CONSTRUCT, Chapter One

Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six

CHAPTER ONE

Images crashed into him, lifting him and roiling like the drag of storm-swelled surf, like memories but somehow foreign. Amidst the turmoil, some few stood out, splitting through the morass of pseudo-remembrances, plastering against his waking mind.

• • •

        Cold eyes bore into his, so close he can see nothing else. Their color could be grey or blue, but reflect a silver sheen in the dim light. The voice coming from beneath them is little more than a whisper, forming words laced with malice. “You made it too easy, canner. You denied me my challenge, and I can’t abide boredom.”
        Fingers press against his chest, and coldness rushes into his core. Blue light floods his sight and extinguishes as fast as it came, leaving only darkness. Numbness replaces the cold, and his hearing falters. In his last moments, the distant murmur of conversation echoes somewhere above him, a second voice chilling him even through the spreading numb. “There’s too much. They’ll figure it out, and we’re out of time here.”
        “Then burn it. Burn it to the ground.”

• • •

        He lay paralyzed in the coagulating gore, unable to tear his eyes from the grisly scene. Her name eludes him, but her face…he can’t forget her face. Where has he seen her before? What had she looked like alive? Memories of fleeing this place dance at the edges of his consciousness. What drew him back? His limbs betray him, stripped of real strength.
        A noise pulls his attention, someone at the door. Thoughts of the consequences of being found here begin to erode his paralysis. His fingers twitch. Knocks at the door become more insistent, the urgent calls of the men outside unintelligible. Willing himself mobile, he manages to roll, still burdened with agonizing weakness. As he gains his feet, knocks transform into crashes, and the door bursts inward.
        Raising his hands to protest his innocence, his voice fails. Something strikes his shoulder, a ripple of weakness crashing through to his feet, driving him to his knees. Fires of hatred burn bright in their eyes as they continue hitting him, each impact sapping his energy—his life—away.
        His face comes to rest in a cool, sticky pool of drying blood. Again he sees her face, her eyes still pleading with him for help, just as they had in the last moments of her life. Another strike; everything is gone.

