Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams (21 page)

“Moron!”
Stanwick slapped his forehead with her open palm, “This isn’t,
‘what do you want to be when you grow up.’ I’m not asking you to
describe the most miserable path you can think of so you can piss
away the rest of your days until you wheel yourself into a
retirement home.”

“What then?”
David’s face was turning red, crow’s feet spreading from the
corners of his eyes as he squeezed them tight, trying to grasp what
Stanwick was talking about.

“David, I can’t
give you any hints here. This is your choice. If I put an idea into
your head, you will resent me when you suddenly realize what you
have shut yourself off from. You will be fast, no question, and
strong, absolutely, but what else?”

David let his
mind melt into itself, darkness folding on darkness. He thought of
the woods, the trees at Calvert, and the complete nightmare of
trying to navigate the undergrowth at an uncoordinated jogging
speed. You will be fast? Strong, fast, and uncoordinated sounded
like a recipe for disaster. As clumsy as he was, the ability to
avert tragedies of ineptitude was something David had thought a lot
about over the years. How could that be improved upon though? He
wracked his memory, certain he’d seen, or read something, somewhere
that would help him right now. The shapes in the darkness of his
mind’s eye shifted, separated, and started to move more quickly,
thousands of dark lines moving chaotically, but never touching.
Their movements reminded him of something, or rather, they were
trying to remind him of something specific.

He smiled as he
opened his eyes, and he felt a calmness so deep that it was if he
had somehow stepped out of his own skin, escaping the heady
cocktail of chemicals and hormones. He watched Stanwick’s lips
move, and heard her words, but she was slow now, and as David
focused his will, increasing the speed at which he sampled reality,
so Stanwick slowed.

“Not a bad
choice.”

He heard the
words stretched into a long drunken slur, and watched her hand
moving from her hip, arcing through the air, the fabric of her
blouse rippling slowly as she moved. She was going to slap him. He
could see that she was going to slap him, and as he moved himself
away from the wall, he felt sluggish, as if he was dragging his
limbs through a room filled with molasses. He pushed his head
forward, feeling the pressure of the air against his face, its drag
on his skin, the weight of his arms still dredging through the
thick swirls of nothing behind him. As her hand approached his
face, David felt the shift in air pressure, and he flinched, the
muscles in the back of his neck tightening, the warmth spreading
down the cape to his shoulders. Then the hurt came, starting with a
sonic boom, like a deep roll of thunder in his left ear, followed
by a burning agony spreading in perfect circular waves from the
center of his ear, reaching down to his cheek and wrapping around
his head. It occurred to David that the experience would be more
bearable at normal speed, and as the thought entered his mind, the
sound of Stanwick’s laughter pierced through over the ringing in
his ear.

Stanwick
stooped her head to make eye contact with David, who was wincing
and clutching the side of his face, “You know, I was aiming for
your cheek right?”

“That really
hurt!” David complained, immediately embarrassed by how whiny he
sounded.

“A car crash is
a car crash David, no matter how slowly you perceive the passage of
time. If you’re surrounded by a ton of metal that is buckling at
thirty-five miles per hour, you’re not going to be able to do
anything about that unless you’re faster.”

“You said I
would be fast.” David spoke calmly, deliberately lowering the
timbre of his voice.

“You’re fast,
I’m fast, it’s all relative.”

“So what? Now
I’m stuck with the ability to experience pain more exquisitely than
ever before?”

Stanwick
laughed, and turned her back, “No David, what you have experienced
there is a fairly low level function for the leeches, triggered by
the release of chemicals associated with stress and fight or flight
responses. You’ll find something that works for you, don’t worry.
In the meantime, I suspect we should push on with your history
lesson. The fact that you have left Washington will have caused a
stir by now, I’m sure.”

