The Cycle
The Cycle
A.R. Knight
Copyright © 2017 by A.R. Knight
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-946554-11-6
Print ISBN: 978-1-946554-12-3
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Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
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About the Author
Acknowledgments
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The Mercenaries Trilogy
The Metal Man
Wild Nines
Dark Ice
One Shot
The Riven Trilogy
Riven
The Cycle
Spirit’s End
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For Justin
Chapter 1
Selena hacked the dead man with her cleaver. The spirit was young, cloaked in hospital rags, and vicious. Blue flames poured from the edges Selena’s weapon and curled around the spirit’s snarling body. His eyes glazed over into blank nothing. Then I snapped my lash.
My lash whipped forward and snagged the outstretched arm of another spirit reaching for Selena’s neck. Gnarled hands betraying the spirit’s own mind, her perception of herself as she crossed to Riven an old woman. Also wearing a hospital gown. As were all the spirits in the courtyard, near the large palace where Alec and I had fought a ghoul not too many nights ago.
“Behind,” I said, and Selena whirled, going low with her cleaver while I held the spirit back. Selena made contact and the spirit howled her rage before the pale fire burned it away.
“You can’t forget that,” I said. “Your back is always vulnerable.”
“Not when you’re around,” Selena said, giving me a quick smile. Not much time for talking. More spirits climbed out of the breach, a glowing pit on the flagstones in front of us that, like a pond reflecting the sky, showed a hospital ward on the other side.
A containment unit housing so many dying from the disease. They called it the flu, and it was wrecking the world. It would wreck this one too if we didn’t close the breaches fast enough. To my right, a pair of spirits worked together to annihilate their brethren.
Graham, looking like an out-sized carnival barker and sporting a spiked hammer, swept raging spirits aside with long swings. That gave space for Katherine to work, her hooked batons carving up and propelling her from one spirit to the next, wrapping each one in blue flame as she moved.
“It’s almost ready,” Anna said from my left. She held a tablet with a blue sapphire in the middle. A device centuries older than I was, a product of unknown creation that had been passed from guide to guide and now found itself in the hands of a former sneak.
“On it,” I said, grabbing my large crossbow from its holster on my back. With Selena providing cover, I clicked the lever on the left side of the stock to load up bolts tinged with blue, and then turned the right crank. Slotted one, aimed, and shot a spirit just as it turned toward us, its eyes awash with the same blue glow as our calming fire. The bolt hit the spirit in the chest and fire burst out, matching its eyes. But when the fire finished crawling over its body, the spirit’s eyes were plain, blank. Ready for the Cycle.
Fired again, and a third time. Each bolt wrangled a spirit with blue fire. Each one bought us a bit of time. Brought us one step closer.
“It’s ready,” Anna said. “I’m going for it.”
I pushed the lever on the crossbow, switching to the normal, hard-hitting metal bolts. I tracked Anna as she ran towards the center of the glowing breach and fired at any spirits that came close. Each bolt slammed into and shoved away a pair of outstretched hands, wild and crazy eyes, and gnashing teeth.
“Back up!” I yelled to Graham and Katherine. Selena caught the words too, ran behind me, and kept going. They had to get out of range.
Anna reached the center of the breach and pressed in on the sapphire. It sank into the tablet, slick blue lines shooting out in all directions, tendrils reaching for the edges of the glowing portal. They lanced through any spirits, enveloping them in that same blue glow. The raging ones in hospital rags turned to simple bodies, standing there without a thought left in their heads. Other tendrils grabbed the edges and pulled them closed, shrinking the portal against the flagstones until, seconds later, there was nothing more than the hard gray rock of the courtyard beneath our feet. Another breach closed.
“It gets easier every time,” Selena said as she walked back to my side.
“These spirits were sick,” I replied. “Patients that weren’t strong. Some breaches are harder than others.”
“Oh come on,” Selena said. “Can you at least say I did a good job?”
“You’re getting better,” I said. “Still have to watch your back. If I wasn’t there, you’d have been caught.”
“Who cares?” Selena said. “I’m already dead.”
