The Book of Transformations (16 page)

Arrogant swine
, she thought. Dartun had found a flat section of thick ice within a gully, which looked like the snow had settled on a small lake with a few cold-crippled trees poking up from their white smothering. His shadow was bold across the ice.

She commenced her well-rehearsed statement. ‘Dartun Súr, Godhi of the Order of the Equinox, you are—’

‘You
do
love stating the obvious, Papus,’ Dartun interrupted. ‘Why have you come out here?’

‘We’re here to bring you to justice, Dartun, as simple as that. In the name of this Empire, we request that you return with us to Villjamur in order to face charges for your crimes.’

‘And what crimes would they be?’ Dartun replied, glancing up and down their row of cultists, a smirk on his face.

‘Animation of the dead, for one thing,’ Papus sneered. ‘You have abused your position as a cultist and breached our ethical boundaries.’

‘Sod you,’ Dartun spat, ‘and your ethical boundaries.’

How
dare
he talk to me like this.
Papus wanted to get this man back to Villjamur immediately. She peered to her left, shading her eyes from the glare. One of her order stepped forward: it was Telov, a chunky blond man with a weather-beaten face. He withdrew from his furs a set of chains that began to glow and splutter with a fierce purple light.

‘I would strongly advise against using that,’ Dartun growled.

‘Why? You’ve no relics,’ Papus observed. Dartun merely stood there, his hands by his sides, and only then did she think it strange he was not wearing as many layers one might expect for such freezing conditions. His dark cloak barely clung to his somewhat tattered frame. Admittedly he did not look his best – his clothes were torn, and she could see exposed skin in places, and in others . . . was that metal showing through?

Telov held the neutral ends of the chains out cautiously in front, and it was clear from his movements that his nerves were getting the better of him. She had wanted to capture Dartun for so long and now this seemed an anticlimax. Was this legendary cultist simply going to let himself be taken back to Villjamur?

Dartun suddenly lowered his head and closed his eyes. She heard a faint drone coming from him. Without looking up, Dartun reached out to grab the chains in Telov’s hands, chains that at this frequency of energy should have given him such a shock as to send him unconscious.

There came an electrical snap: energy was being forced back through the chains into the neutral handles – and Telov’s hands began to burn. He screamed, couldn’t let go, fell to his knees still gripping the heated handles, crying while smoke streamed from his palms.

Papus quickly activated the
Skammr
and the chains were jammed and deactivated, and ancient energy, in the form of purple light, dissipated. Telov collapsed to his side and buried his hands into the snow.

She was stunned: how, without any relics, was Dartun able to do that?

Dartun spread his stance and, with his arms either side, his glance calm, took in the situation. Once again he faced Papus and smiled. ‘Sure you can handle me?’

‘How did you do that?’ she demanded. ‘You aren’t carrying any relics.’

‘I’m not who I used to be,’ Dartun replied.

The
Skammr
should have worn off by now. She gave the signal and four of her cultists ran forwards with relics: an electrical net spurted slickly into the air, and with a liquid grace fell onto Dartun – but he simply ripped through it with his bare hands.

How is that possible?

Two others tried to use weapons to beat him, one a sword, another a crossbow: miraculously, with a quick gesture of his right hand he managed to bend the metal of the sword so that it had become inert, and the crossbow bolt he caught with his left hand; doubly impressive because he wasn’t even looking in that direction.

Dartun flipped back his cloak and peeled away the skin on his arm: where she expected blood to surge and tendons to be exposed, a strange, almost white ceramic arm was in place, and it glittered with tiny webs of light.

More of her order charged, relics in hand.

The arm was a revolution in technology. It stuttered into life, vibrating minutely, one minute quite inflexible, the next very fluid. His face was set in a savage sneer as one by one he ripped into her order. She watched the violence in awe.

He jumped and bent back and forth with impossible flexibility. There was so much blood and ice spraying, and he moved so quickly, it was hard to discern the action, but she saw him cleave one of her members in two, sever another’s head sending it skittering across the frozen lake.

She was agog. Mortified.