Brad Cobb squeezed an
avocado judiciously, then rolled it off the palm of his hand and
into the cart. He had shitty luck with avocados, but this
particular berry was destined for a Cobb salad, and a party of one,
so it didn’t matter either way. Every salad was a Cobb salad, and
Brad would remind himself of that, no matter how much bacon or
pulled pork spilled over the sides of his plate. Cobb worked out
though. Most days he’d spend upwards of ten hours on the job, three
hours in the gym, an hour at the range, and the rest of his time
would be divided between eating, sleeping, and gaming. One of his
colleagues had asked Cobb if gaming was a guilty pleasure, and Cobb
had explained to him that as a lapsed Roman Catholic, everything
was a guilty pleasure. It was partly true. Cobb didn’t make a habit
of doing anything he didn’t like doing. His job was a testament to
that. When the call came, Cobb walked away from his cart and made
his way towards the store’s exit whistling, already happily
resigned to the fact that something was going down.

At the office,
there were stern faces, and bruised egos. Agents McMahon and
Carmichael, two agents working the Beach case were MIA, and this
fact had not been picked up on by anyone for over twelve hours.
Heads would roll. A drive by had revealed that (contrary to what
the low-jack would have them believe,) Beach’s Toyota was not
parked outside the Beach residence. An attempt had been made to
activate David Beach’s cell phone, and this had failed. A warrant
was being sought to activate Stephanie Beach’s phone, but this
would likely prove pointless.

This was the
shit storm that was thrust upon Cobb, and he smiled inwardly. He
opened a manila folder and checked the duty log, noting that
McMahon had penciled himself and Agent Carmichael for ‘Clean up and
asset retrieval,’ which indicated that they had driven to the Beach
residence with the intention of wrapping up what they thought was a
dead end. He’d not spent much time talking to either of the agents,
but their reputation in the D.C office was impeccable. He hadn’t
had any involvement in the Beach case either, and up to now, he
could have cared less. Now though? With two field agents, and their
mark missing in action, it was starting to look like something Cobb
could really sink his teeth into.

“I’d been
beyond the walls of Allim once before. One of the many privileges
of being brought up in the science sector.”

“Into the
garden thing?” David asked. West raised a quizzical eyebrow, but
David didn’t care; he had made a decision early in life that he
would rather look stupid and ask questions, than stay stupid and
remain silent. He shrugged, “Look I get it okay, I get that this is
a big deal.”

West shook his
head, “I’m sorry David, I don’t mind the question, but it shouldn’t
be necessary. You’ve been tuned out, which is understandable.
There’s a lot to take in, absolutely, but I’m sure you’ll find that
if you focus for a moment, you will be able to recall the
conversation perfectly.”

David closed
his eyes and thought through everything that had been said, “So I’m
right … The Void Garden.”

West nodded,
watching David roll his eyes and sit back into the couch
cushion.

“The first time
I visited the Void Garden, I was seven years old, and I was with a
group of three hundred students from Arctum. A hundred or so yards
from the walls of the city, there was a precipice which overlooked
some thousand-foot drop into dense forest, and each child was
allowed to stand at the precipice for five seconds before they were
hustled back to the wall. If you were brave, professor Pirlek
Magren would hold the back of your clothes and allow you to lean
over the edge.”

“Did you do
it?” Stephanie asked, certain that she knew the answer already.

“I did. It was
a breathtaking sight, to be sure. Five seconds of absolute wonder,
soaring a thousand feet above the edge of the void garden, then
that gnarly hag Magren yanked me out of my reverie.

Stanwick
laughed, “Magren wasn’t that bad. She could only have been in her
thirties when you had her.”

West nodded,
“Honestly she might not be as bad as I remember her. The Matriarchs
set me up for thinking that every woman beyond the age of twenty
were gnarly hags.”

Stanwick
gasped, “How have we never had this conversation? They were just
normal women, looking after all of the children of Allim.”

“I was schooled
there, but I wasn’t brought up in the divinity Stanwick. From the
outside, it was all some huge mystery, and yes honestly, whenever I
ventured anywhere near the houses of the divinity, I saw a lot of
pretty rough looking women.”

Stanwick bit
her lip and rolled her hand with a flourish, “Do go on West. Regale
us with your tale of daring do and adventure, and make sure you
embellish it with as many chauvinistic motifs and ornamentations as
you can.”

