A Conversation in Blood

  Egil hung on with one hand, flattening himself against the stone while he carefully pulled one hammer from its thong. He held it by the haft and waited, waited, and dropped it when the creature was below him. The hammer fell true, struck the creature in the head, but whatever hope had flashed in Nix for a moment died quickly. The blow barely budged it and the hammer tumbled earthward. The creature looked up at Egil, growling and coming on fast.

  The priest inhaled and nodded, as though he’d come to terms with something. He did not look up. He tensed, waiting for the creature to get closer, just below him. Nix knew what was coming; his heart thrummed, pounded his ribs.

  “Egil!” Nix called, wanting to say something but not sure what, but the priest did not acknowledge him.

  All at once Egil roared and launched himself at the creature, twisting in midair as he came so he hit head-on. He crashed into it, the impact dislodging it from the wall, and both of them plummeted in a tangle of limbs.

  Nix could not breathe.

  Halfway down Egil extended his arm and raised a defiant fist, the gesture purposeful, intended for Nix and Jyme.

  Nix blinked and turned away before they hit the ground. He stared at the stone, noting every detail of its texture, gathering himself. The wind felt cool on the wetness on his face.

  “Gods, Nix,” Jyme said. “How can it—? Don’t look, Nix, don’t look! But that fakking creature survived the fall. And now here it comes again.”

  Nix nodded. He didn’t look. He couldn’t. He cleared his throat and looked up at the top of the clock. He blinked away tears.

  “Climb like you’re on fire, Jyme. Like you’re on fakking fire.”

  “Aye,” Jyme said. “I’m right behind you.”

  “We go again,” Nix muttered as he climbed. “We go again.”

  As they ran for the clock, Nix played out the next steps in his mind. Likely they’d have to climb and the creature would be hard after them. Maybe it could climb, maybe it couldn’t. Nix would assume it could. The tower thinned as it rose, giving it a favorable incline. And the unusual bricks that composed it made for a scalable surface. Odd that he’d never heard of anyone climbing it, not even on a drunken dare. He started shedding gear as he ran, small blades, pouches.

  “Keep a weapon, but get rid of everything else you can. We’ll need to climb.”

  “Climb?” Jyme said, huffing at their pace. “The clock? Are you mad?”

  “You said you could climb,” Egil said, a smile in his tone.

  “I showed I could climb,” Jyme said defiantly.

  “Just lose what you don’t need,” Nix said, dropping another belt pouch. “No stopping at all when we reach the clock. We go up.”

  Jyme and the priest hopped and skipped as they went, to allow them to drop or cut loose equipment. The pedestrians on the street watched them pass with bemused expressions.

  “Why up and not in?” Jyme asked.

  “We know there’s no way in,” Egil said. “Tried it before.”

  “Aye,” Nix said, recalling the night when he and Egil, half-drunk, had tried to find a way in. “There probably is no in. There’s just up.”

  “To what?” Jyme asked.

  Nix didn’t bother answering. He was operating as much on faith as reason. If he ended up being wrong, they’d all die.

  “Up to where, Nix?” Jyme asked again.

  Nix didn’t look at him. “You ever see anyone climb that clock, Jyme? No? Me either. Just trust me, yeah?”

  To that, Jyme didn’t answer.

  They reached the clock, the twisting white spire seated on a foundation of stacked gray slabs of stone, a monumental finger pointing at the sky. Nix looked up, past the gongs that belted it three-quarters of the way up, to the four-pronged pinnacle.

  “The top,” Nix said. “The very top.”

  Without further ado they started climbing, Nix in the lead, then Egil, then Jyme. The wind would pick up once they broke above the city’s rooflines.

  “Follow my path,” Nix said. “I’ll get us lee of the wind.”

  The tower’s face provided ample hand and footholds and they made rapid progress. Twenty paces up Nix circled left as he ascended, to keep the worst of the wind from them. Another ten and the city lay out below them: its tangled, nonsensical streets, the huge stone span of the Archbridge, the wide brown ribbon of the Meander.

