The creature slammed Egil down to the floor, the priest’s body visibly shattering under the impact. Blood poured from his cracked skull, joined with Nix’s.
Do it, Jyme.
It was for Jyme to do. Not Nix. Not Egil. Jyme.
Be the hero.
He briefly entertained the idea that he’d done this before and one of the changes he’d wrought had been to make himself a braver man. If he had, did that actually mean he wasn’t brave? If he’d remolded the clay of his soul to make himself brave, wasn’t he really just a coward?
He shook his head and decided he couldn’t let it matter. He was who he was, at least this time through, and he knew what he had to do.
The creature looked at him, all of its eyes fixed on him, its malformed shape diffused by the light into a blurry grotesquerie. Jyme stared at it for what seemed a long time.
“Is the palimpsest always like you?” he said.
“Giveusgivegiveususthespell. Freeususus.”
“What is your name?” Jyme asked, bracing himself for the answer.
“Namenamename. We are the Afterbirth.”
Jyme nodded.
“One more time, then, Afterbirth. And perhaps after that you’ll have your freedom.”
The creature cocked the mass of its head. Perhaps it understood him, or perhaps not. It scarcely mattered.
Jyme stood in the place that was no place, in the time that wasn’t time. He thought for a moment of Sessket, of Ziza. Those had been good months. Had they been there through each iteration, he wondered, or were they new? Had he made those for himself, too? He decided it didn’t matter. They’d happened and he’d loved her.
He formulated his thoughts, looked down at the plates, and started to read the words that would remake the world.
The Afterbirth roared, charged him, but it was too late to stop what Jyme had begun.
Little changes.
Little changes.
But not for Jyme. Not this time.
The world stopped and grew blurry, but within himself he saw with perfect clarity.
—
Nix dreamed of Jyme’s voice. Disembodied, it carried across a dark void.
“A price, Nix,” Jyme said. “That’s what we missed, or wouldn’t face. A price had to be paid. I think we knew it. I feel like I knew it, maybe on a previous time through. It turns out that someone always has to pay. The remaking is imperfect and something has to be done with the leftovers. The remaking works best when the price is paid willingly. That’s when the wishes of the caster are most fully realized. I understood that this last time. And that’s why I’m not with you this time around. I may have been a coward most of the times, but not this last one.
“I willed that the plates be secreted away, so that there won’t be another time. You’ll have scrolls instead, and they’ll be of no interest. I’ll keep the plates here, with me, in the Fulcrum. I can’t get out. The only way in and out is via the plates and the remaking and soon I won’t be able to use them. The price will change me.
“It’s funny, Nix. The creature chasing us, he couldn’t have used the plates he was after. The mind of the leftover gets too cluttered to use them, too filled with…everything. He was just desperate and hopeless and afraid and looking for a way out. I’ve given him rest, too.
“I’m leaving you this because it’s important to me that you know what’s happened, even if only for a moment. I’ll take solace in you knowing. You’ll wake and you’ll remember and then you won’t. I can’t let you remember permanently because then you’ll try to save me and the whole thing will start over again. I built this remembrance, and much else, into the remaking. Hells, I can’t be saved anyway. I don’t want to be. Egil had me right. I wanted to be the hero. I wanted a purpose. And now I’ve found it. Maybe you made me that way one of the times through, maybe I made myself that way, or maybe I was genuinely born that way. It doesn’t matter. I’ll stay here, apart from time, forever, and the world will go on.”
“Jyme?” Nix said. He couldn’t open his eyes. He existed in a void. “Can you hear me? Don’t do this.”
“Goodbye, Nix. We were friends through many worlds. I’m glad of that.”
“Jyme, don’t!”
—
Nix opened his eyes to see blue sky above, clouds, a lone gull winging along. He blinked. His eyes were crusty, stinging. Jyme’s words echoed in his brain. His head felt thick, like it was filled with feathers, like a doll’s head. For a moment he could not remember where he was, who he was, his mind seemed empty of everything….
