The Book of Transformations (14 page)

‘Morning, councillor.’ The stout old man standing before him was his driver, and he opened the door of the carriage, which was a huge dark-wood affair outfitted with luxurious ruby red trim. Mewún popped up, ducking his head, and plunged inside with a groan.

‘Thank you, Edsan,’ Mewún called out, once he was safely within the opulence of the carriage.

‘Where’s it to today, sir?’ his driver enquired.

‘The indoor iren project, if you please.’

‘That open now, sir?’

‘Not yet, no, but very soon – I’m giving a site visit to make sure we’re all set for the grand opening.’

‘Very good, councillor.’ Edsan slammed the door and, through a little hatch, Mewún watched him trudge around the front of the carriage. A few minor rumbles later, a few terse words, with the undergear cranking as the mighty wheels turned, they rocked forwards.

Mewún shifted into the corner, rummaged around in his pockets, and drew up a roll-up and a box of matches. A few moments later, he promptly lit up and eased back, allowing the sounds of the city to wash over him, the calls of traders, the sharp orders of the military, the crunch of wheels and the horse’s hooves on stone. Outside, the sun peered beyond the clouds, giving the city a rich, red veneer. Snow seeped from roofs round chimney breasts, dripping onto the streets incessantly, whilst children hurled snowballs at each other. They must have been entering an open plaza, as the scents of fried food from vendors filled his nostrils—

Something brown flashed by the hatch.
What was that?
Something rattled underneath.

Mewún scrambled to the opening to see a hooded figure in brown clothing sprinting down the street in the opposite direction.

As he frowned, he heard something fizz, and could smell burning, followed by an enormously bright flash and loud ripping and fire streaming upwards and
oh shit oh shit
his skin was burning . . .

*

‘Fulcrom, get over here.’

Fulcrom strode cautiously through the chunks of charred wood to Warkur’s side. The rumel superior’s face seemed distinctly unimpressed by the carnage, and who could blame him? Debris littered a zone nearly a hundred feet wide: flesh was scattered amidst the remnants of a carriage and, a few feet away, the burned and mutilated corpse of a horse lay gruesomely on its side. Even Fulcrom, who had seen his fair share of dire things on the streets of Villjamur, was forced to cringe. At the moment it wasn’t snowing, but he wished it would, just enough to cover this mess.

The iren had been forcibly closed, the traders ushered on, the citizens steered away. It was possible there were some civilian casualties amidst the wreckage, but it wasn’t easy to tell. Other Inquisition aides had been sent to recover the bodies and any evidence, and they sifted through the scene with sketchpads or assiduously made notes.

‘What’re you doing here – aren’t you supposed to be looking after the Knights?’ Warkur snapped.

‘I heard about the incident and rushed here as soon as I could. Looks like we’ll need military assistance on this.’

‘If my hunch is right, we’ll need whatever help we can get. You know who I’m thinking did this?’

‘Did you see the flag too?’

‘What flag?’

‘On the wall over there.’ Fulcrom pointed to an old red-brick structure between two whitewashed shops. Tied to a windowsill was a black flag: similar to ones that had been found at the site of every major anarchist crime to date.

‘You and your powers of observation,’ Warkur muttered. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be – I’m missing even obvious things now.’

One of the human aides, a red-haired man, lunged onto the scene out of breath: ‘Sir, we’ve got some information on the event.’

The carriage was one of the new models – strips of wood bore fresh Imperial logos, but there was no glory to be found in this mess, only the remains of a politician. A councillor had been in the carriage. The aide provided the name of Mewún, who had left Balmacara earlier.

Fulcrom knew the name, though couldn’t put a face to it – but the title was enough. Sure, councillors were murdered from time to time, and there had been public incidents in recent months, but generally such matters were kept low-key and away from prying eyes.

‘This is some damn public spectacle,’ Warkur said.

‘It was obviously intended that way,’ Fulcrom added. ‘We know these
anarchists
like to make a show of things. They must have known a councillor was using this route, or they followed him from Balmacara.’

Warkur shook his head in disgust: ‘How’ve they become so damn effective all of a sudden?’

‘Do you want me to pursue this case, sir?’ Fulcrom asked.

‘Though I don’t fully trust orders from the top, and we could do with someone like you checking the day-to-day investigations, you’ve got enough on with the Knights,’ Warkur said, waving him away.

‘Well, we all have plenty to be getting on with, sir,’ Fulcrom replied.

‘It’s possible all investigators are going to have to work together from now on. Means we’ll have to pass over full control of monitoring the refugees outside to the military.’

And I know just what the military would do to them under Urtica’s control
, Fulcrom thought grimly.

‘So’, Warkur continued, ‘you just look after those precious Knights and make sure they’re ready to prevent shit like this from happening again. If our Emperor’s beloved news rag is anything to go by, they’ll have some pressure coming their way. They’ll be famous. Everyone out here knows their names and faces. With all that damn fuss, they’ll find it difficult to get close to the enemy. In the meantime, I’ll start drawing the investigations together. See if we can spot patterns or find new leads. Fuck, at this rate I might as well get some tribal priests in for shell readings – maybe they can help us find out who the hell these anarchists are.’

Warkur kicked a piece of wood, and it skittered across the street and into the wall. A few passers-by had snuck into the scene, and there were several more leaning out of windows despite the cold, voyeuristically curious. Two human aides were now surveying the debris and lifting pieces of flesh into large metal containers. It would take a while to clean it all up.

‘These Knights of yours – they’d better be good,’ Warkur bellowed, before skulking off into the distance.

What difference can three humans possibly make in a world like this?
Fulcrom thought.

After a few day’s travelling, and with the sun about to dip over the horizon, Dartun called a halt. He seemed suddenly attentive to their surroundings.

