So, this Randur wanted his mother to live a long time. Fine, that's possibly simple enough – a few months or a year at the most. He might even make her outlive her son if he was lucky. Randur had some charm, some vague charisma that appealed to Dartun. He would help the lad, but knew that the treatments would not last, knew that it wasn't a process good enough for himself. Dartun once possessed eternal life, thanks to the Ancients' technology. Once a year he had injected himself with a serum generated by relic-energy, a relatively simple procedure considering what else he had achieved – but now he was dying.
He discovered that the Dawnir relic technology was beginning to fail him the day he cut himself with a razor. Some time ago now: there it was, a red line through his skin. Standing up against the mirror. Candle brought close to his face. A line of cut skin that filled quickly with blood. Red liquid leaked into the sink, little drops of his own death.
He was suddenly aware of so many things that could kill a person:
A back-hoofing horse.
Disenchanted young swordsmen with something to prove.
Mishandling a relic.
Poisoned food.
There were banshees waiting at every corner.
He gathered as many of the relevant relics as he could find, spent sleepless nights in distant places until he could figure out what was going on and so prevent his ageing, utterly convinced that he could find some solution.
Some cure for his forthcoming death.
And he hadn't yet. At the time he wrote down his thoughts in a journal, wondering about the words lingering after he had gone: So how is it that I can still communicate from beyond the grave? How can I talk to you now? Words on the page, no less. Is this how we live on, in these little gestures? These trails left throughout our own existence – a note here, a pissed-off lover there? Something poignant we said to someone. Advice we gave. A joke we told.
Little pieces of ourselves donated to the world.
Is this what makes me live eternally?
Spurred on by these thoughts, and by the visit of Randur, Dartun went deeper into his labs to look at the Shelley tanks.
*
A darkened room in the deepest corner of his order's headquarters. To one side seven corpses were laid out, claimed from the streets of Villjamur by good old Tarr, but he had hopes for the ones in the Shelley tanks: they were not dead to begin with. The tanks were arranged in two rows, the bathtublike metal basins filled with regeneration fluids. Bodies lay submerged beneath, their lips touching underneath the surface of the water.
They were disturbed people, the mental patients, the radically disfigured, the severely disabled – people that Villjamur and the Jamur Empire did not wish to acknowledge, let alone look after. They had no opportunity to contribute to the Imperial system, and up until recently, they constantly stalked the backstreets with haunted looks on their faces.
He could imagine nothing worse than being forgotten about, than being shunned by every face that he ever looked at. One of the batch told him that when people would not speak to them, would not even look them in the eye, they may as well have been dead already. Do we rely on being noticed by other people to confirm that we are alive?
Dartun wanted to experiment on them: if he was successful, it would offer them a way out – if they could not die, would they be alive in the first place? He wanted to see if they could have their lives extended with his newly developed techniques. Then he could try them on himself.
Chemicals smeared the air.
Blindly, he lit a blue-glass lantern in one corner. Modified relics were submerged in each of one row's tanks, a faint purple glow shimmered above them: it meant they were ready. Riddled with pangs of anxiety, he walked over to the first, raised up on a waist-high platform, and the light on his face made him quite aware of his reflection in the thick fluids. Bombarded with test formulas, these bodies faced toxic chemical structures that no ordinary person could survive a minute of, let alone several hours.
Turning off the relics within, one by one, the fluids began to drain through thick pipes, polluting somewhere deep within the city. As the liquid levels descended, a male body was revealed, glossy and slick, naked and scarred with traces of minor operations and major rewirings – Dartun's attempt at preserving them. He plunged a syringe into its chest and within seconds it lurched and began to shudder violently. Its eyes opened and the figure clutched the air above its head, then gave a perversely bass baby's cry.
Dartun was ecstatic, drunk on optimism – had this attempt been successful?
It suddenly collapsed back into the tank, shaking silently. Then ceased to move at all, as lifeless as a pre-op undead.
Another failure.
He sighed, and repeated the procedure with the five other Shelley tanks on this side of the room, each one eventually falling uselessly into death. They should have been preserved, their internals had been rewired to prevent decay. He could see nothing but the futility of life in his experiments, and again he became depressed and sad. These people had no other choice and surrendered their lives to him, and he had let them down.
He could not even tell if it was good enough to convert to one of the undead.
Dartun was enraged. With only the dead for company, he kicked things about the room, and when someone from his order came in to see what was going on, Dartun indignantly shoved him back out again. He knew he was being immature and unstable, but that's what failure did to him. He hated it, hated that his own life was failing him.
Did anyone even think of their own death, or did they also assume the day would never come?
The days now seemed merely a heartbeat long.
All these failures had removed most of his options down to just the one. One decision, then, in honour of his recently acquired mortality: to push the limits of Dawnir technology to its fullest. If he was going to die, he wanted to do so as a legend – a name to be remembered – as a pioneer. There is so much in the world that he had spent his life detailing, and now he was going to put it into practice. And not only that, but he needed to find some supreme relics, some intense piece of technology. Because any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic – and he had run out of technology.
At least in this world.
SIX
Investigator Rumex Jeryd sat at his desk, feeling like a victim. Already he had suffered from the first snowballs from the Gamall Gata kids. The street, central in the Kaiho district, seemed to breed the little buggers, but he couldn't move home, no, because they'd only follow him. The weather over the past day or so had been mainly sleet, so where they'd found such a supply of firm snow, he had no idea. Either way, the kids had woken Jeryd up much too early. As he left his house that morning, he could see their little heads cresting stone walls, attitude glaring from their eyes, communicating with whistles and urgent street-slang he didn't understand, calls of 'Hey, Jerrryd, watch your back, yeah?', derisive calls of 'Hey, Jerrryd, where's your missus gone? You need us to keep you company? We lurve you, Jerrryd.'
You couldn't do much about kids like that. You could maybe arrest their parents, if they had any around, but the kids themselves would vanish fast through any number of broken stone alleys to avoid being caught.
Jeryd was old. He couldn't keep up with them. Couldn't keep up with a lot of things around Villjamur.
As he picked up a weekly news pamphlet on the way to work, he was shocked to discover that the death of the councillor was headline news. The case would now mean having to work with the Council, something he really wasn't looking forward to.
To his right lay a file, left for him by one of the night-duty investigators. It detailed yet more violence near the city gates and the immigrant camp. Two refugees had been seriously injured with sword wounds to the head.
