Knowledge Aforethought, page 13
“You would dare,” Death breathed at his wife. “Your antics have gone one step too far, this time.”
“My antics?!” Life laughed, the sound brittle. She ramped up her own power to meet Death’s halfway into the square and they mingled together, too overwhelming for anything—plant or stone—that stood in their path. Life’s already everchanging appearance became harder to bear. Her beauty, her tantalising nature, even her scent, seemed to overpower my other senses so that all the world except for Life fell away. “My antics are what my nature entails! I am meant to be enjoying all of the things the world has to offer. Dancing. Partying. Battles. Arguments. Passion. It’s mine and you can’t have it!”
“All things come to an end, wife, dear,” Death said, his own voice still deeply calm and cold. At the words, my breath fogged and my temperature dropped. I staggered to my feet, knowing that if I didn’t do something, this day’s destruction would only bring about a whole lot more in the future. I had to stop them now before they truly went to war. “And that is my domain. You have no place there.”
“Thief! You take everything that I love!” Life screamed, hands clenched into fists at her sides.
“Petulant child,” Death countered. He curled his lip in a look of contempt and I knew that things were about to get a whole lot worse. Death surged forwards, moving towards Life as if nothing stood in his way. Only, someone did.
A child, a young girl, stood frozen as the two forced converged on her. She had been trying to run for the tavern and safety and instead was standing directly between Life and Death. Charlotte was staring, wide-eyed, at the girl. Her sword was out and her feet were moving, but the combined powers of Life and Death were mixing together and affecting even her; she was too slow.
I lunged forwards, shoving away any lethargy, any pain that lingered. I could feel the blood dripping down my neck from where my head had hit some of the rubble, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the fact that the two most powerful beings I had ever seen were going to converge in an attack right at the spot where an innocent child stood. I forced myself to move faster.
My arms wrapped around the girl, too slow to push her away. All that I could do was flatten her beneath me, shielding her with my body, as Death and Life converged above me. There was a sound, like a thousand people screaming in horror or ecstasy. I couldn’t tell you which it was. Pain, worse than even I had felt when my soul was severed, flared through me. This time, the world didn’t turn white, it turned red. I opened my mouth to howl, but no sound came out. Probably because my mouth was gone. I was gone.
And then I wasn’t.
My body reformed, pulling itself back together from the depths of whatever oblivion I could never reach. My arms, my chest, my fingers, all of it came back together from a million pieces. Somewhere in my reforming, my mouth and throat returned so that I could scream. I threw my head back and shrieked to the sky, certain that this was my end. Only, it wasn’t.
I don’t know how long it took for me to piece myself together again, only that I was covered in sweat and blood by the time I was done. I panted heavily, all my muscles trembling. But—a miracle—the girl that I had shielded looked up at me, alive. She was a bit scraped from where I had tackled her to the ground, but she was alive and well.
I pushed myself off of her, sitting up. My clothes had been obliterated, but I didn’t really care about dignity. I forced my muscles to cooperate as I looked between Life and Death. They were both still, gaze fixed on me. Death could not seem to form words, though his jaw worked up and down. Life recovered first.
“Very well,” she said, pointing at Death. “You want my champion? You think you can keep your ‘appointment’ with her? Then you have to go through me to do it!”
Life moved, faster than the eye could follow. She appeared beside Charlotte who was breathing heavily from the residual power in the air. Charlotte’s sword lifted, the point tracing Life, but she was too fast, too powerful. Life wrapped her hand around Charlotte’s arm. “She is mine,” Life said.
Charlotte screamed, the touch of Life burning her even through her leather armour and clothes. Life tilted back her head and roared with laughter. A light filled the square, forcing me to close my eyes. When I looked back, Life was gone. So was Charlotte.
“You should not have done that, Cal,” Death said lowly. He was as close to angry as I have ever seen. “She was not meant to escape me.”
Then, in an absence of light that was as equally blinding as Life’s departure, Death, too, vanished.
Out of Time
The square fell silent. The people trapped there by Life and Death’s altercation seemed to hold their breath for a minute. Then, as if air had been sucked back into the world, activity broke out. People fled the scene. The little girl that I had shielded from Death ran to her mother across the square. There were few injuries that I saw; one man had a scrape on his head from where some of the cobbled stones had thrown themselves towards him. Another woman looked dirty and harried, but unhurt but for a twisted ankle. These impressions lasted only a few seconds, though, because the square emptied almost faster than I could blink. Then, I was alone.
“Where is she?”
Okay, not alone.
I twisted my body to turn and look at Mary and Machiavelli, who were mincing their way through the damage, looking a little distraught. Machiavelli undid his outer coat-tunic-thing and handed it to me. I felt a little bad, considering this was the second set of his clothes that I had ruined. I wrapped the garment around me, feeling all my muscles protest at the movement.