• • •

        The pleasant scent of wood-fire drew him back to consciousness. It reminded him of some far-off place, a distant memory he couldn’t quite grasp. When his vision returned, he couldn’t focus, the jumble before him a confusion of flotsam. Disorienting weakness hindered his movement, and a weight bore down on him that was not his own.
        An arm lay across his chest, disappearing under the heavy form of a downed bookshelf. The hand at its end was supple and young with fingers bearing scars of light burns, like someone who works with wax or molten glass. A pair of silver rings, together forming the image of two winged serpents locked in mortal combat, wrapped the middle two fingers. The cuff of a simple tunic was buttoned tight around the wrist. Past the cuff, the white cotton changed, sewn or dyed with a random pattern.
        The hand on his chest was nothing like his own. Softer and more delicate, it bore an extra finger opposing its thumb than the three that adorned his. His own hand was worked metal of burnt orange, like armor of copper or bronze, but his fingers moved with a subtlety an armored glove would not allow. Searching for any memories that would help him discern where—or what—he was, he found only a yawning void. Even his own name eluded him.
        He turned his head to take in his surroundings. Clutter dominated the small room, tables and shelves overflowing with books, parchment, glass vials, small dishes, and unfamiliar tools. Haphazard piles of items littered the floor. One of the worktables had been upturned, its contents a shattered mess beside it. Something obscured the tops of the bookcases at the room’s periphery. The ceiling itself roiled as though insubstantial, more gaseous than solid. Panic strummed a discordant note, shocking his senses back to focus with a terrible realization: The building was on fire.
        Smoke poured down the walls. Flames licked at the borders of the room, the crickle-crackle of dry leaves crumbled in calloused hands. He sensed the heat. His vision dimmed and his head thumped back to the wooden floor. Strength receded from him like a wave, then crashed back to wash away the weakness. Fear took over. I have to get out of here.
        Scrambling to free himself he found his left arm useless, offering no leverage. With what strength he could muster, he managed a roll. The dead man’s hand slid away from his chest and landed behind him with an unexpected slap on the wooden floor. A still-expanding pool of fresh blood seeped from beneath the bookcase. The pattern on the sleeve was not dye after all.
        A wave of sorrow and targetless remorse cut through his confusion. Was he a victim or an assailant? He shook away the thought—answers were for later. Fumbling the serpent rings from the dead man’s hand, he found they were connected in a single unit fitting over both fingers. Maybe it would help him identify this person and discover his own identity.
        His immobile arm thudded against his body as he rose, swinging from a crippled shoulder. He balanced above his feet, his stance weak. His movements were jerky and stiff; his joints creaked like a warped door on rusty hinges.
        The fallen bookcase blocked access to the room’s only door. Hooking the fingers of his good hand under the blockage, he widened his stance and pulled with every ounce of might he could gather. A subtle shift but nothing useful, the movement due more to the softness of the support beneath than the result of his efforts. Damn this broken limb! With two good arms I could make a solid effort at it. But like this…
        The floor floated and bucked beneath him as he swooned again and pitched forward to his knees. Tipped onto his good right hand, his defective left thunked hard on the wooden floor. The serpent ring skittered out of his grip. A haze slid in around his mind like the incoming tide, draining him, drowning him. He retrieved the dropped ring, clinging to the idea that it was important.
        He powered back to his feet. A heavy cloak hung on the wall near an upturned worktable. Fumbling it around his shoulders, he dropped the serpent ring into an interior pocket and donned the hood, clutching the cloak closed at the neck. Not much protection against fire, but there weren’t any other options.
        A tendril of the ever-lowering smoke caught his attention, twisting downward to slink away between the bookcases at the rear of the room. He lunged for the corner, probing the fingers of his right hand between the shelves, looking for anything leading to the opening that pulled at the smoke. When nothing obvious presented itself, he grabbed the edge of the corner bookcase and pulled.
        It moved.
        The bookcase did not fall as he expected, but swung outward on hidden hinges. Planting his foot against the neighboring support, he heaved. The effort produced an opening just wide enough to see into.
        Behind the bookcase stood a small chamber, no more than three feet to a side, with a low, angled ceiling and no doors or windows. Over his shoulder, the door had caught fire, hungry flames licking upward. Tentacles of heat writhed across the ceiling to consume the books on the top shelves opposite. The wood-fire smell now carried the sweet scent of cooking meat as the tumbled bookcase began to burn and its prisoner along with it.
        Inside the corner chamber, the smoke settled, drawn between the cracks in the chamber floor. He pushed inside, splintering the old wood on the backside of the bookcase with his metal shoulder. One of the floorboards ended short of the rest. Near the board’s end, metal glinted through a split in the wood. The split hinged open to reveal a large ring beneath… A trap door!
        A loud crash startled him as the walls and supports of the room, engulfed in ravenous flame, began to collapse. He lurched up, spreading his feet off his glorious escape door. Grasping the iron ring, he gave as mighty a yank as he could muster and… nothing. The tide of weakness betrayed him and the iron ring held fast, the wood of the false floor barely creaking under the feeble pull.
        The inferno clawed at his back as he moved in for another try. Shelves fell to the floor as their supports burned. Glass melted atop worktables that had become elevated pools of fire. Glowing embers of paper swirled in the superheated air of the oven-room. Flames touched at his face as the moving bookcase caught. He flinched away and dropped into a crouch.
        Gripping the ring tight, he uncoiled his legs and back. With a creaking sigh, the trapdoor swung upward. Elated at his success, he braced himself over the open space. The darkness beneath gave no hint to where he would end up. Couldn’t be worse than here.
        Even so, he hesitated, looking one last time back to the burning room into which he had been born. He felt distant, spying the flames through a looking glass, and his thoughts fell into a murky weariness. Slipping downward, he dropped into the inky blackness below. The trap door slammed shut as the room above collapsed into flaming debris.