I shook my head. Didn’t have a good come back for that one. Just because Selena was a spirit and couldn’t actually die again, didn’t mean she couldn’t get hurt. Didn’t mean she couldn’t wind up broken and weak and waiting to recover. “Even if that’s true, I bet Nicholas wouldn’t like repairing all your stuff.”
“He lives for it,” Selena said.
That cockiness. That was a new one. An unexpected bonus of bringing Selena into the more dangerous parts of this life. She’d wanted to add adventure to her endless days in Riven and had taken to it like a rat to a sewer. I couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“Is that enough for your quota?” Graham said. “Or has Piotr increased the number again?”
“Still at one breach,” I said. Which was a ludicrous amount. We’d never had an expectation to close a breach on every night in Riven before. Normally, it was a set number of spirits. Three, four, maybe even five that we had to find and reduce to walking mannequins heading for the Cycle. That far-off place where Riven cleansed the dead.
“It’s not getting any better,” Katherine said, panning a slow look around the courtyard. “Every time we’re wandering around, there are more. And more guides to go with them.”
“Piotr’s been recruiting,” I said. “There’s no telling when the war is going to end. We’re taking everybody we can get.”
“Except for some people,” Anna said. She handed me the tablet and I slotted it back in my belt.
“I’m working on it,” I said. “Sneaks don’t do themselves any favors.”
“Not everybody can afford to be noble and righteous all the time,” Anna said. “Some of us need to get paid to survive.”
“The guides were always too stuffy,” Graham said. “All pomp. All bravado.”
“Quit it,” Katherine said. “You loved them just as much as I did. Besides, without being a guide, you wouldn’t have met me.”
“And then I wouldn’t exist,” I said. “Come on, let’s get back to the apartment. It’s almost time to cross back.”
Chapter 2
In the few months since we’d freed Graham, there had been one objective for the apartment: to expand. The usual routine was to clear a breach and hit my quota, and then come back to this place and clean the next floor down. Put in new doors.
Scavenge materials and work with Nicholas to prep the new living space.
The nutty scientist now had the ground-floor lab that he wanted. As we came back, Nicholas was audible from a block away, buzzing around with his machines. How the man managed to craft working ovens, generators, and other miracles from Riven’s desolate ruins stunned me. But then, that’s why I bound him in the first place.
The second and third floors belonged to Graham and Katherine, with Selena taking the top for herself. The tall and thin building now resembled an actual residence. We made furniture, stripped what cloth we could find in other places to put together bedsheets and even some semblance of carpet. The whole thing an exercise to make the spirits feel more like the humans they once were.
“Do you like it?” Nicholas asked as we walked in. He gestured to a far wall on which he’d carved a map of the city. Hooks, little spikes, were driven in nearly every inch. On some of those hooks hung glowing blue dots. “Each one is a breach. The stones work like your resonators. The breaches pulse a certain signature. A wavelength that I can catch with these little gadgets.”
The scientist held up what looked like a pair of beads fused together with a wire running around them. Next to the map Nicholas kept a bent metal barrel full of the things, with a thick lid on top. Nicholas led us over to it, continuing his explanation. “I leave one out, and when it picks up a signal, because every single breach is slightly different, the wire vibrates and the beads glow blue. Then I measure the frequency to determine the distance, and that tells me roughly where it is.” One of the dots on the map faded. “And that tells me when a breach has been sealed. Genius, right?”
“You never cease to amaze,” I said.
“So does this tell us where we should be going?” Anna said. “Or where other guides are more likely to be?”
Nicholas stared at her for a moment. Then hummed, tapping his lips. “I suppose I haven’t thought of that. Perhaps that’s the next thing. Find a way to track where the guides are going.”
“Now if you could do that,” I said. “Then you and the others would be safe.”
“The guides would be safe, you mean,” Graham said. The spirit wasn’t wrong. That spiked hammer of his could probably take care of most of the guides we had. With Katherine beside him, I would pity any poor guide that tried to wrangle them.
“All the same,” Katherine said. “It’s best if we avoid each other.”
“I love it, Nicholas,” Anna said and the scientist beamed at her. “Keep going. And, speaking of guides, it’s time for me to check out.”
“Anna,” I said. “Come by Ezra’s in the morning. I’ve got something for you.”