Soon she was the only member of her order left standing, and Papus was stunned at the carnage around her. Tears filled her eyes as she regarded her whole cult wiped out with so much ease. Dartun was hardly tired by the spectacle, panting lightly, his breath clouding the air.

He stood to regard her, basking in the aftermath. His arm shimmered as the sun broke through, washing the scene with a pink light.

‘You’re . . . you’re not even human,’ Papus managed to say. She felt her stomach churning.

Oddly, her words seemed to knock him back, and he shook his head as if in a half-daze. He suddenly stared at her like he didn’t know what he’d been doing.

Papus took this moment of respite to survey the wreckage of her order, her life. Blood covered the narrow region of the lake. Body segments were scattered and heaped where two or more had fallen on each other under Dartun’s swift blows.

She would not let herself die in the same way. She would, at least, honour her order. As Dartun scanned the scene seemingly as confused by his work as she was, Papus primed all the relics beneath her furs, shivering with shock. She produced an
Aldartal
, triggered it—

Time froze rigid: nothing moved at the periphery of the scene, everything stopped. Except for Dartun, who sluggishly pulled himself free of the relic’s energy, slowly – as if covered in some abstract treacle – and stuttered into a state of normal time.

‘How . . . ? How did you do that?’ Papus asked. Her fears were assuaged by her all-consuming desire to understand what he was.

‘You’ll have to try harder than that,’ he muttered. There was an air of insouciance about the manner in which he moved, as if he had all the time in the world to kill her. She deactivated the
Aldartal
and—

—the wind groaned once again, her hair spiralled before her face, and they were back in normal time.

‘Enough of this.’ Dartun lifted his surreal arm.

She turned to flee. He marched after her, and she sprinted across the ice to escape him. Frantically, in her pocket she activated a
Deyja
for a cloak of invisibility. A purple flash – like sheet lightning – and she was gone.

They paused for a moment, uncertain of how to proceed. Dartun tipped his head this way and that, as if trying to listen.

Even if, despite his new-found powers, he couldn’t see her, out here it was pointless – he would easily be able to observe her indentations in the snow, her frantic scrabbling across the white surface, the scuff-marks on the ice.

And as soon as she shifted even slightly, he clocked her.

Dartun continued his pursuit, his arm a gleaming white stammer of vibrations.

Something
Brenna
-based next, two small solid aluminium balls that she plucked from her pockets, activated, then rolled back towards Dartun. They skittered across the ice into his path and, as he stepped around one, they both exploded, aggressively spurting up fire and tiny, razor-sharp chunks of metal.

A short scream:
At least he’s vaguely human
, she thought.

Dartun stopped and flinched, as the fire ravaged his clothing. The shrapnel had shredded the skin across his face, and now, blood-streaked, he collapsed to his knees –
finally!
She heaved a sigh and, crawling on all fours and still invisible, she sagged tentative relief. Now to finish this off.

Papus slipped out a dagger from her boot and stood up. She walked over to him and prepared to stab his kneeling form in the back of the neck. Suddenly he lunged up at her, his face a snarling bloodied mess. He grabbed her by the throat with his human hand. She tried to slice at it, but the other arm punched her stomach—

And punctured it.

Stunned, a burning pain surged through Papus’s body – and she could see her own blood flowing like wine along Dartun’s arm, down into the little nooks and crannies in the surface. Dartun was elbow-deep inside her abdomen.

She stared into his eyes and saw something mechanical behind his glare, like a subtle functioning of relics. Then he must have clutched something inside her –
oh, fuck
could she feel it – and he tugged hard. Her own innards were yanked out before her eyes, flecks of her blood peppering the air.

Papus collapsed, her head striking the ice.

*

Verain experienced a state of being both relieved and appalled as Dartun returned covered in blood. What horrors she had witnessed she had observed from a distance, and the details were unclear. She knew there had been a slaughter, however – that much was obvious.

