Chapter One

He ran his marred fingers over the weathered script. The raised lines of ink pressed into his flesh like spears. The eight manuscripts in front of him aligned perfectly with equal spacings on either side.

Malmorthael coughed softly and glanced at the pooled wax to his right, at the base of the candle. He struggled to read the handwriting under the muted light. The edges of the vellum before him were decayed from handling which made some words indecipherable.

It had to be here. He turned back to the parchment and ingested the mathema theorem before him. There might be a connection between the tongue he was trying to understand and the equation. There had to be. He was running out of time.

Malmorthael hacked, coughing up phlegm. He wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand. He picked up the mucus and studied it. Wiping his hand on his enjil, he turned his attention to the equation.

Failure.

Sweat carved cold channels across his back.

Murderer.

His left hand spasmed, fingers curling like a dying centipede.

Leper.

His chest tightened like a trap, pain flaring across his left shoulder. Malmorthael forced his gaze to the parchment to count the words.

One.

Two.

Three.

Each number was a shield around his mind before the voices extinguished him.

The scars on his back tingled as he worked on the formula. The sensation brought to memory that day long ago of a new birth. He scrunched his forehead and commanded the memory to leave his mind then kept reading.

His mind became aflame with wonder as the equation revealed itself to his awareness. The theorem was expounding on a brief history of zero as it visualized in his mind. He marveled that zero had survived wars and various tongues until it came to mean nothingness.

He traced his finger over the raised script and reached back to adjust the blanket where it had slipped from his shoulder. Then he continued reading the scrawled handwriting:

“If the creation was without form and void, something must have come before. Our inability to conceive of such an abyss is”—there were words missing—“a problem with no solution.”

Malmorthael stopped reading and scratched at his right cheek. He knew that in mathema, one could generate all numbers from an empty set, but even that was not a void. He pondered if there could be nothingness before a beginning. If so, what did that imply for infinity?

Malmorthael rubbed his forehead absentmindedly as he closed his eyes. He had been at this for days and his head ached. He wondered if there was a connection between the theorem and the others that he had studied. He ran his eyes over the chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, and astronomy manuscripts before him. Did they relate to this concept of nothingness? Was there a connection between them that he was missing?

A distant hum rumbled the night like the horn of a umebuurm as it warned ships amidst the fog. His thoughts changed as an echo of the past. A disfigured face filled his mind. He remembered the enjag’s hideous eyes and its sickly posture as it had died.

Malmorthael crouched and walked from the rug across the hand lain stone floor, the blanket trailing behind him. He placed his ear upon the northern wall below the small cut-out window in the rock as moonlight streamed in. His chest heaved in anticipation of the threat.

A foreign sound like a hissing or scraping of metal startled him. He fell backward from the window, knocking over the candle behind him, and grunted from the open lesions along his spine. The flame sputtered. He hurried to right it before the rug caught fire. His mind raced. Something was watching him. Dread rose in his chest.

Malmorthael placed the candle back in the holder, and glanced at the wax that had spilled onto the cracked floor. Something had to be done about this problem or he would be exposed.

What am I doing? He needed to get it together.

The walls groaned as the wind beat against the house. The doorway shuddered to his left, pulsing forward and back. He reached out and snuffed the light. The smell of death and the taste of earth filled the room.

Foot falls thudded in front of the door. The sparse sections of wood in the house creaked like a drawn-out keen. A heavy rasping sounded on the other side of the door, growing louder.

Malmorthael held his breath. Sweat pooled at the nape of his neck, running down his back. The familiar pain in his left shoulder ached. His eyes darted to the sword resting against the post by the door. Wincing from the sores on his feet, he rushed to the door and threw off the blanket. He grabbed the sword with his right hand and felt strength.

He paused and scratched at a pustule beneath his forearm, with blue ringed fingernails, as he stood in front of the door to the south. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door, stepping into darkness.

Malmorthael stood, hunched at the spine and waited. The moon cast a sharp light that rippled across his back. The scars were like valleys among deep crags. His eyes tracked movement in the dimness, ears noting a slithering and still, he waited patiently.

A hissing infused with metal erupted to his right as a shape lunged from the shadows. He dropped to his right knee and threw his sword backward in an arc. A shape collided with it, sliced into two. A head thundered past, and the body slammed into his side, falling to the ground with a thud.

Malmorthael picked up the body and the head. A slow sigh of relief escaped him. He had not been discovered. Satisfied, he turned and returned to his house. It was barren except a table and a fireplace with a cauldron set above it. He set the creature down on the table and lit a candle. The light revealed the creature’s ugliness. It was almost completely translucent with tiny teeth and, he guessed, thirty tentacles that ended in rounded tips. They streamed from its face, covering the razor-sharp teeth. It had centipede-like structures under its coiled body and a head like a beluga whale with pale blind eyes. He had read about whales a long time ago at Ameth-Amir.

