A Conversation in Blood

  “Seems I’m helping you two a lot,” Rusk said. “First in the swamp, then earlier tonight, and then now.”

  Egil grunted. Nix bit his tongue. In truth, Rusk hadn’t helped them in the swamp at all. Egil and Nix had helped him, in a way. He’d had false memories of events placed in his head by a mindmage. But Nix and Egil could never tell him. The fewer people who knew the truth, the better.

  “We appreciate the help you’ve given,” Nix said, trying not to choke on the words. “Here’s hoping third time’s lucky.”

  “You called it a thing,” Rusk said, hustling them along. They passed a guild man now and again, who nodded respectfully at the Upright Man, but looked with curiosity at Egil and Nix and Jyme.

  “How’s that?” Egil asked.

  “What’s chasing you. You called it a thing. What is it?”

  “We don’t know,” Nix said. “And that’s truth. It’s not human and it’s big and it’s hard to hurt. That’s what we know.”

  Rusk grunted, plainly not believing them entirely. “How long in the Vault?”

  “Hours. Full sun in the sky and that thing won’t show itself,” Nix answered.

  “Well enough,” Rusk said. “We’ll talk payment with the dawn.”

  They moved through two concealed doors and entered the tunnels under the Meander, taking the winding turns, their feet walking the circular, spiral path of the corridors, tracing the shape of the ward that protected against detection. At the end of it they reached the door of the Vault. Rusk unlocked it and allowed them in.

  Nix and Jyme filed in, but Egil hesitated. He stood before Rusk, looked him in the face, and extended a hand. Rusk hesitated a moment, but took it. Egil pulled him in for an embrace. Rusk’s shocked expression mirrored Jyme’s.

  “We appreciate the help,” Egil said. “We won’t soon forget it.”

  “You two want your own room or something?” Nix said.

  Rusk shoved him away. “The fak, man? This is business. We’re not friends.”

  “Even so,” Egil said, and entered the Vault. “Even so.”

  “I’ll return in a few hours,” Rusk said, and closed the door.

  Jyme stared at Egil, dumbfounded. “In a night that makes no sense, that…embrace made the least sense of all.”

  “Sure it does,” Nix said. “What’d you lift, Egil?”

  Egil held up the magical talking key Nix had paid to Rusk to use the Vault the first time. “This. In case we need to get out. We’ll give it back to him when the time’s right.” He tossed the key to Nix.

  Nix snatched it out of the air. “Nicely done, priest. Picking the pocket of the head of the Thieves’ Guild. Impressive.” He put the key in his satchel with the book and plates and other needful things.

  Egil sat in the chair he’d sat in the first time. “So here we are. You going to tell us?”

  Nix nodded. “I am. But not until I’ve read more, yeah?”

  “Sounds like more delay,” Egil said.

  “No,” Nix said. “I’ll tell you. As you said, I need to. But first, the book.”

  “Suit yourself,” Egil said. He interlaced his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes.

  Jyme looked from one to the other. “Read what? The plates? And are you going to sleep, Egil?”

  “Not the plates, no. This book,” Nix said, and took the ancient tome from his satchel.

  “Just resting my eyes,” Egil said. “Catch as catch can. I’m tired. Aren’t you?”

  “To the bone, but that don’t mean I can sleep,” Jyme said. He sagged to the floor, his back against the wall, his arms on his knees. “You two,” he said, shaking his head. “You two.”

  Nix stared at the book a moment, knowing that when he opened it the magic of the script would allow him to read and understand it quickly. He wanted to ensure he was ready. He wished he had a drink.

  “What is that? A spellbook or some such?” Jyme asked.

  “Some such,” Nix said, then, “Here we go.”

  He opened the book. He picked up where he’d left off before, and, as before, he felt apart from himself as he read, an observer, not a participant. The knowledge he gained tempted despair, but despair wasn’t in Nix and he fought it back.

  Instead, he read, he understood, and he began to plan.

