The Book of Transformations (43 page)

*

About an hour later they let Fulcrom in to see Lan. She was lying with a blanket over her body like she belonged in a mortuary. But she was, at least, breathing. Miraculously much of the bruising had vanished from her face and, from what he could see, her neck and shoulders.

‘What did you do to her?’ Fulcrom asked the room. Three of the cultists in the corner, busy tweaking bits of equipment, glanced at each other, as if deciding who could be bothered to give such a long-winded answer.

Feror stepped in alongside him. The old man was a reassuring face, as much as a cultist could be. ‘It was me, mainly,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s nice to know I’m not completely letting everyone down.’

What does he mean?
Fulcrom thought, observing his nervous mannerisms that contradicted his confident words. ‘Go on.’

‘We essentially bathed her in a solution that speeded up her recovery at the . . . cellular level.’

‘What?’ Fulcrom demanded.

‘The little building blocks, which make us all.’

‘If there are any secrets you’re keeping from—’

‘It is well known in cultist circles. A lot of the enhancements we’d given her, particularly the skeletal alterations, protected her. If she was a normal woman, she would be dead.’

‘What do you mean by
normal
?’ Fulcrom snapped.

‘Without our rigorous enhancements,’ Feror corrected, and Fulcrom contemplated the sudden silence between them.

Feror continued, ‘So, what should have taken months of recovery, will now take hours.’ Feror talked about obscure things like oxygen flow, and to Fulcrom the science could have been magic for all he knew.

The important thing was that Lan was alive and would soon be back to normal. The cultists’ work done, Fulcrom was allowed to be alone with her. As they closed the metal door behind them, Fulcrom pulled up a leather chair alongside the surgical platform on which Lan was resting, and slumped into it.

And waited for her to wake.

*

When she was fully conscious and her drowsiness fading, with a beaker of water in her hands, Lan described the attack in full detail to Fulcrom, who stood alongside her bed and affectionately caressed the back of her neck.

‘It was a trap,’ she told him. ‘And it was definitely the anarchists. I remember them arguing how far to take the beating. Someone asked if they should actually kill me, but the woman in the gang – it wasn’t Shalev – she said that they wanted the city to see how vulnerable it is, and how normal the Knights are. That they had the upper hand. They wanted the
bourgeoisie
to feel scared again, to give people something the
People’s Observer
couldn’t twist into propaganda. She said they were using me as a symbol.’ Lan took a sip of water. ‘Which explains why they dangled me off that bridge, I guess.’

‘Feror told me if you weren’t enhanced, you would probably be dead,’ Fulcrom said.

‘Oh,’ Lan replied and appeared to contemplate the statement. ‘Perks of the job, I guess.’

Fulcrom smiled. It was reassuring, under the circumstances, to see she still possessed a sense of humour. ‘Apparently your recovery is going to be quick, because of these cultists. You’ve considerable value to the city, you know.’

‘I feel a little guilty, if I’m honest. Especially after seeing so many people slaughtered by the military, for me alone to receive such privilege just doesn’t feel right.’

‘The Emperor has invested heavily in the three of you. He’s simply protecting his interests. Nothing personal, I’m sure.’ Fulcrom winked.

‘You’re full of love this . . . afternoon?’

‘Nearly. It’s early evening now. You’ve spent a few hours in bed.’

Lan pushed herself so that her legs hung off the edge of the platform, and Fulcrom pulled the blankets up over her to keep her decent, should any of the cultists return to the room.

She gave him an intense look then, and he knew that there was a deeper problem, one that the cultists couldn’t fix. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m . . . I’m pretty sure they knew my past.’

‘Nonsense,’ Fulcrom reassured her. ‘I promise you, no one outside of the highest echelons of the empire have the slightest clue, and even then the background of the Knights is hugely confidential – just one or two cultists, perhaps; security is tight on this. They wouldn’t gossip.’