He surveyed the creature once more. This was a creature that lived in a fluid sack or a water environment. What was it doing out of its habitat? He shrugged. Then chopped the creature with his sword. He placed the refuse into a small pile and threw the delightful bits into the pot. He bent down, lit a small fire, and smiled. Breakfast would be delicious. He rested his hand against the hearth and released a long sigh.

Malmorthael wiped the sword on the skin hugging enjil covering his body before, setting the sword by the door. He glanced at the eight manuscripts. They lay on the rug before him yet one was out of place. He frowned, adjusting the spacings until they were aligned.

He cinched his tattered blanket around him, retrieving the manuscript—but an object fell from it with a thud.

Malmorthael’s eyes snapped to the tattered purple banner of the Banir strung on the wall, and then to the entrance. He listened to hear if anything stirred outside. The animal earlier was no coincidence. Someone was about. Of that, he was certain. After a few minutes, he relaxed, setting the parchment on the rug and reaching for the object. It was a small, crystal-like glass. It was two inches wide and five inches long, tapered like a stalactite that had broken off a larger piece. His fingers searched the crease but found nothing more.

He tilted it to get a better look. For a moment he saw a deep darkness. An unfathomable void before him as he stood on a cavern floor. Walls rushed in and bowed overhead. Splashes of color dotted his sight in flickers of red and grey. A large shape hung in the air over a marching army with words written beneath them. Below the words was a circle partially broken with flowing script on either side, raised in vicious curves and lines. Then the vision was gone.

Malmorthael squeezed the shard in surprise. It cut into his right palm. He cried out, releasing his grip. The shard fell to the ground.

He pressed the wound shut to stop the bleeding as it leaked from between clenched fingers. He grimaced as he stood. Malmorthael looked down at his blood-soaked clothes and screamed. The theorem was blotted, ruined from his blood.

He hurried to a bowl of water, cleaning the wound carefully. To the left of the bowl was a small jar with a white powder in it. He removed the cork stopper with his teeth and formed a paste, applying the dried plant to cleanse the wound. He wrapped the wound carefully and when the cloth was tight, and he had inspected it, he sat on the small wooden chair to the left of the table.

Malmorthael rested his face in his hands. Pustules covered the back of them like a thick network of flesh in ridges that descended downward into the skin. The sores continued up his strong forearms. They were moist and covered with a mucus-like secretion. He had scratched the abscesses raw.

He clenched his jaw at his carelessness and flexed his hand. Anger hardened his eyes. He returned to the parchment, cleaning the blood splatters, until something caught his eye. The shard was resting in the middle of the blood. But it looked as if a form had been drawn on it. He squinted to discern its shape.

Thin wisps of fluids colligated on top of the shard, forming a U. Like an abstract drawing with thin lines that came together, with spaces between the threads, coalescing.

Malmorthael gnawed on his lip. How this was possible and how his blood had amalgamated into a distinct shape, he did not know. This was the third time this had occurred, the first being when he had been a child. He had thought it meant something then. Something he was supposed to do with this life, yet as time went on, there was no apparent reason it had happened.

He went over to the small table and the linen bundle on top of it. He undid the strings and pulled out a smaller shard. He brought it to the shard on the manuscript. Suddenly, it leapt from his hand, sticking to the side of the blood covered shard.

“They have magnetic properties,” Malmorthael whispered. “The odds of this happening again are unfathomable. What can this mean?”

He reached for the shard and brushed it with his fingers.

Profound darkness stretched before him as his sight vanished. A bottomless void surrounded him as he stood on a cavern floor. Walls curved and wallows of color filled his vision in spasms of red and grey. From the sides, obscure forms stepped forward. A luminous cry of many voices came forth from a shape hanging over an army, clothed in the greys of fog and shadow. Then the vision was gone.

Malmorthael slapped his cheek as his sight slowly returned. The same vision, again. What was this waking dream that plagued him? Suddenly, an odd sensation ran through his face, causing his right eye lid to twitch.

The eyelid quivered again. Panic gripped him. He glanced at his palm and saw blood had seeped through the cloth. Suddenly, his whole body shook. In agony he fell to the floor. Something had laced the shard. His eyes moved rapidly, and he saw only brief flashes of light. His limbs seized, teeth grating as he struggled for control. His thoughts became jumbled.

He quaked on the stone floor for long moments. His eyes struggled to focus. Everything he had ever read, ran through his addled mind. He swam in and out of consciousness. Then through the mental fog, on the outskirts of the dark circle at the edge of his mind, he heard a voice speak, like a pinprick of light breaking through his thoughts.

“Malmorthael”.

“Father,” Malmorthael cried and fainted.