Silence (38 page)

“
If you
only knew…” Sheikoh murmured under his breath. He was
way
past exhaustion. The
realization crashed down onto his shoulder and eyes with almost
unbearable weight. With a yawn, Sheikoh gently rested Emili’s
unconscious body on the surface of the table.
Then he realized something.

He wheeled around to stare at the
Celestial in shock.

“
You’re surprised that the
amulet didn’t cancel out the magic of this place?” Camillio guessed
with a wry smile.

“
No, I’m surprised your
eyes didn’t go all blue and creepy,” Sheikoh responded, flinching
around the last word.

Camillio threw back his head and
laughed. Sheikoh joined him after a moment, his giggle cut with
unease. All the while, he watched Camillio warily. He hadn’t been
joking. And he’d never seen the imperious Celestial act this
way.

“
My eyes glow when I draw
energy into myself,” Camillio explained with a laugh in his voice.
“I didn’t have to just then. Here we’re immersed within willing
Celestial Energy. One doesn’t have to be a Celestial to manipulate
pockets of the Transcendent Plane. I would’ve thought that you’d
have realized that after your own time in this dimension.” He
grinned. “Why don’t you try?”

Nonplussed, Sheikoh looked around and
then experimentally pointed a finger at a wall to their left. His
brow crinkled with concentration, and the wall rippled like the
surface of a pond in response. Globs of white goo floated out of it
like a slow-motion splash of water. Camillio watched the droplets,
his face lined with interest. He turned back to Sheikoh.

“
Why don’t you make
yourself a seat?” Camillio asked him.

Sheikoh grinned in response, willing
the globs of white into a sphere that floated just in front of the
Celestial’s desk. A marble-white snake whipped around his waist and
jerked him into the glob’s center, exactly as it’d happened in his
own time in the Transcendent Plane.

Unlike the vivid scene from before,
the center of this blob was just a boring white. Sheikoh believed
that it was because that horrible meaning no longer had any hold on
him, now that he’d brought Emili back. Sheikoh let the material
melt from around him, dripping over his rising body into the form
of an armchair. He molded it to resemble the one he’d sat in his
first time meeting the Celestial across from him. Camillio
applauded his show.

“
Pretty sick stuff,”
Sheikoh admitted.

“
Indeed,” Camillio grinned
back. Then he cleared his throat. “And now, the reason I brought
you up here.”

Curious, Sheikoh waited.

“
The empire isn’t forever
Sheikoh. It isn’t absolute and it doesn’t deal in justice. The
empire left both you and me to wither within the chains of
captivity,” Camillio murmured, piercing Sheikoh with an intense
gaze. “You and I are the victims of a broken system. We can change
things to how they should be, with the Transcendent Amulet and the
powers of the Sycrarian.”

What has this dude been
smoking?

Rebellion against the Intrasentient
Empire was futile, everybody knew that. It was common knowledge
that the Intrasentient Line was invincible. Sure, individuals could
die, but in times of coup and peril Intrasentient’s last surviving
heir gained their birthright, the immortality that’d held the
Empire together for 10,000 years.

Camillio read his expression well
enough.

“
The Celestial didn’t
perform the magic upon the Intrasentient’s bloodline. That power is
far beyond even the entire Enclaves’ combined ability,” Camillio
excitedly told Sheikoh. “Their immortality seems to be a magic
above the Celestial’s, along with the Transcendent Codex, the
Transcendent Amulet and this very house.”

“
No
Celestial could ever hope to match these feats; their power
is
inhuman
. It stands to reason than that these artifacts are of the
Sycrarian peoples’. And now, thanks to you we have the powers of a
Sycrarian within our grasp.”

“
So you’re saying that the
Sycrarian created the codex and amulet, the only things that made
it possible for us to control them?” Sheikoh wondered aloud. “Tad
unrealistic, mate, and what about that Celestial Crescent of
theirs? The one whose orders they follow? Who created
that?”

Camillio thought to himself for a few
moments.