West rolled his
tongue along the backs of his bottom teeth, composing his thoughts,
“On the morning of my execution, the commander of the Dannustine
guards explained to me that I would need to keep my arms stiff at
my sides, my mouth tightly closed, and I would need to walk
stiffly. Penitents, those people who were sacrificed daily in the
Zenith Pyres would be trammeled, which means their mouths were sown
shut, their arms were sown to their sides, and their legs were sown
together from their crotch to their knees.” West noticed that
Stephanie’s eyes were filling with tears, so he moved ahead
quickly, “Later that day, I woke in a tunnel beneath Arctum, my
head hanging between the bodies of two of the Dannustine Guard, the
glistening glardium floor reflecting the dim service lights.”

“What’s
glardium?” Stephanie asked, a slight quiver in her voice.

“Glardium was
the main building material used throughout Allim, an amalgam of
glass, granite, and ore. The most important thing about glardium
was the silica coating which was applied at the cold end of
production. It was almost impossible to scratch glardium, and
because of the coating, whenever two glardium surfaces met, an
ad-hoc communication network was formed.”

David sat
forward quickly, “Whoa there, wait a minute, are you talking about
fiber optics?”

West’s nose
wrinkled, “Not really. Fiber optic works using the transfer of
light. Glardium was a little more advanced than that. Most of the
people of Allim didn’t understand how the city worked, and to be
honest, even the scientists of Arctum were a little in the dark on
the subject.” West sighed, “I’m getting ahead of myself really. I
didn’t understand glardium until I left Allim.”

“I’m sorry.”
David offered.

“No need to
apologize. Where was I?”

“In a tunnel,
looking at the glardium floor.” Stephanie piped up, her enthusiasm
quickly rebounding.

“Yes, so I’m
dragged to the end of the tunnel, and the guards tell me that my
stuff should be on the other side of the door. One of them pressed
their hand against a plate, the corridor filled with light, and I
was tossed out into the void. Fourteen years old, with nothing but
a few changes of clothes and a couple of day’s worth of food.”

“And the
sticks.” Stanwick added, pointing at West with an extended arm,
“Boom!” she blew on the tip of her finger.

“I was getting
to that.” West glared at her jestingly, “It took two days to climb
down the precipice, and when I reached the bottom, I hadn’t walked
forty paces into the dense forest, when I was greeted by the site
of the Dannustine crest, flapping in the breeze, clearly marking
the site of a camp.”

“The camp?”
Stephanie asked, “Crackling’s camp?” She hid her mouth behind her
hand to mask her mischievous grin.

West nodded,
“Stracklin Tiarsis’ camp, yes. I suppose if I’d set off in any
other direction, it might have taken me months to find Stracklin’s
camp, but there it was, overgrown, fetid, picked over by wildlife,
but more or less intact. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I
found the camp. Everything about the landscape bent my will towards
that clearing, and I’m sure that the path I took must have been the
same route that Stracklin Tiarsis followed on his return to
Allim.”

“I spent a few
hours rummaging through crates and containers, growing more and
more disappointed. There was nothing amongst these artifacts that
wasn’t already documented in the archives of Arctum. The great
invention was born of Stracklin’s discovery that the glardium rills
were facilitated by the presence of microscopic organisms in the
water supply which ran under the tech district where the glardium
was produced. Fascinating, but nothing I hadn’t already learned.
Then, finally, I opened a chest which bore the runes which
represented Stracklin’s initials, and in that chest, was a journal.
Now mind, there were many of Stracklin’s journals in the archives.
I’d read them front to back, numerous times, so I knew as soon as I
opened this book that it was unlike the others. Filled with
illustrations of hideous creatures here, technical diagrams there,
and in the middle, a map, marking the path of the River Dannum,
it’s course throughout the void Garden, and through tunnels beneath
Allim.”

Stephanie
kicked the base of the sofa, and West looked up, “Yes?”

Stephanie shook
her head, her eyes wide, “Go on …"

West pointed at
his hand, “There, on the map, was a single rune, our word,
‘silinthalis,’ which could alternatively be read as birthright, or
origin. I read through the pages slowly, and quickly learned that
the illustrations, these abominations of nature all seemed to stem
from this point on the Dannum, this silinthalis. It was clear to me
that I need to find this point on the river Dannum; the origin of
his discovery.”