Anna nodded. Her exit prompted the rest of us to make our own. I went with Selena to the fourth floor, the top. I thought it funny how we’d filled the apartment with furniture. Things absolutely meaningless to a spirit in Riven. Selena didn’t need to sleep. She didn’t need to eat. She never, barring injury, became tired. No day to shade and night to light in the perpetually gray monotone of this world.
When you walked into her place, it looked, it felt, like a home in a world that needed none.
“You’re bringing her to Ezra’s?” Selena said as soon as we’d shut the door behind us.
“She doesn’t know yet,” I said. “But Piotr approved the application. She’s going to be inducted as a guide.”
“She already is, more or less, right?”
“If guides caught her in Riven with a weapon that could wrangle,” I said. “They’d probably try to blind her.”
“Sometimes I wonder if that would be so bad,” Selena said. “Never having to come back to this place again?”
I followed Selena through the living room, back to normal after Nicholas moved down below. Selena covered the walls with her black and white drawings, mostly cityscapes that Selena could see out from the balcony. Where we went now.
Off in the distance, over the gray tops of buildings, the occasional shower of colored sparks flew through the air. Guides communicating their positions to one another. Riven looked the same as it always did. Full of buildings with no real architectural pattern. Some bearing the pointed, targeted stone of centuries ago while others had the sheer walls and multistory design of more modern cities. Though no one could recall ever seeing a building come up in Riven, the variety of design made it hard for me to accept that it had all been created at once. One certainty, though; Riven was falling apart.
Walking the streets was a tour through disaster. Some buildings crumbling in their entirety, others only in pieces. A floor collapsed here, a wall knocked over there. The decay continued to spread through Riven. Partly due to the fighting; the endless waves of angry spirits trashing things in their fury until a guide put them to rest. Partly due to the mysterious, gradual decline of this place. A dying world.
I glanced up at the gray sky, a permanent mist blunting the white light above. Ash flakes filtered down around us; a constant presence floating along on a breeze that came from nowhere. Like snow that never melted, that wasn’t cold.
“It’s a gift,” I said. “Everyone else has to sleep. Has to dream. I get to spend these hours here with you.”
“You’re such a sap sometimes, Carver,” Selena said, but I caught her smile. “It’s much better now than it used to be. Thanks for taking me along.”
“You’re getting good with that thing,” I nodded to the cleaver locked into a holster on her belt. The jackets we wore, long trench coats that provided protection, weren’t always the easiest to fight in. They were heavy. The long sleeves and flapping cloth could get in the way. But Selena learned fast and she came with on all of our raids.
I wasn’t sure if my girlfriend being a murderous expert with a cleaver was comforting or not, but it fit that she’d learned to use the weapon that killed her.
“I want to go with you,” Selena said. “When you go after him.”
“We don’t even know where he is. Who he is,” I said. “I’ve only heard him called ‘the Master’.”
“We found your mother,” Selena said. “We can find him too.”
“So long as he doesn’t find us first,” I said.
“If he does, we’ll be ready,” Selena replied with all the confidence of one who couldn’t die.
Chapter 3
I jerked awake in Chicago. Even after years. I would fall asleep in my bed in Riven’s cloc
k tower, the base from which our Chicago guides operated, and wake up in a world full of color. With whirring machines and, outside the window, swarms of drifting zeppelins. The war burned abroad, and Chicago’s industries changed to suit the country’s needs.
I glanced over at the growing pile of mail underneath my vacuum tube. A funnel that sucked letters up from the street and shot them into my apartment. The latest paper sat on top. Above the fold ran a piece by my most and least favorite reporter, a guy by the name of Opperman.
“Death by disease, or war?” the headline ran. I skimmed the article, wincing at the endless hyperbole Opperman employed. Every battle a glorious victory or horrendous defeat. Every death multiplied to the thousandth in its cost to humanity. Every outbreak of sniffles the next doom to sweep the land.
I used to laugh at pieces like these. The ridiculous notion that that I lived in the world described by these pages. Not anymore. The articles weren’t all embellishment. They weren’t proved false by the facts at play. Opperman had finally found a world that suited him. One that brought more disaster every day.