or even in space and time itself, but real all the same. It was a fountain from which life flowed. The unseen stream of fire that flowed across the universe and sparked amino acids into forming the living organisms. Life is a constantly renewing and replenishing energy source. When a thing is born it is fed by this invisible river—the structures that make up its cells are given light and heat. When a thing dies, the waters ebb out of it and return to the cosmic source. Life flows from this well and back into it for eternity. Or so it seemed.”

“Generations of my crusading scientists studied this fountain. To their horror, they discovered that it was running its course. The river was drying up.”

“They tried to come back to me. They flew through the immeasurable black gulfs to inform me of the fact that life was draining from all things at an ever increasing rate. They never made it. None of them did.”

Theia loomed, a brown husk bathed by a yellow star.

“I have not heard communication from any of my princes in decades.”

He breathed in once, felt warm air rasp the ragged edges of his lungs.

“I believe that we may be the last two living things, my old friend. My scout ships have not returned. And look—oh, look. The oceans of Theia were once deep blue. A rich, gem-like blue that one could stare at for hours. When the world died the oceans turned a sickly green. I remember recognizing that as rot, that microbes had consumed all of the rampant death. But rot results from life, you see. Even decay is a product of river of life. The algae of the oceans bloomed without any threat from predation of competition. And soon enough it died, too. And the waters returned to blue.

“I have watched this world for thirty-one years without moving. To me that feels eternal, but it all happened in an instant. Slowly watching this sphere turn, knowing that the ever-encroaching horizon will never show me anything new. I wrote it all down almost a decade ago, when I’d heard the last scream broadcasted across the galactic waves. I composed a history of mankind. I detailed my own life, my journey. I followed the histories of old earth, of the first colonies. The wars with the Dendrenians, and—more prominantly—the wars with our own people who had been separated from us by thousands of years of isolation. Who we were as a people. As lifeforms. I came to two conclusions during this writing. The first was that all of human history could be summarized, and that thought caused me to mourn. All of the tens of thousands of years of our records happened in a cosmic blink. Ponder this for a moment: there are two-hundred billion stars in this galaxy. So many that no sentient mind can even comprehend that number. At any given moment unfathomable numbers of those stars are dying and being reborn again as waves of light and blackholes. They erupt or collapse in such spectacular fashion that their deaths can be observed on the other side of the galaxy. This cycle happens eternally, continuously, without any direction. And humankind’s entire existence spanned less time than the life of even one star. Far less.

“My thoughts at this time flattened me. For as grand as I believed my accomplishments to be, none of it was measurable. I thought my eternal life to be a defiant act, but the universe didn’t care. Worse, it was incapable of caring. I am not ignored—my existence is simply so temporary and reality so vast that there was never a possibility of my being significant. It was beyond incomprehensible.

“My second conclusion followed swiftly: the accomplishments of life mattered only to life itself. Thus, my record was meaningless. The well of life is draining and soon there will be no minds anywhere in the universe, and there never will be again. Anything I write will simply be sequences of data sitting frozen in a machine that will never again be accessed. There are no eyes to appreciate art, no psyches to feel dread at my harrowing words. There is, quite frankly, no point to it.

“Even as I speak now I see the futility of every word. You will not remember this, Renfro, because you too will soon be nothing. There are no future generations to spread our stories to. Very soon all will be cold and inert, except for the blazing energy of the stars in their phoenix cycles.”

He let out another breath, and felt the tug on his chest that he had been experiencing for the last four months.

“Was anything I did ever truly evil? With no other human beings to ascribe morality to my actions, was I an evil man? Here I speak, pondering the rightness of my life, in a language that means nothing with no ears to hear it. Where do we travel, I wonder? I regret. But at the same time, I feel no remorse for anyhting I have done. It is all ash and fractal patterns. What should I do? What will be the last action of the only living thing in all the cosmos? Years ago I screamed defiantly into the darkness of space. I strode out onto the upper deck and howled like a beast…”

His heart thumped.

“There will never be beasts again. That word, like so many others, carries no meaning now, except for what goes on within the shell of my skull.”

Over thirty seconds he breathed only twice. He tried to move his arm, and felt only prickly numbness.

“Does pain exist?”

Outside, Theia turned.

He drew in one large breath.

“I open my ears, and the void says nothing.”