“Where is Charlotte?” Mary repeated, looking around more fervently. “We saw Life and Death fighting, and then there was a flash and then everybody was gone. What happened? Where’s Charlotte?”
I struggled to my feet, nearly crying out at the pain that lanced through my muscles. I could only imagine what it would really feel like if I didn’t have my soul running loose. “Life got her,” I said.
“What?” Mary stumbled backwards, almost tripping on an upset cobble. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that Life decided she would take Charlotte, since Death was demanding…” I stopped, unsure how to continue. Death’s words hadn’t really processed while he was talking, but now that I had a chance to think about them, I realised what he had been saying. Charlotte was Death’s appointment. The one that he missed. And she was the mortal that Life refused to give up. The whole reason I had been sent back was because of Charlotte. And the whole reason for the future relationship problems between Life and Death, it was because I had stepped in to save that girl when Charlotte was the one meant to do it.
It was my fault. It was all my fault.
I looked at Machiavelli, hoping that he would have the words that would make everything clear. He could explain it to Mary. He could make her understand.
He looked back at me with an ashen complexion. His eyes were wide and glassy and he wobbled in place. Machiavelli no more had the words than I did. He was nothing more than a regular, fragile human who had been pulled into a world that he didn’t understand. One that could kill him just as easily as breathing. His famous name and place in history had made me forget that he was mortal. Truly, completely, heartbreakingly mortal. And he had just seen the horrible reality of Life and Death laid before him. What had been a lark before had turned into something out of a nightmare.
I took a deep breath. “Charlotte was Death’s appointment,” I said before I could stop myself. I had to make them understand. I had to fix this. Which meant—
“No.” Mary poked me in the shoulder, the contact painful to my newly reformed person. Her eyes blazed. She took a step closer to me so that she glared up at me with all the hatred she possessed. “You’re wrong.”
“I saw it myself,” I said, holding up my hands. “There’s no way that—“
“You’re wrong!” Mary screamed. The empty square rang with her fury. She clenched her fists at her sides, her belt purse bulging with papers and charcoal, all that was left of her life. “Charlotte couldn’t be the appointment! She’s wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. You brought us here. You made us try to search for the person Death was supposed to kill. You did this!”
I stepped back, my foot coming down hard on a jagged edge of stone. I bit back a hiss and took another step back as Mary advanced. “I didn’t know!” I said, desperate to explain. I looked between Machiavelli and Mary, hoping that one of them would see the plight, see that I hadn’t meant for any of this to happen.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mary said, the sneer on her face doing a poor job of hiding the contempt in her eyes. “Charlotte didn’t deserve this. You didn’t deserve her.”
“She’s not dead,” I whispered in protest. Mary’s shoulders jerked, but the look she gave me could have easily levelled me flat had it been tangible.
“No, she’s in the hands of a madwoman. One who takes pleasure in torturing people, making things as difficult for them as possible. Do you honestly think that is a good thing?” Mary shook her head, not waiting for an answer. Instead, she climbed over the rubble and left the square, vanishing around a corner.
I looked beseechingly at Machiavelli. He swallowed, licking his lips, eyes darting from destroyed garden to upturned street. After a moment, he spoke, the words barely intelligible for being so quiet. “Perhaps we should leave before the city guard and the Medici mercenaries arrive,” he said.
I nodded and we two left the square, heading towards Machiavelli’s house. I received a few strange glances for my completely inappropriate attire, but no one bothered to speak to us, to stop us and ask questions. They were afraid.
“I’m sorry,” I said after we had walked for a few minutes. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
Machiavelli nodded, swaying slightly as he walked. He paused and leaned against a wall, a steadying hand resting on the stone. He swallowed again, eyes closed. When he opened them, the fear and emptiness that I saw there struck me worse than the open rage that Mary had shown. “Perhaps… perhaps you shouldn’t have gotten me involved in all of this. Perhaps I’m not meant for such things.” He took in a deep breath. “I just want to go back to how things used to be.”
I reached out, wanting to place a comforting hand on his shoulder. I pulled back a moment later, unable to bear the thought if he flinched away. Instead, we started walking again, moving quickly through the streets so that people wouldn’t stare any longer.
I felt a thick sludge settle on my stomach, the emptiness I had pushed aside for perhaps longer than I cared to admit. I was in a time without my usual resources. My friends—people I hadn’t realised I missed until just now—were sitting in an office a few thousand miles and several centuries away, laughing together. So what if Yolanda was a rock troll and Agravaine an aggravating air elemental? So what if I worked in marketing for beings of magic? Any of that would be better than being here, where I had messed up so thoroughly that all friendships I had made withered away before my eyes.
