Resurrection

Resurrection is the second chapter in my upcoming dark fantasy novel, TechnoMage. Each chapter in this novel will be a short story in itself (I hope). The first installment of this book was The Speed of Dark and is featured in an earlier blog on this page.

Resurrection

Pain was everywhere. It reached down into Richard’s memories and pulled him back to the light. He could hear himself screaming: sounds which seared his brain as the unending light had seared his eyes and the hot gravel had seared his skin. But he couldn’t stop. The screams rolled out in waves, one after another, time and time again—until blessed unconsciousness came crashing down.

Tim fed them for months. Mother was pleased. One day, after finishing a particularly good roast, she even went so far as to say he tasted better than Becky. Richard figured that was because he was younger.

At night, when greasy rain fell on the rotting roof, creating phosphorescent droplets which occasionally fell on his skin and burned him, Richard would conjure up images of what his mother would say when the time came to eat him.

“Richard didn’t have an ounce of fat on him,” she would brag. Or, perhaps, “He made a fine stew.”

The boy could hear the smacking of her wet, red lips, could envision her licking juices from jewel-encrusted fingers, flat, black eyes studying each morsel as she calculated how to get all the precious meat from his dead bones.

On the days Richard wasn’t locked in the cellar, when his mother chose not to go foraging for edibles in what was left of the city, he enjoyed walking in the fields. Trees hadn’t yet recovered from the firestorm, but clover and hay and the like had come up greener than ever. He also watched dragonflies. They weren’t birds, but they were alive. And mother wouldn’t eat them.

Bright light behind his eyes. Voices in his head. The unmistakable buzz of an electric saw.

How strange. The world had faded for a moment, had left him feeling like he was somewhere else. Richard shuddered, gooseflesh rose upon his arms. Time to head back. Mother was cooking up the last of the Tim-steaks. She’d be angry if he was late.

The boy pushed through waist-high grasses. Poisoned grasses. Ones he’d contemplated ingesting on many previous occasions, as a way to bring about an end to the headaches and the nausea and the aching in his chest.

But Richard was more afraid of the dark than Tim had been. So, recently, rather than thinking about ways to kill himself, he’d begun to harbour a secret dream. Down in the black place that was now his mind, the boy was cultivating the thought that maybe, just maybe, he could find the nerve to make mother a dessert.

“Wake up seer,.” the voice rasped and rumbled. “Now, majicker, I demand it.”

Richard’s eyes opened of their own volition. The owner of the voice, he of indeterminable age, skin the colour and texture of pig cracklings, eyes of liquid fire, stood before Richard like some terrible combination of dream answered and nightmare delivered.

Richard wondered how this could be. He knew in his gut that he’d died on some hellish world, abandoned there by his young enemy, Jack Lightfoot. Yet here he stood, before his liege.

“How?” he asked.

The voice that came out of Richard’s mouth was not his own. It wasn’t even human, having a strange mechanical quality he equated with those telephone devices he’d learned to use on Earth. Richard attempted to bring his hand to his face. Nothing happened. He couldn’t move any part of his body other than his eyes and his mouth.

“What have you done?” he asked in his strange new voice.

“All will be revealed,” said the Old One. “For now, know that you have been resurrected. Understand that I have kept my word with you. Eden will be yours. Perhaps, in time, Earth shall follow.”

The beast came close.

“Right now, we need to speak about Lightfoot. Did he cause what happened to you? Is he, as I suspect, a throwback? Has he the ability to cross the void at will? Does the Godhead flow through his veins?”

Richard let his mind revisit the battle he’d fought with Lightfoot. The incredible power he’d felt in the boy. The way the young mage had straddled two worlds, and the ease with which he had tossed Richard across the void.

“I suspect that what you say is true, but I can’t verify. All I know for sure is the boy was able to pull me from this world and leave me in another. I saw him cast no spell.”

The Old One nodded, waved a hand, and the world went black.

After finishing off every hateful morsel on his mother’s bones, Richard had gone to the city. He lived off scavenged foodstuffs, spending his nights foraging under the cover of darkness and his days holed up with books he found in an underground archive. It wasn’t safe to be out in the daylight. Too many hungry eyes. Besides, the books turned out to be useful. Most were about magick, the chosen trade of his father and his father’s father.

The boy studied and practiced magick until his supply of edible food ran out. Winter was coming, and he knew that to further linger in the city meant starvation. But he’d learned enough by then; he was able to defend himself—after a fashion. Selecting a few of the more substantial books in his collection, Richard filled his pack with as many other useful items as he could find: a boning knife, a durable tarp weighing but an ounce, a lamp guaranteed to never fail and Devil Dust for starting fires. He then turned away from the city and headed south on a snow-kissed road.

Years went by as words roll off the tongue. Richard continued to damage his soul. He embraced evil, following the path his mother had set him on, a path which took him to many strange places. One of these was his father’s childhood home. Here he reclaimed a few of his sire’s prized possessions, namely a crystal ball and an unusual stone almost too large to carry. In another place, a village full of thieves and murderers where he spent two summers and one winter, the boy learned the importance of preparedness and forward thinking. He also learned to speak little and listen a lot.

So it was, that in his seventeenth year and full of well-hidden venom, Richard Bartholomew invited an old man to share his fire. They’d camped on an open plain, at the side of a dusty road, under a canopy of a million stars. Neither of the men had wanted to close his eyes on the majestic view, so they’d chosen to forgo sleep for conversation.

“There’s many a world under them stars,” said the old man, running a hand through his wispy hair. “And I met a man who claimed to have been to one of them.”

Richard had been intrigued.

“This fellow—called himself Herod—told me he was a trader. Said his family had been traveling between the stars for generations. Got around in some kind of iron ship that was lighter than air, if you can get your mind to believe it.”

“They flew through the heavens?” Richard asked in wonder.

“Never saw it,” said the old man. “But that’s what Herod claimed.”

“He had this weapon. It was a small thing you could hide in the palm of one hand. A thief took my purse one day. Herod just pointed the thing at him and the fellow was gone. There was this incredible flash of white light, then nothing. Nothing, that is, but the ground, my purse lying on it, and the thief’s severed hand attached. No blood, though. The hand was sealed at the wrist, smooth as glass.”

The old man gazed up at the stars and said, “I was a young man, I’d find me one of those ships, or I’d summon me a demon that had the power to carry me across the void. Either way, I’d get off this world. She’s almost done for.”

Richard, who knew a little bit about demons, listened carefully. Then, as first light touched the eastern horizon, he sent the old man home. It was a fine breakfast, enjoyed more because the old man had been well met. Once the feast ended, Richard put his new knowledge to work. He endlessly studied and practiced the magick in his books—long past the time when the old man was fit for eating. But he did it. He managed to conjure up one of the fallen Gods, and he bargained for passage to a new world. The deal wasn’t great, but it worked for both of them. Richard gave her the use of his body for a year; she gave him The Garden of Eden.

When the Old One turned on the lights again, Richard had his mind back. He remembered what had happened to him, realized he’d been reliving parts of his childhood, even understood that his new master had somehow brought him back from the dead. The questions remaining were: What was the Beast up to? How had the Devil found him? And as it had been through so much of Richard’s life—what price would he pay?

“Ready for that war?” the monster asked his vassal.

Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2009

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