‘We’re being pursued,’ Dartun announced, his breath clouding in the air. He held his hand to his eyes and scanned the horizon.

‘What should we do?’ Verain called out.

‘Confront it.’ His voice seemed to lack his usual vibrancy. For a man who had been given new life, he certainly seemed to lack it.

‘Why?’ Verain asked.

‘Because I can sense it needs to be removed from our paths,’ he replied.

Sense? How has he ever been able to
sense
things before? Surely he can’t mean intuition – that kind of talk goes against his whole logical philosophy
.

‘Who’s following us?’ Verain persisted. ‘Where
are
they?’

‘Due south, and based in a small piece of woodland.’

How can he know such things?
she thought, trying to follow his gaze and seeing only the empty landscape.

‘They are from this world.’

That offered some consolation. They wouldn’t, at least, be facing the horrors that they’d just left behind them. Dartun seemed to sniff the air. His mannerisms startled her, but his sudden smile was vicious. ‘They were sent to track us, possibly to even kill us. I would like to see them try.’ Dartun waved them on again, the dogs hauled forward, ropes snapping tight, their paws kicking up puffs of snow as they slowly dragged the sleds on. Verain continued to worry about the changes to Dartun: since returning he had not so much as held a relic in his hand, had not once harnessed the technological wizardry of ancient races.

Come to think of it, where are the relics?
When she expressed her concern to Dartun, he barely acknowledged she had spoken. This was a far cry from the man who had plucked her from her life as an orphan, who had chosen her for her skills with relics, who had taken her into his great Order of the Equinox, his inner sanctum, then his heart, and shown her great tenderness. Now, he was as cold to her as the wind that whipped across her face.

The landscape was punctuated only by a cluster of shattered shacks, broken villages and torn-down church spires. The weather was brutal. Bitterly cold, the ice was blinding, and the wind felt raw upon Verain’s skin. Occasionally, when her hood blew back, she had to close her eyes and hunch double to shelter from the pain of the elements.

It wasn’t long before Verain’s legs buckled and she tumbled face-first out of the sled into the snow . . .

*

The world seemed a blur – a haze of images, nothing more. She came to her senses to find Dartun crouching over her pouring hot fluid into her mouth.

Minutes passed and all she could do was stare up at him. They had paused to make camp near where she had fallen. Canvas wind-blocks provided shelter and a fire was burning.

Dartun regarded her, and she felt like an object of his investigations under his gaze. ‘Your strength should return soon,’ he said – more a statement of fact than words of encouragement. ‘I was foolish to push us so hard. I suspect one thing I have learned is that where I walk, others will suffer.’

‘W-what d-does that mean?’ she replied.

‘Only that when we were there – through the gate – what was done to me has enabled me to survive much, whereas the rest of you . . . Well, of course, you remain unchanged.’ He seemed almost delighted at that last statement.

‘I wouldn’t say we remain unchanged,’ one of the other cultists muttered – Tuung, a bald man whose attitude was dour even before they went through the gates. ‘I’m now cold, probably suffering from frostbite, and starving. And I’m mightily pissed off. I wasn’t like that before, I can tell you.’

Dartun laughed at them like they were charming, naive children.

‘Still,’ Tuung continued, peering down into the flames. ‘Least we’re alive.’ The look he gave Verain said:
Remember how the others died, right?
Remember what they suffered, the hideous brutality they faced?

‘Why were we set free, Dartun?’ Verain asked, shivering.

All that could be heard was the wind groaning as it drifted across this landscape.

‘Because’, Dartun said, ‘we have work to do on their behalf. Temporarily, we are working for them.’

And now she remembered. The patches of memory were starting to slot together to form a narrative in her mind.

Like visual echoes:

Images of the genocide across Tineag’l, before the cultists stepped through the Realm Gates the first time. Villages with blood-trails through the snow, the corpse in the bath, dead bodies of the very old and very young left strewn behind buildings like waste outside a tavern. Then she had thought it just brutal warfare – that they had been the innocent victims of an invasion. Now she knew why people had been taken by the creatures made from blackened shell, now she understood why the island had been cleansed. And she wished she didn’t.

Humans were considered to be a finite but necessary resource in the other world. For one of the indigenous cultures there humans were organic, living ore; nothing more, nothing less. They were subjected to death factories, to diabolical bone merchants, a utility to be used and discarded as necessary for furtherance of a war that wasn’t their own.

So it begged the question, if humans were so valuable a resource – why had their small group been set free?

*

The next morning the cultists from the Order of the Equinox continued on their journey south. The horizon was unperceivable. The sun broke through the cloud to tint pink the surrounding. Shadows presented themselves, giving away the location of unknown objects across the snowscape.

And unknown people.

Dartun pulled the reins and the dogs slowly slipped to a halt. In the distance, he pointed out a cluster of figures moving slowly northwards and, as Verain squinted, Dartun stepped off the sled and knelt by one of the dogs.

A cream-coloured beast with a dash of grey across its face, it didn’t yip excitedly like the others, and there was something almost mechanical about its movements. Dartun held his head against the animal’s and whispered something and suddenly the dog became startlingly active. It sprinted towards the figures in the distance, claws turning up little plumes of powder across the ice.

Dartun stood casually, shading his eyes with one hand, watching its progress.

*

This much was obvious:

Papus was going to kill him. And here she was, weeks away from comfort, weeks across the Archipelago, and still no closer to her victim. Papus cursed the weather, cursed the island of Tineag’l, and cursed the Empire. Most of all, she cursed herself. Why had she not ignored her determination to get one over on Dartun? Why had her competitive drive overwhelmed her sensibilities, and landed her all the way out here?