  —

  The soaring bridge of white stone, the monumental bones of an earlier world, rose above the rooftops of the city and colored lanterns dotted its sides, bouncing in the predawn breeze, and the breeze carried the sound of distant gongs and chanting, prayers to gods unknown to the Afterbirth. He continued forward through the alleys and streets, never slowing, his feet sticky with the gore of the dungsweeper he crushed, and he passed the corpse of a small man and mechanical creatures that lay in ruins and smelled of magic and soon he was on a wide, winding street that tracked the wobbly course of the river. The scent of the Great Spell was thick in the air, tracing the line of the street.

  Large, multistory buildings lined up on the river side of the street, places for men and their clubs and societies and guilds, and the Afterbirth ran along in their shadow, under the soulless eyes of their windows, hunched and mumbling. The smell of the spell led into a low, two-story wooden building ahead, a building that had been expanded many times, a building that splayed out on its lot like a sleeping drunk, limbs askew.

  He could smell the men lurking around the building, the stink of their leather and steel and sweat, the smell getting more acute as their tension grew. They’d seen him. They were preparing for him but the Great Spell was not among them because the aroma of it was still too attenuated and the men he’d been chasing must have carried it into the sprawling building and left these men to ambush him.

  There were men on the roofs and on the street and in the doorway of the building and he didn’t care or slow. The city would soon be awake and alerted to his presence, perhaps it already was, and the authorities would come if they weren’t already there. He’d left a trail of broken buildings and broken bodies in his wake, and they would have to come after him and because they could not kill him they would try to hold him and he would not be held. Day would reveal him and he thought that it would not matter if he obtained the Great Spell, which entered the sprawling building but did not exit it. He had the two men penned in the building and the river was to their back.

  The twang of crossbows announced the men’s attack and three bolts sank deep into the flesh of his middle, the ends shuddering with the impact. He pulled them free and did not slow, growled, and ran pell-mell toward the building. Men stormed off the porch, blades drawn, and men ran from alleys, brandishing steel, and shouts came down from atop the buildings. More men in hidden alleys and doorways darted out, a march of steel and resolve and none of it would matter because the Afterbirth would not slow or stop and he would kill them all.

  “It’s hard to hurt, men!” said one of the men. “Mind yourselves, now!”

  “Look at it!” said another.

  “It’s a horror!”

  He crashed into them like the tide and his weight knocked two of them down and he stomped them, crushing them underfoot as blades rose and fell and stabbed and thrust. The sharp edges of steel opened his flesh, spilled his blood, but he felt nothing except purpose and hope and anger and nothing would stop him. His fists rose and fell, smashing jaws and skulls, and anyone that fell to the ground he stomped underfoot. The men around him shouted, first in rage, then in disbelief, and finally in fear. He smelled the stink of their growing terror as he left bloody smears in the street, broken, groaning men, a gory trail that was leading, inevitably, to the door of the sprawling building. Gashes and cracked bones knit closed as he continued his roaring, bloody march toward the doors. He muttered and drooled and crushed and stomped and broke and killed and soon found himself on the porch, the men on the street having either retreated or died, and he put his hand, slick with blood, some his own, much of it not, to the handle, and found it locked.

  He began to beat on
the iron-reinforced door, the sound of his blows booming through the night’s quiet. Shouts sounded from behind the door, men issuing orders to other men. Crossbow fire continued to rain down on him from the rooftops, some thudding into his flesh and scraping against bone, others slamming into the doorjambs and skittering along the paving stones.

  He stepped back and charged the door, throwing the entirety of his weight against it, and the door cracked and metal reinforcing bands creaked. Shouts of surprise and alarm sounded from behind it. He repeated the process, slamming into it a second time, a third, and then it gave way, tearing free of the hinge mounts and falling inward. He lumbered in, flattening the door the rest of the way as he entered and finding himself face-to-face with a crowd of men who stabbed and slashed and shouted.

  “Kill it! In Aster’s name, kill it!”

  He answered their shouts with the roars of his many mouths and began again to crush and stomp and throw and bludgeon until the room was awash in blood and bodies.