“
That’s a good point,” he
admitted slowly. “I seem to have let excitement get ahead of
me.”

“
No worries,” Sheikoh
yawned. “Happens to the best of us.”

Camillio stared at him for a few
moments. Sheikoh eyed Camillio back, trying to work out what was
going through his head. What was he getting at?

“
My original point remains,
however. There is a power that is greater than the entirety
Celestial Enclave, and I intend to show them that. And I want you
to help me, Sheikoh.”

“
Honestly, I’m not much of
a revolutionary type. Afraid to disappoint, mate,” Sheikoh
responded uneasily. Camillio Tyche’s intense gaze didn’t even waver
at the rejection.

“
You have no idea how
unique you are in the entire world,” Camillio told him
simply.

“
Right back at you,”
Sheikoh replied lightly, raising his eyebrows.

Camillio Tyche laughed, and his
slightly-manic looking, twilight eyes held Sheikoh’s. The resolve
in their depths was unwavering. He noted that the Celestial’s hands
were taunt and veined.

This was starting to creep him out.
 

“
From the outside in the
life of a Celestial seems glorious, doesn’t it? Wealth… Prestige…
Power… that’s everything the common man sees,” Camillio said out of
the blue. “However, this that isn’t always the case. To live on the
inside of the enclave is the same as staring through the bars of
the Solitarium, condemned without trial. The life of a Celestial is
the life of a slave. You lost a few minutes of yourself to my magic
and that felt horrible, didn’t it?”

Sheikoh’s eyes hardened.

“
Imagine losing a
decade.”

They stared at one another.

“
When I was twelve year
old, so very long ago,” Camillio murmured, seemingly lost in
reverie. “I was confirmed Celestial.”

“
I was excited at the
possibilities ahead as a train carried me from Dario in the distant
region of Chorz, all the way to Intrasentient City. I remember
looking at all the enormous skyscrapers and the monocled, suited
people riding around on made-up Swifthooves with wonder. Coming
from a village of solar farmers, I had never seen such opulence.”
His tone was without inflection.

“
The
train dropped me off at the station and two Century arrived to
escort me to my carriage. I thought that the escort was a simple
statement of my newfound prestige, rather, than the truth. That
their duty was assuring the emperor that no young Celestial escape.
They brought me to the Celestial Enclave, and then shoved me into a
blacksteel room. The first time that I met Zul,” Camillio’s voice
twisted when he said the name. “The council member shoved a burning
hunk of metal into my chest. The mark of restraint… It was a more
painful experience than any since. Though my…
relationship…
so to
speak
…
with
Ternate Zul… Let’s just say that it didn’t improve from
there…”

Camillio trailed off.

“
The mark of restraint was
conditioned so to make disobedience of any orders given from an
Imperial superior impossible. For many power-mad Celestial the mark
is a necessary evil. In my case however… something about my pain
that day… attracted Zul’s attention. He would-

Camillio choked on some desperate
emotion, opening and closing his mouth like he couldn’t breathe.
His desperate eyes flickered blue.

Suddenly Sheikoh was hurtling through
the Celestial’s memories. His awareness flew through eleven
sadistic, subhuman years of constant enslavement to the wrinkled
hands and lusting face of Ternate Zul. Sheikoh’s jaw clenched with
glaring hatred, mixed in with helpless pity as he watched the
Celestial Councilman force a young Camillio to do unspeakable
things. The flickering memories of abuse and depravity rent at
Sheikoh’s heart.

Then they landed, stretching out the
life-changing day that Sanatous had been called to the enclave for
an inquiry on his exploration of forbidden avenues of magic.
Sheikoh watched the white, dread-locked Celestial admit to their
accusations boldly. One of the council members brought up Sanatous
efforts to artificially create Celestial.

Sanatous answered that he’d managed to
achieve the end and went on to outline a process in which a woman
with child could converted, provided one cut certain blood runes
into her skin that would force the woman’s obedience as well
attempt to merge her life-force with her unborn child’s. According
to Sanatous, the child’s death was certain and the mother’s was
almost certainly likely.