Had she imagined it? Her head was hazy from the beatings and the treatments. Maybe it wasn’t true. No one was treating her any differently, were they? And in fact the cultists had just spent their resources repairing her. She felt she should just keep quiet about it.

‘From now on,’ Fulcrom said, ‘I want the Knights only to work as a group, or at the very least patrol the streets in pairs.’

Lan creased her face as little fluxes of pain moved around her body. ‘I feel a little drunk. What did these cultists do to me?’

‘Saved your life, is what they did,’ Fulcrom reminded her. ‘It was Feror’s work mainly.’

‘Good old Feror.’ She gently eased her feet to the floor, Fulcrom clasping his arm behind her for support as her legs took her weight.

She let him prop her up for a while longer, and he walked her around the room in slow circles.

Soon he realized she was walking normally. ‘Do you actually need my arms around you?’

‘No, I can do this on my own – I just didn’t want you to let go.’ She smiled, stood upright, faced him, then with a sigh she held him, burying herself beneath his robes.

For someone who’d nearly been beaten to death, her grip was remarkably strong.

*

When Lan was well enough to return to her living quarters that evening, Fulcrom guided her home, taking care not to be too patronizing with his gestures. He found Tane and Vuldon in the company of Ulryk.
Of course
, Fulcrom realized,
the priest has not yet found a new place where he can shelter
.
What better place than this?

He didn’t think there would be a conflict of interests – he was overseeing ‘weird shit’, as Warkur so aptly put it. It seemed more efficient to lump all the weirdness together.

None of the three stood up at the couple’s entrance. Tane and Vuldon were hunched over a table. The pages of
The Book of Transformations
, Ulryk’s copy, was the focus of their attention. The tome was surprisingly large under the mellow lighting, at least a foot long, and three or four inches thick. Sometimes Fulcrom wondered why so much fuss was being made over a simple book.

‘Investigator,’ Ulryk announced, ‘I was explaining what it was that got me into so much trouble earlier. I considered that such brave and skilled people might be able to help me . . . where we both visited.’

‘I was thinking something similar,’ Fulcrom agreed. ‘Though I’d only be able to spare a maximum of one. No more, I’m afraid. Maybe it’s something Lan could do?’

Lan nodded as she joined the three of them at the table. Somewhere in the distance, Fulcrom could hear the sea droning against the base of the cliff.

The tattered sheets of vellum were turned slowly, one after another, as Ulryk revealed some amazingly incomprehensible scripts and diagrams. There were weird woodcuts, parodies of real-life objects, creatures in perpetual states of change, and unexpected juxtapositions – couples bleeding into flowers into houses.

‘To the trained eye,’ Ulryk explained, ‘there are numerous glyphs, none of which are to be found in any other text in our world, and no more than seven per word. This is a special script, a special language, comprised of special letters, written in intricate code. It is an artefact of huge importance.’

‘Who wrote it?’ Lan asked.

‘Frater Mercury,’ Fulcrom said. Then, aware of everyone’s surprised expression. ‘That’s what Ulryk told me before. I’ve no idea who he really is.’

‘The wars you have heard about, where creatures have come from another world into ours,’ Ulryk said. ‘They come from warring civilizations, ones created by Frater Mercury. These civilizations he created millennia ago, in this very world. He is responsible for all you see – for life as we know it – and within
The Books of Transformations
we can be witness to some of his secrets. I think, also, that he has left such texts for wayfarers to discover, people such as myself, should he need to return to our world. I am convinced it is so. Now he needs to return. As islands of our realm are cleared of human and rumel life, as alien cultures swarm into ours to destroy it, we need him. And, as I understand it, things are far worse where Frater Mercury still resides.’

Though the news of the wars on the fringes of the Empire came rarely, Fulcrom was aware of the threat. He was convinced that what reports
People’s Observer
did publish were heavily censored so that the information wouldn’t be detrimental to the population’s peace of mind – or, indeed, threaten the current regime.