  —

  The words in the book, written in Ool’s steady hand, pierced Nix, burrowed through his eyes and into his brain and lifted him up and left him floating. Reading them, understanding them, separated him from the world, because he knew a truth of the world that no one should know, that seemed impossible and left him feeling disembodied.

  The will of the caster determines the scale of the remaking. Thus, the most powerful of magics requires nothing more than an act of will. A first cause.

  As he read, as each new revelation planted itself in his head, it struck Nix that the book, the Account of Ool the Mad, could have been from the world that immediately preceded Nix’s, or it could have been from a world ten iterations in the past. The book could have survived each casting. Things did, or at least could, or so said the book. Ool’s clock was a leftover. And so too was Ool’s name, but all of it could have been a remainder from a world many worlds in the past.

  The only things certain in each casting are that it must be done at the Fulcrum, the place that is no place, and that it results in the afterbirth, the palimpsest of the rewritten world. The greater the remaking, the more pronounced the afterbirth.

  Nix realized that the imperfect remaking would work as a constraint on the amount of change wrought by the caster. Small changes would probably be the rule. A kingdom here. Beauty there. Wealth the next time. And that might explain why, if Ool were from a much earlier iteration, his imprint had survived.

  Or could there be a different reason?

  Nix remembered what Kerfallen had said, what Kazmarek had implied: The plates were eternal. They existed to tempt us. To tempt us. Because they’d been made that way.

  Because Ool had made them that way?

  Maybe that was why his name had survived, his clock, his book. They were as eternal as the plates. They couldn’t be destroyed or erased, either.

  Was Ool the Mad the first of the first causes? Was the Great Spell of his making? Or had Ool figured out a way to game the spell?

  Nix focused on that last.

  He would game the spell, too, find a way to keep the plates out of anyone’s hands, but keep the world the same. Nix had gamed the world since as far back as he could remember. He could do this, too.

  A thought struck him and it made him dizzy and he had to look up and he had to stop reading and he had to not think too hard about what it could mean.

  He could have done all this before.

  He could have been him, or some version of him, in a previous iteration. And he could have had these very same thoughts, followed this very same course, and he could have…

  “No, no, no.” He shook his head, consciously choosing not to descend too far into that spiral. He turned his mind back to the problem of preserving his world, this world. He realized that he would need to use the plates. He had to, despite his vow to Kazmarek.

  He had to use them. He had to use them to isolate them.

  Likely everyone who’d used them before had used them to gain something. Nix didn’t want to use them for that. He wanted to preserve something. Maybe that would be a difference? If an act of will effected the spell, maybe the motivation for that act would allow it to work as he wished.

  But he couldn’t have been the only one to think of that over the course of…how many previous worlds? Others must have, mustn’t they?

  He realized that he was going to drive himself mad, that the possibilities for doubt and second-guessing were endless, and that entertaining them over and over would render him paralyzed or insane.

  He had to act. He could do nothing else.

  —

  He turned the page to realize he’d finished the book. He didn’t remember reading particular words. Instead it was as though the knowledge had just bonded with him. He looked up to find that Jyme and Egil were staring at him, their brows furrowed, questions in their eyes.

  “Fak, man,” Jyme said.

  “You were shaking your head and muttering,” Egil said.

  Nix nodded. He looked down at the book, back up at his friends. He didn’t even know where to begin.

  “Just tell us,” Egil said. “What’s going on?”

  “And what in the name of the Hells is that thing chasing us?” Jyme added.

  Nix could feel a vein pulsing in his forehead. A headache formed behind his eyes, dug its roots farther back into his brain. “I’m not sure I can tell you.”

  “Things could go bad, Nix,” Egil said. “Then what? If this is that important, you can’t risk letting it die with you.”

  “I can’t die,” Nix said, waving a hand derisively. “Everyone knows that.”

  Jyme was nodding. “Egil makes a point. You probably should tell us.”

  “I know he does and I know I do,” Nix said. “But when I say I’m not sure I can, I don’t even know how to tell you. It’s…unbelievable.”

  “Maybe that book is shite?” Jyme said, sounding unconvinced.