The tide of memories came in, the events at the Fulcrum, the creature, Egil, Jyme. He’d been crushed, a sharp blast of pain. He sat up with a gasp, blinking in the sun. His ribs, his body…
…did not pain him.
He prodded his abdomen and found the bones were healed. He looked at his arms, took the measure of his frame. No wounds. He smelled the Meander and the faint familiar rot of the Deadmarsh.
He shielded his eyes and looked north. Dur Follin’s walls rose gray and dark in the distance, maybe a long crossbow shot away. He was sitting on the grass beside the southern road, the Meander to his right, its sluggish brown waters making their way south. Egil lay still near him. He saw no sign of Jyme. But then he wouldn’t.
“Fakking heroic-minded idiot,” Nix said, meaning Jyme, as he scrambled to Egil’s side and shook him, fearing him dead. Egil groaned. Nix kept shaking him.
“Get up,” Nix said. “Jyme has done something stupid.”
“Enough,” Egil finally said, pushing Nix’s hands away, opening his eyes, and sitting up. “Stupid you said?”
Nix sat back and nodded.
Egil ran his hand over the tattoo on his pate, squinted in the sun. “That’s Dur Follin. What happened?”
Nix was still working it through, though realization was dawning.
“Jyme happened.” He looked hard at Egil. “Because you told him, too.”
Egil’s thick lips pursed. He nodded. “You’re right. But I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t want to hear. He wanted to be the hero, and so he was.”
“Damn it,” Nix said. “We had an agreement. All of us or none.”
Egil just stared at the Meander. “Couldn’t be done that way. He must have realized it and…made a different decision.”
“He brought us back,” Nix said. “Saved everything.”
“He did,” Egil said.
“And we remember it all.”
Egil nodded. “We said we wanted to.”
“I’m not as sure now,” Nix said, feeling unmoored.
“Nor I,” Egil agreed.
“Is this even real?”
“Real…” Egil shook his head. “Real enough, I guess. How can we even ask the question now that we know what we know?”
“That supposed to be flippant or profound?”
“Fak if I know,” Egil said. “I mean that, too. I don’t know, Nix. I don’t know that there is a ‘real’ at all.”
Neither did Nix. Know and real seemed useless words. How could they know anything, ever? It was all relative, wasn’t it?
Other than what he felt. That was real. Whatever it was built on, truth, lies, fiction, the feelings were real. He held on to that, dug his fingers in and held on tight.
“The world is made and unmade with words,” Nix said softly. “Fakking wizards.”
“Aye that. But then you were almost a wizard yourself till you quit.”
“I was expelled,” Nix said, the words a reflex. He sighed. “Drink?”
“Gods. Several.”
“And so the world is righted,” Nix said, thinking of Jyme. “Maybe. Let’s go see what Jyme got up to.”
They stood and the moment they did Nix remembered Jyme’s words.
“You’ll remember and then you won’t.”
He cursed, looked at Egil. He felt wobbly, dizzy, and a rushing sound filled his ears. He put his palms to the sides of his head, fell to his knees, groaning. He was vagu
ely conscious of Egil beside him, doing the same.
“No, no, no, no!” Nix shouted.
The world spun, grew dim, darker. He cursed, fell, and the world went dark.
—
Nix woke to Egil’s snores. He opened his eyes and found himself staring up at the night sky. The murmur of the Meander’s current carried from his left, the sound of crickets and insects.
He sat up and looked around, confused.
Egil lay beside him sleeping, snoring, stinking of alcohol. Nix prodded him awake. The priest grunted, stirred, and opened his eyes.
“I’m sleeping,” he said.
“Get the fak up,” Nix said, and stood.
Dur Follin’s walls rose in the distance, lantern lights glowing at intervals along them. Lamps and torchlight glowed the length of the Archbridge, which spanned the dark, slow-moving Meander. The sound of instruments carried intermittently on the wind.
Egil, groaning and creaking, rose and stood beside him.
“What the fak are we doing out here?” Egil said. “The last two days are…?”
