‘What did you do to her?’ Fulcrom asked the room. Three of the cultists in the corner, busy tweaking bits of equipment, glanced at each other, as if deciding who could be bothered to give such a long-winded answer.
Feror stepped in alongside him. The old man was a reassuring face, as much as a cultist could be. ‘It was me, mainly,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s nice to know I’m not completely letting everyone down.’
What does he mean? Fulcrom thought, observing his nervous mannerisms that contradicted his confident words. ‘Go on.’
‘We essentially bathed her in a solution that speeded up her recovery at the… cellular level.’
‘What?’ Fulcrom demanded.
‘The little building blocks, which make us all.’
‘If there are any secrets you’re keeping from-’
‘It is well known in cultist circles. A lot of the enhancements we’d given her, particularly the skeletal alterations, protected her. If she was a normal woman, she would be dead.’
‘What do you mean by normal?’ Fulcrom snapped.
‘Without our rigorous enhancements,’ Feror corrected, and Fulcrom contemplated the sudden silence between them.
Feror continued, ‘So, what should have taken months of recovery, will now take hours.’ Feror talked about obscure things like oxygen flow, and to Fulcrom the science could have been magic for all he knew.
The important thing was that Lan was alive and would soon be back to normal. The cultists’ work done, Fulcrom was allowed to be alone with her. As they closed the metal door behind them, Fulcrom pulled up a leather chair alongside the surgical platform on which Lan was resting, and slumped into it.
And waited for her to wake.
*
When she was fully conscious and her drowsiness fading, with a beaker of water in her hands, Lan described the attack in full detail to Fulcrom, who stood alongside her bed and affectionately caressed the back of her neck.
‘It was a trap,’ she told him. ‘And it was definitely the anarchists. I remember them arguing how far to take the beating. Someone asked if they should actually kill me, but the woman in the gang — it wasn’t Shalev — she said that they wanted the city to see how vulnerable it is, and how normal the Knights are. That they had the upper hand. They wanted the bourgeoisie to feel scared again, to give people something the People’s Observer couldn’t twist into propaganda. She said they were using me as a symbol.’ Lan took a sip of water. ‘Which explains why they dangled me off that bridge, I guess.’
‘Feror told me if you weren’t enhanced, you would probably be dead,’ Fulcrom said.
‘Oh,’ Lan replied and appeared to contemplate the statement. ‘Perks of the job, I guess.’
Fulcrom smiled. It was reassuring, under the circumstances, to see she still possessed a sense of humour. ‘Apparently your recovery is going to be quick, because of these cultists. You’ve considerable value to the city, you know.’
‘I feel a little guilty, if I’m honest. Especially after seeing so many people slaughtered by the military, for me alone to receive such privilege just doesn’t feel right.’
‘The Emperor has invested heavily in the three of you. He’s simply protecting his interests. Nothing personal, I’m sure.’ Fulcrom winked.
‘You’re full of love this… afternoon?’
‘Nearly. It’s early evening now. You’ve spent a few hours in bed.’
Lan pushed herself so that her legs hung off the edge of the platform, and Fulcrom pulled the blankets up over her to keep her decent, should any of the cultists return to the room.
She gave him an intense look then, and he knew that there was a deeper problem, one that the cultists couldn’t fix. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m… I’m pretty sure they knew my past.’
‘Nonsense,’ Fulcrom reassured her. ‘I promise you, no one outside of the highest echelons of the empire have the slightest clue, and even then the background of the Knights is hugely confidential — just one or two cultists, perhaps; security is tight on this. They wouldn’t gossip.’
Had she imagined it? Her head was hazy from the beatings and the treatments. Maybe it wasn’t true. No one was treating her any differently, were they? And in fact the cultists had just spent their resources repairing her. She felt she should just keep quiet about it.
‘From now on,’ Fulcrom said, ‘I want the Knights only to work as a group, or at the very least patrol the streets in pairs.’
Lan creased her face as little fluxes of pain moved around her body. ‘I feel a little drunk. What did these cultists do to me?’
‘Saved your life, is what they did,’ Fulcrom reminded her. ‘It was Feror’s work mainly.’
‘Good old Feror.’ She gently eased her feet to the floor, Fulcrom clasping his arm behind her for support as her legs took her weight.
She let him prop her up for a while longer, and he walked her around the room in slow circles.
Soon he realized she was walking normally. ‘Do you actually need my arms around you?’
‘No, I can do this on my own — I just didn’t want you to let go.’ She smiled, stood upright, faced him, then with a sigh she held him, burying herself beneath his robes.
For someone who’d nearly been beaten to death, her grip was remarkably strong.
*
When Lan was well enough to return to her living quarters that evening, Fulcrom guided her home, taking care not to be too patronizing with his gestures. He found Tane and Vuldon in the company of Ulryk. Of course, Fulcrom realized, the priest has not yet found a new place where he can shelter. What better place than this?
He didn’t think there would be a conflict of interests — he was overseeing ‘weird shit’, as Warkur so aptly put it. It seemed more efficient to lump all the weirdness together.
None of the three stood up at the couple’s entrance. Tane and Vuldon were hunched over a table. The pages of The Book of Transformations, Ulryk’s copy, was the focus of their attention. The tome was surprisingly large under the mellow lighting, at least a foot long, and three or four inches thick. Sometimes Fulcrom wondered why so much fuss was being made over a simple book.
‘Investigator,’ Ulryk announced, ‘I was explaining what it was that got me into so much trouble earlier. I considered that such brave and skilled people might be able to help me… where we both visited.’
‘I was thinking something similar,’ Fulcrom agreed. ‘Though I’d only be able to spare a maximum of one. No more, I’m afraid. Maybe it’s something Lan could do?’
Lan nodded as she joined the three of them at the table. Somewhere in the distance, Fulcrom could hear the sea droning against the base of the cliff.
The tattered sheets of vellum were turned slowly, one after another, as Ulryk revealed some amazingly incomprehensible scripts and diagrams. There were weird woodcuts, parodies of real-life objects, creatures in perpetual states of change, and unexpected juxtapositions — couples bleeding into flowers into houses.
‘To the trained eye,’ Ulryk explained, ‘there are numerous glyphs, none of which are to be found in any other text in our world, and no more than seven per word. This is a special script, a special language, comprised of special letters, written in intricate code. It is an artefact of huge importance.’
‘Who wrote it?’ Lan asked.
‘Frater Mercury,’ Fulcrom said. Then, aware of everyone’s surprised expression. ‘That’s what Ulryk told me before. I’ve no idea who he really is.’
‘The wars you have heard about, where creatures have come from another world into ours,’ Ulryk said. ‘They come from warring civilizations, ones created by Frater Mercury. These civilizations he created millennia ago, in this very world. He is responsible for all you see — for life as we know it — and within The Books of Transformations we can be witness to some of his secrets. I think, also, that he has left such texts for wayfarers to discover, people such as myself, should he need to return to our world. I am convinced it is so. Now he needs to return. As islands of our realm are cleared of human and rumel life, as alien cultures swarm into ours to destroy it, we need him. And, as I understand it, things are far worse where Frater Mercury still resides.’