  Screams from below drew their attention. The creature was coming. Nix could see it moving at speed down the avenue, pedestrians parting around it like water around a stone.

  “Faster,” Nix said.

  The creature reached the clock and looked up, its face still shrouded in its hood. It screamed at them, the particulars of the sound lost to wind and distance. It felt along the foundation, found a grip, and heaved itself up, another, another, and soon had a rhythm, ascending rapidly.

  Nix looked up, past the gongs, to the uttermost top of the clock. He convinced himself the point at the top had to be significant, had to be the Fulcrum.

  “Climb,” he said.

  Hand, foot, lift, hand, foot, lift.

  The creature came up fast, very fast. It was well that they’d had such a large head start or it would have caught them quickly.

  “No panic,” Egil said. “Steady and sure but quick.”

  “Aye,” Jyme said from below him.

  Hand, foot, lift. Hand, foot, lift.

  The creature was gaining, its slobbery words carrying up to them over the wind.

  Nix kept going, felt the grit of the stone under his fingers and just kept climbing, as fast as he dared but not so fast as to risk a slip. A crowd had gathered in the street below, faces looking up, arms pointing.

  By the time they reached the gongs, the creature was closer still. The gongs, along with the geared hammers that struck the hours, hung from a metal apparatus that jutted out from the stone of the tower’s façade. Nix looked at them to see if he could see an easy way to release a gong to fall on the creature, but he would’ve needed a blacksmith’s tools and time to get through the chains and metal arms on which the round slabs of metal hung.

  “Little farther,” Nix said, sweating, his shoulders and fingers aching, going past the gongs.

  “Best hurry,” Egil said.

  “Move!” Jyme said.

  Nix glanced down, saw that the creature was maybe ten paces below them, less perhaps, and coming up fast. It growled and muttered as it came.

  Nix put it out of his mind, got his hands on the lip of the pinnacle, and heaved himself up.

  He didn’t know what he expected to find, but finding nothing wasn’t what he’d imagined. Framed by the four corner spires, the top of the tower was just a concave stone surface shielded from the wind. Bird shit dotted it here and there. A spiderweb fluttered in one corner. Leaves had collected in a small pile in another. He stood there, looking around, lost.

  “Is it there? Is it?” Egil called, the priest’s hands cresting the lip. He pulled himself up, staring around. Nix stood in the center, hands slack. He saw nothing that could be taken for the Fulcrum.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said.

  The creature’s babbling carried up, the sound ominously close and getting louder.

  Jyme’s head came over the edge, his eyes wide, face flush and slick with sweat.

  “Did we—?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nix said. “Shite, I’m sorry.”

  Jyme’s expression fell. He looked up sharply. “The plates?”

  At first Nix didn’t take Jyme’s point, but then he understood. He opened the flap of his satchel, saw that the characters on the plates were glowing brighter, that the plates themselves were vibrating more noticeably.

  “That’s it, Jyme!”

  Nix looked a smile at him and Jyme’s eyes went wide with terror as the creature below him forcefully tore him loose from the wall and Jyme vanished from sight. His prolonged scream carried up as he fell.

  One of the creature’s hands, covered in calluses and scales an
d filth, the nails yellow and long, appeared over the edge.

  Nix hurriedly pulled out the plates while Egil drew his hammers.

  “We go again,” Nix said, pulling out the plates and watching the veil of the world fall away. “We go again.”

  —

  Nix put his hands on the lip of the tower’s pinnacle. The creature babbled and moaned below them, coming up fast.

  “Go, Nix!” Jyme said.

  Nix felt the plates vibrating in the satchel, like it contained a swarm of bees. He knew he’d been right. He heaved himself and rolled onto the top of Ool’s clock, the dawn painting the sky in orange and red. Jyme, breathing hard, pulled himself up after and drew his sword.

  “Help Egil,” Nix said, and opened his satchel and took out the plates.

  Jyme fell backward with the effort of heaving Egil over the edge of the tower’s top. Egil had his hammers drawn in an instant. The mutterings of the creature grew in volume.