“Gone?” Nix asked. “Likewise. I’ll wager ale and women fit in somewhere. We got those scrolls we found in the Deadmire identified by Kerfallen’s automaton, they proved to be nothing, and then…?”
Egil shook the bucket of his head. “I don’t know. I do know an ale is in order.” He ran a hand over his head, sniffed, winced. “I stink.”
“No argument,” Nix said.
Egil took out the short wooden pipe he always carried in a pouch at his belt. He struck a match and took a long draw. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, “Whatever happened, I’m sure we accounted well for ourselves.”
“Little doubt,” Nix said. He felt thoughtful, melancholy for no reason he could name. “Put out that fakkin’ pipe, yeah? I’ve always hated that smell. Let’s get back to the Tunnel. Tesha will be wondering after our health, having been gone a day or two.”
“Agreed,” Egil said, and the two friends started back down the road to Dur Follin. “I have an odd thought.”
“That’s different than usual how?”
Egil went on as though he hadn’t spoken. “You remember that merc we met a long way back? The one who stayed behind in the desert after we fought that creature in service to Rose and Mere’s brother?”
Nix rifled his memory. “I remember him. ‘Jyme,’ was his name, I think.”
“Jyme,” Egil said, rubbing at the whiskers on his cheeks. “Aye, that sounds right. Wonder what happened to him?”
“Why in the name of the Gods are you thinking of him?” Nix asked.
Egil shrugged. “No reason. Like I said, an odd thought.”
They made their way to the road and back toward Dur Follin. As they journeyed, the sound of Ool’s clock carried across the distance, tolling the hour of the world.
—
The rush of memories and fragments and images and knowledge poured into Jyme at an accelerating rate. He paced the metal room, the room from which he could never exit, groaning and moaning and mumbling as the leftovers entered his mind, changed him. He stared at the wall, saw his words.
Jyme Ehren was here alone and he tried.
He was losing himself in the mnemonic flood. Struck with an idea, he hurriedly drew his dagger and scratched new words into the metal. He gritted his teeth as he wrote, trying to keep himself against the tide of voices that had begun clamoring in his head. He felt his body changing, too, appendages forming, mouths opening, new eyes blinking into being, feathers, scales. He could not hold on to himself against the tide and started to slip, to drift, to lose and to fall into the cacophony of voices and events and parts of people and things that had been imperfectly rendered in the remaking and so had been made manifest in him and he’d had a name once and he’d had a name once and he’d had a name once and now he was the leftover, the afterbirth, and he was the seal and he had secured the world and that is why he was, what he was, and he was alone and there was writing on the wall and a part of him recognized the words and he could read them but not understand them and he said them aloud and his voice was many voices.
“I…am…Jyme.”
For Jen, the Knights R&R, and the Ladies D and S
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Foremost to my readers. Thank you so much. And a hat tip and my most sincere gratitude to Ms. Brackett, and Mssrs. Leiber, Howard, Burroughs, and Moorcock.
BY PAUL S. KEMP
The Tales of Egil and Nix
The Hammer and the Blade
A Discourse in Steel
A Conversation in Blood
Star Wars
Star Wars: Crosscurrent
Star Wars: Riptide
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived
Star Wars: Lords of the Sith
The Sembia Series
The Halls of Stormweather
Shadow’s Witness
The Erevis Cale Trilogy
Twilight Falling
Dawn of Night
Midnight’s Mask
The Twilight War
Shadowbred
Shadowstorm
Shadowrealm
The Sundering
The Godborn
Anthologies and Collections
Ephemera
Realms of Shadow
Realms of Dragons
Realms of War
Sails and Sorcery
Horrors Beyond II
Worlds of Their Own
Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL S. KEMP is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Star Wars: Crosscurrent, Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived, and Star Wars: Riptide, as well as numerous short stories and fantasy novels, including The Hammer and the Blade and A Discourse in Steel. Paul S. Kemp lives and works in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with his wife, children, and a couple of cats.
paulskemp.com
Facebook.com/paulskemp
@Paulskemp
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Paul S. Kemp, A Conversation in Blood
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