Was it some ancient conflict coming to fruition?

‘Frater Mercury – the man who wrote this – you’re saying he’s still alive?’ Lan asked. ‘How old is he?’

‘Who knows?’ Ulryk sighed. ‘He is responsible for creating much of our culture. As his influence grew, and his creations began to dominate, he was forced into another dimension – a choice he took in order to preserve his work.’

‘Is he some kind of god?’ Lan asked.

‘Gods are crafted by mortals, dear lady, so that may have been the case at one point. I believe that he was a scholar, a theologian, a scientist, a philosopher, a linguist. A world-changer.’

‘What kind of
things
did this Frater Mercury make?’ Fulcrom enquired.

Ulryk sat back with a beatific grin. His shoulders rose and fell as he chuckled. ‘What didn’t he create?’ Then with sudden urgency, he returned to the book and pointed out a section which seemed to feature wings . . . Garudas. They were definitely draft sketches of garudas, with tables of incomprehensible script to one side.

‘Here,’ Ulryk gestured with the flat of his hand, ‘lies the method in which garudas were constructed. And here’ – he skipped backwards two pages, where a diagram of other animals upon which large wings had been grafted – ‘here is where primitive experiments at creating flying beasts failed. I have trouble reading much of the notes, but I have little doubt that garudas were as a result of experimentation deep in the past. And Frater Mercury had repeated this process for hundreds of other creatures, many taken from our own stories, made real – merely because he had the knowledge to do such things.’

The group stared dumbly at the pictures, not quite understanding, but not quite disbelieving either.

‘It is my conclusion, from years of study, that cultists – who for thousands of years said that they rescued and perfected ancient methods of technology – were in fact merely resurrecting the tools of the author, Frater Mercury. I believe that the still undiscovered companion book to this unites the two texts; and that, together, they contain a ritual for the restoration of Frater Mercury in this world. Given the great disasters about to ensue, his return might well prevent a catastrophe.’

Vuldon seemed to take a deep interest in the pictures. With reverence, and a delicate gesture, he turned the pages, smiling when he came to an elaborate sketch. ‘This is a recipe book for life itself, then.’

‘It is indeed, my dear Vuldon,’ Ulryk sighed.

‘The pictures – do they come to life or something? I mean, is this magic?’

‘No, though there are techniques I know where pictures can have an extra dimension added to their purpose – pictures that can influence minds.’

‘I’d really like to see that.’ Vuldon seemed impressed. ‘Fulcrom, Ulryk can stay here for the evening if he wants.’

Fine by me
, Fulcrom thought.
Better to keep an eye on him than have him summoning anything else into being.

Their ship ran into trouble: the seas were rough, rolling at four times the height of their vessel, and none of them had the skill to sail or navigate.

Dartun was forced to steer them to the western edge of the island of Folke, and it took them some time before they found a stretch of coastline that satisfied their needs. They had run out of provisions and were desperately hungry. Verain was so exhausted, physically and emotionally drained, that nothing in her life seemed to matter any more.

Eventually, they ran their ship into a wide estuary, surrounded by high, snow-smothered valleys, with a scattering of buildings nestled into the nooks and crannies of the landscape. Smoke drifted up from chimneys, a sight that generated some optimism in Verain’s heart: here was a signal of domesticity, an indication that life was perfectly normal for some people.

Up ahead was a reasonably large port. A few dozen boats of various sizes were moored, most of them equipped for fishing. Slick slate roofing and grey granite structures created a dreary ambience, but at least this side of Folke was untouched by the invaders pouring from the Realm Gates.

Snow and winds buffeted them as their craft approached the quay. A local harbourmaster strolled out in a thick coat and hat to meet them as they alighted on the quayside. Verain’s determination to survive had somewhat diminished since they’d left Tineag’l, but it felt good to be on land again, to have something solid beneath her. She did not have the legs or stomach for sailing.