Sheikoh’s thoughts were ripped through
with the memories of the runed women ‘Celestial’ at Randel
Sanatous’s house, the surprise on one of their dead faces.
 The last one had tried so desperately to survive.

He’d had no idea…

The memories juddered to another
moment. Ternate Zul ranted furiously, pacing circles around a room
that was arranged like a torture chamber. He stood over the
now-older body of Camillio that was chained to a silversteel
bedframe and bleeding. Sheikoh felt Camillio’s hope as Zul
mockingly described the amulet that Sanatous had professed
nullified the effects of magic. Camillio realized in that moment
that the amulet would be his release from the horrible prison of
Zul’s unceasing attention. While Ternate Zul took out a perverse,
indignant fury on the younger Celestial, Camillio Tyche dreamed of
freedom.

More years, more horrible, depraved
atrocities flashed through Sheikoh’s head. He watched Camillio age
before his eyes. Sheikoh found that he hungered for the sight Zul’s
blood almost as Zul had lusted for Camillio’s. His eyes tinted the
deranged Zul an eternal haze of scorching red. Sheikoh wanted to
kill Zul himself; that piece of subhuman filth deserved a slow
death by torture.

Then the memory paused one more time.
One more night. The night that Camillio had managed to wrest a
mission that brought him to the city of Interium, where Randel
Sanatous and the man’s rumored amulet had been exiled
to.

Camillio had arranged his break-in at
a time that Sanatous was in a meeting with Cylium Vest. He crept
into the Celestial’s house. Sheikoh noticed that Sanatous’s home
was arranged almost exactly as it had been when he’d visited the
man.

After several hours’ worth of spells
and incantations, Camillio teased his way through the runes and
pentacles guarding Sanatous’s secrets. He slipped through the house
invisible and stumbled upon a room where two pregnant women were
chained to the metal walls. Runed pentacles etched red-rimmed scabs
into their skins. With a jolt of horror, Sheikoh recognized one of
the Celestial. He felt sick. Her limp brown hair and patched skin
was dappled with sweat. As she lay on a blanket of coiled chains,
her eyes wildly flared between their normal state and a brilliant
poison-green.

Sheikoh’s perception was dragged back
into the hall, following as the Celestial’s search of the rooms.
Finally Camillio found Sanatous’s office, where the Transcendent
Amulet hung within one of Sanatous’s many bookcases. Desperate for
release, Camillio threw caution to the winds and ripped the amulet
off of its pedestal, tossing it over his head and running back out
into the night.

He didn’t slow until Sanatous’s house
of horrors was out of sight.

Memories flickered again, skipping
ahead to the vision of Camillio walking through the doors of
Councilman Zul’s room. It was the middle of that same black night.
Camillio walked up to a sleeping Zul and stopped. His hands balled
into fists as he looked down at the elder Celestial. His face
burned into an expression of unfiltered loathing.

As if he sensed the peril, Zul woke
up. The elder Celestial sat up rubbing his eyes and asked how
Camillio had gotten through the rune lock on his door. Camillio
ignored the man’s question. Sheikoh could feel his euphoria at that
simple defiance.

Then Camillio lifted a dagger and
plunged it in the heart of the contemptuous man who’d invaded his
every aspect of being. Blood splashed red droplets onto Zul’s
sheets as the Celestial garbled his wordless shock. The decrepit
Celestial shook violently, coughing up blood that streamed down his
chest. After a moment, Zul fell back with sightless
eyes.

Camillio, wearing a pair of ice-cold
eyes, ripped the dagger out of Zul’s lifeless body stared at the
corpse for a moment. Then his expression twisted with vindication
and hatred, and he thrust the knife’s red-stained blade into the
Celestial’s chest again and again. By the time he’d stopped, Zul’s
chamber was stained blood red, and the Councilman’s mutilated body
could have been that of a butchered Swifthooves for all the
features anyone could make out.