  “Stopstopstopstop,” it said, getting closer.

  Egil looked over the edge, hands white around the hafts of his hammers. “We face it here as it climbs. We knock it down and earn ourselves some time.”

  Nix had the plates in hand. They felt slippery in his grasp. They vibrated and hummed and the characters on them glowed as if they were aflame. He became conscious of a sound, like the roar of distant surf, growing louder, louder. His vision blurred, the entire world around him becoming indistinct. A bout of dizziness caused him to wobble.

  He was cursing, cursing.

  The sound of surf was coming from the plates, the hum getting louder, the tide of magic building.

  Instead of ambushing the creature as it came over the lip of the pinnacle, Jyme and Egil fell to their knees, holding their hands to their ears, shouting something. The roar of the creature cut through the tumult, too, as it heaved its huge body over the side of the tower.

  And the world spun and twisted and blurred and transformed and Nix screamed and shouted and feared he would vomit and the world dissolved and he closed his eyes and tried to stay on his feet while the plates thrummed and sang.

  —

  Nix felt a flurry of motion, not so much like he was moving, but rather like the world was moving under and around him. He felt dizzy, felt as if he were light and floating, or maybe falling. The sensation left him unmoored for a breath. He gasped, opened his eyes, and found himself standing on weak legs in a vaulted chamber of smooth dark metal. The still air felt heavy, thick in his lungs. The smell of ages seemed to hang in that air, stale and brittle.

  Engravings were etched into the walls, seemingly by different hands, in different styles, but all of it depicting what Nix assumed to be people and events and creatures from other worlds, other times.

  A column of translucent light, two paces in diameter, descended from a source high in the ceiling, ringing a declivity in the metal floor, a socket into which a man could stand—the Fulcrum, Nix assumed—the motionless center of the world.

  Jyme and Egil lay on the floor beside him, both of them groaning. The creature was ten paces away, already on all fours, already getting to its feet. It looked up and saw Nix from out of the depths of its hood and roared. The plates, still in Nix’s hands, keened at a high pitch, vibrated like plucked strings.

  “Givegivegiveusthespell!” it shouted, its voice many voices. Nix considered making a dash for the Fulcrum, trying to complete the casting before the creature could get to him, but it might reach him first. Or Nix might get the casting done but not before it killed Egil or Jyme, in which case the casting would be for nothing more than another run-through.

  Nix pulled Jyme to his feet while he nudged Egil with his boot.

  “Get up!” Nix said to them. “Jyme, you’re doing the spell. Egil and I will buy you time.”

  “What?” Jyme asked. “What?”

  “You heard me,” Nix said, and shoved the plates into Jyme’s hands. “Egil, get up!”

  The priest mumbled and rose, hammers in hand. Nix drew his falchion.

  The creature reared to its full height, clenched its fists.

  “Go, Jyme,” Nix said. To Egil he said, “Yeah?”

  Egil banged the heads of his hammers. “Yeah.”

  The creature charged them. They spaced themselves and readied for blood, as they had countless times before.

  —

  Jyme took the plates—they felt slippery, as though coated in oil, and vibrated in his hands—and ran for the column or light or whatever the Hells it was. A voice sounded in his head, very much like his own.

  “No more. Pay the price. No more. Pay the price.”

  Behind him the creature growled and he heard the impact of blades on flesh, heard Nix curse, heard Egil snarl, heard the sound of something heavy slamming into flesh.

  “Stopstopstop!” the creature said.

  “Egil!” Nix exclaimed.

  Jyme glanced back and saw the creature stomp on a prone Nix, crushing bones and organs, Nix screaming as he exploded like an overripe fruit. The creature started toward Jyme but Egil bounded before it.

  “Oh, no,” the priest said, his voice hard and sharp. “You get me first, Thing.”

  The creature threw back its head and roared, its hood falling away to reveal the deformed bulb of its head. Misplaced mouths, crooked rotting teeth, three dotting eyes, two overlarge vertical slits that must have served as its nose.

  “Freeusfreeusfreeus,” it said.