After the butchering of the final cultist, Dartun had remained there for several minutes, patrolling up and down the devastation, and she wondered what he must have been thinking. The remains were gruesome, like the despicable culling of seals that many of the tribes across the Archipelago performed each year. She could not take her eyes off the scene, even as Dartun made his way back through the thick snow, to reach the remnants of the Order of the Equinox.

‘I have dealt with the matter accordingly,’ Dartun announced.

‘You don’t say,’ Tuung blurted out from behind her.

‘Your face . . .’ Verain began. His skin was gently pockmarked, like a volcanic rock.

Dartun reached up his hand to sense the details, and seemed unmoved. ‘It’ll be back to normal soon enough – a side effect against one of her relics.’

‘Are they all dead?’ she asked.

‘They are indeed,’ Dartun beamed.

‘So what now, eh?’ Tuung said. His tone was frail, that of a man on the edge. ‘We’re shattered and hungry.’

Dartun’s expression was distant, withdrawn. Something wasn’t right, but she didn’t know what. ‘I understand your concern,’ he droned. ‘I will ensure that you are well cared for.’ Verain fell under his gaze, and she didn’t know what to think. Was that affection?

‘It is essential we
all
survive and return to Villjamur, and I must confess I have neglected your welfare.’ Dartun still didn’t seem to be particularly bothered that he was drenched in blood. She could barely look at him in this state. ‘We will get off this island and seek a town and some accommodation and some nutrition.’

‘Thank fuck for that.’ Tuung headed back to the dogs.

On one of the central sections of Villjamur, beneath the disused aqueduct, a short walk from the corner of the long street called Gata Sentimental with its narrow, five-storey buildings, and under the subtle night shadows caused by a bold stone bridge, two men in hooded tunics and thick overcoats were navigating their way across the vast, empty iren, avoiding the patches of moonlight. A pterodette lunged down, inches from the cobbles, hunting bats, before it scaled one of the numerous, crenellated towers of the city at a high velocity. A sharp air pervaded the scene, and a fog was beginning to roll in from the sea, bringing with it a deadly evening chill.

‘There’s a foul air tonight,’ one of the men muttered.

‘Quit your fairy talk, Liel,’ sighed Brude, a barrel of man. Stubble smothered his face, and his small, beady eyes examined the distance for signs of life. Satisfied, he regarded his companion. ‘You’ve been spurting all sorts of shit since the banshees stopped their keening, and tonight’s no different from any other. Or have you been hanging around with kids and reading too much MythMaker, eh?’

‘No,’ Liel replied. ‘But them banshees going all silent just ain’t natural, I can tell you that much. Word is, someone’s got their tongues.’

‘It’s easier, idiot, because who’s now here to scream for the dead? No one, that’s who. There’s less fear when you’re murdering someone, so it makes life easier. Now, stop being so pathetic. You should be more like your mate, Caley – he’s not chicken shit and he’s years younger than you.’

Liel squirmed a nod.

Brude couldn’t stand the scrawny man being so paranoid. He was eighteen, slow for his age, and his incessant paranoia was infectious. Brude turned his furtive attention to the edge of this iren, one of the largest in the city, where a few glass shopfronts were glittering like starlight.

Among them he searched for a name . . .

Granby’s Gemstones.

There it was, a decorative and faded green facade, its square sign creaking gently in the wind. In the daytime, people of the city would mill about outside this shop and goggle at the metallic trinkets and precious stones beyond the glass.

Shalev’s instructions were, as always, to the letter. Forty days had passed now since she’d been working with them – the anarchists. Forty days of furtive undertakings, though strictly speaking, they wouldn’t ever call it work; they wanted to refer to it always as a
collective
. Work was still a form of wage slavery, they claimed. Work was getting grimmer and grimier, poor conditions forced upon people by propagating the fear of how bad the ice would become. Other folk felt they wanted
secure
jobs in such conditions, despite the poor pay and treatment. They wanted to remain in their front-room cloth manufacturers, labouring under restrictive conditions by the underground docks, but Brude wasn’t into such self-abuse. Rumour had it that the Freeze was destined to keep the ice here for decades, so he was fucked if he was having any of that.