  “No,” Nix said. “It’s not. I’m sure it’s not.” He looked each of them in the face. “If I tell you, it will change everything. I mean it. Everything. You still want to hear?”

  Egil leaned forward in his chair, rubbing his hand along the stubble of his beard. Jyme cursed softly.

  “Let’s hear it,” Egil said. “Jyme?”

  Jyme squinted, sniffed, and nodded.

  Nix gathered his thoughts and began. “Fine. The plates are inscribed with the words of a great spell. No, not a great spell. The Great Spell.”

  “That’s what the creature was saying,” Jyme said. “Back at the Tunnel.”

  Nix nodded. “Right. The spell is…” He sought for words, felt too ridiculous to say the ones that came to mind first. “It’s powerful.”

  Egil stared at him. “Nix, what is this thing?”

  Nix swallowed and dove in. “Imagine you could wish for something, anything, and you could have it.”

  Egil’s eyes narrowed.

  Jyme exhaled, said, “I can think of a few things. That what this does?”

  “Yes,” Nix said, then shook his head. “No. It does more than that. It does more than that.” He exhaled and said it. “It remakes the world. That’s what this book says. It remakes the world.”

  Jyme looked at him as if he were speaking a language he didn’t understand. “What?”

  Egil looked at Nix, off to the side, back at Nix. “The book could be wrong. Or it could be lies, as Jyme said. A wizard wrote it.”

  Nix heard the lack of conviction in Egil’s voice. “Maybe. But Kerfallen wants it. Kazmarek was terrified to have us learn about it. And that…thing wants it, too. And Jyme said the creature spoke of the Great Spell.”

  Jyme stood and started to pace. “Fak. Fak. What does that even mean, ‘remake the world’? As in the whole world? From the beginning of time? That doesn’t even make sense.”

  Nix shrugged. “Those are the words. And I think they mean what we think they mean but I agree that it doesn’t make sense. Can’t be from the beginning of time. Ha
s to be from the point of the first change, doesn’t it?”

  Jyme stopped pacing and stared at him.

  “Doesn’t it?” Nix asked.

  “How the Hells should I know?” Jyme exclaimed. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “How is this possible?” Egil asked.

  Nix sighed. “I don’t know. It’s wizard shite, Egil.”

  “No,” Egil said. “It’s more than that. Much more. Those plates are just sitting at the bottom of the Deadmire waiting for us to find them? How has no one ever used these before? That makes no sense either and…”

  Nix stared at him, letting the silence serve as answer.

  Egil tilted his head to the side. “Are you saying they’ve been used before?”

  “I am,” Nix said. “The book says they’ve been used before. Maybe many times.”

  Jyme waved his hands in the air, the gesture almost comical. “Wait, wait, wait. What the fak are you saying? You’re saying…?”

  “Yes,” Nix said. “Maybe.”

  Jyme stared at him a long moment, holding his breath. He blew it out. “You’re saying this world, our world, was remade? Is remade?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Worlds gone by, Jyme. Our world just another one.”

  Jyme’s mouth opened, closed. He blinked, stared wide-eyed. “Worlds gone by? Worlds gone by! That doesn’t…I can’t…This doesn’t make sense. Egil?”

  Egil was staring off at the wall, his mind away on some thought of his own.

  “No, it does make sense,” Nix said. “There are leftovers from previous worlds each time the Great Spell is cast. The Archbridge. Ool’s clock.” He looked at Egil. “Some of the things we saw in the swamp. You remember?”

  Egil’s eyes refocused on the present and he nodded slowly. “The thing that’s after us?”

  “What do you mean?” Jyme said.

  Nix saw the logic of it and pointed a finger at Egil. “Yes! That makes sense. That’s why we can’t hurt it. It’s eternal, like the bridge and clock.”

  “Not eternal,” Egil said softly.

  Nix took his point. “No. In existence until the next iteration of the world.”

  “Wait, wait!” Jyme said. “Why can’t we just use the plates and wish that creature dead? Then our problem is solved.”