  Egil hefted his hammers. “I intend to do just so.”

  Jyme glanced at Nix’s broken body, the crimson paste of his innards staining the floor around his body.

  The creature roared and took a step toward Egil, another.

  Egil gave no ground. He spoke over his shoulder to Jyme. “Everything the same,” Egil said over his shoulder. “Small changes at most. We go again.”

  Jyme remembered the plan. It felt like it had been written on the pages of his brain, easy for him to recollect as needed. And realizing that made him realize something else.

  They’d done this before many times. And always they’d failed. His voice sounded in his head again.

  “No more. Pay the price.”

  The creature’s eyes fixed on Jyme and it charged. Egil, standing in its way, braced himself, his hammers whistling as he struck the creature’s head and chest. The blows hit with a dull thud, snapped and cracked bone, and would have felled an ox. But the creature merely endured the blows and lashed out with a ham fist that struck Egil in the side and sent him careening across the floor, out of the creature’s way.

  “Giveusthe​spellthespell​thespell,” it said to Jyme.

  One of Egil’s hammers spun haft over head and slammed into the creature’s deformed mien, shattering teeth and exploding lips. The creature turned to the priest, the wounds already starting to heal, and roared, spitting blood and saliva.

  “You and me aren’t done,” Egil said, wincing at some pain in his torso. The priest looked past the creature to Nix, back to Jyme. “Go, Jyme. I can’t hurt the damned thing.”

  Jyme nodded, his legs weak, and feeling as though he might vomit.

  They’d done this before. But who’d done it? Him? Nix? Egil? All of them, maybe.

  Either way they’d failed because here they were again.

  “Little changes,” he said. “Little changes.”

  The plates were fundamental. They could not be destroyed. And they always sought to return to the Fulcrum, to have their power expressed, to rewrite the world.

  How did he know that? Had Nix told him that? Which time through?

  Egil circled the creature, crouched, coiled, trying to keep it distracted, occupied. The creature tracked his movements, muttering, drooling, its eyes darting.

  Jyme turned away. Writing on the metal wall caught his eye, an inelegant scrawl scratched into the surface with something sharp. He cocked his head, digesting the words. They read: Jyme Ehren was here alone and he tried.

  He closed his eyes and stepped through
into the light, down into the Fulcrum, the socket of the world. The touch of the light caused his flesh to tingle. The moment he stood there he felt a weightiness settle on him, a responsibility, a sense of possibility that exceeded anything he’d felt before. He was connected to everything, floating on waters of possibility. He looked down at his hands, holding the plates, the glowing characters on them spinning, turning from indecipherable to the common alphabet.

  He turned and looked back on the words he’d left himself on the wall.

  Broken pots. Broken pots.

  He had used the plates at least once before and it hadn’t worked. Or maybe it had, inasmuch as they could. Maybe there was no way to do what they wanted to do.

  Worlds gone by.

  The plates could not be destroyed. The plates always worked in the world to return to the Fulcrum and be used anew. There was always a palimpsest, a leftover, an afterbirth of the creation.

  Jyme could not know if what he thought he knew had been with him throughout or if he’d learned it only in the latest iteration of the world. Maybe he’d learned it, or understood, only upon standing in the Fulcrum this time.

  Broken pots. Broken pots.

  Why hadn’t they remade the world and simply caused themselves to remember everything?

  Maybe they’d tried that and it hadn’t worked? Maybe they’d tried that and it had driven them mad or made them nihilists?

  The possibilities were endless, a spiral without end, the permutations too slippery to grasp or understand. Jyme only knew certain rules.

  If he wanted a world like his world, he needed to make only small changes. The world was remade via an exercise of will, the wishes of the holder of the plates. But how to deal with the plates, with the palimpsest, with the obvious fact that they’d tried and failed at least once but probably many times?

  And then he had it—understanding.

  And understanding made him weak.

  He looked up, watched through the barrier of light as the creature lifted Egil over its head and the priest, helpless in its grasp, looked at Jyme, a long look, a hopeful look.

  “Do it, Jyme,” Egil said.