Charlotte had been taken and was enduring who knows what horrors. Mary—The Author—hated me for not only stealing her friend away but for the realisation that Charlotte was meant to be dead. Charlotte the Unkillable, brought low by a myopic PR agent. And Machiavelli, whose empty expression was almost worse. I had ripped the rug out from beneath him, making every certainty that he knew questionable.
This was my fault.
Everything was my fault.
And I was never going to be able to fix it.
Wisdom Comes with Time
Once we reached his house, Machiavelli no longer acknowledged my existence. He went about the motions of doing work, pulling out a quill and some ink. For the first time, I saw servants—two people, a man and a woman, who watched the strange behaviours of their master with quiet concern—and did my best to stay out of the way. New clothing, this time much more worn and slightly patched, was procured for me. A bath was heated for Machiavelli, but I made do with a basin in my room and staying out of the way.
After an hour of this confinement, though, knowing that the household would be much happier if I just vanished, I decided that there was little I could do. So I pulled on my shoes and slipped out of the house, walking right past Machiavelli. He just stared vacantly off into space, the poem on the page before him forgotten.
I left to go wander the streets.
The few coins that I had earned during my brief stint as a city guard—and grudgingly returned to me by the Church—had long since been spent on food and wine, the last vestiges of my fortune gone on this afternoon’s pity-feast with Charlotte, Mary and Machiavelli. And while I quietly craved the oblivion that I still hoped to find at the bottom of a jug of wine, the thought of interacting with people in a tavern sent chills down my spine. So, broke, tired and ostracised, I wandered through the city gates, promising the guard that I’d be back by dark.
A short while later and I found myself in the middle of a familiar field, a gorge and creek only a few hundred feet away. This was where I had first arrived in 1494. It looked so different, now. Instead of being terrible, it was simply calming and beautiful. Just a field in Italy, somewhere I had always wanted to go. It wasn’t the fault of Italy that I was such a cockup.
I looked around for mercenaries, wondering if they would remember me, and found nobody but a few crows in the trees. I wandered to the place where Machiavelli had helped me out of the creek and sat, debating dangling my feet in the water.
“It is peaceful here, is it not?”
I looked up, somehow unsurprised to see the figure sitting beside me. Unlike my hand-me-down rags, he still wore that despicably tailored suit, his expression just as calm and sure and arrogant as before. Time smiled at me, tilting his head back to enjoy the sunshine.
“Did you know that all of this would happen?” I asked, the hardness in my tone surprising even to me. Time chuckled, completely unconcerned by my rancour.
“Dear Cal,” he said, shaking his head, “you must be more specific. My mind is not always when you think it should be.”
I felt that same wall of rage rising inside me that had Death practically threatening me yesterday. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that just because I was soulless did not mean that I wasn’t in control. I was not going to give in to this situation. I grabbed a rock and threw it into the water, watching the resulting ripples and imagining my anger dissipating in much the same way.
“Did you know that my coming here would be the catalyst that starts the problems between Life and Death? Did you know that my friend is meant to die and that I may have sent her somewhere much, much worse? Did you know that I was going to break history?” The words came out in a rush, not nearly so furious as I would have thought. Time said nothing for a moment. I looked at him and saw that he was laughing so hard he had to cover his mouth to keep the sounds from escaping.
“Ah, Cal, how arrogant you are,” Time spluttered. “Do you think that such an insignificant force as you could break history?”
Heat rushed into my face, though whether from embarrassment or anger I couldn’t say.
Time shook his head. “I have met only one being who could change the forces of history and you are decidedly not she.”
“So, what,” I demanded, “this was all meant to happen?”
Time considered, tilting his head. He rested his weight on his hands behind him, threading his fingers through the grass. “Meant to happen? Is anything meant to happen? No, everything that you have done—and everything that everyone else has done—has been a choice. History is made up of choices. Infinite choices. And each choice creates history. There are so many different histories, some of them almost precisely the same, some of them so wildly different you would not believe it possible. Your choices brought you to this history. I had a feeling this might happen, which is why I gave you the advice I did, but I was not certain.”
“Shouldn’t you know these things?” I asked, not understanding. Was he talking about multiple realities or something? Was I meant to do this or not? If my soul weren’t missing, I’d have a massive headache.
“I am Time. I am not certainty. I am not the events that happen. I am merely the stream into which they fall and the ripples they create. This point in history created stronger ripples for your being here, which is why I knew to send you here,” Time said. His circular logic was bringing back that rage.
“So, yes, you knew—certain or not—that my being here would cause problems,” I snapped. “I created the rift between Life and Death.”
“There’s that arrogance again,” Time chuckled. He took a deep breath. “Life and Death are beings older than even myself. They are supremely powerful in ways that I think you cannot comprehend. You perceive them in a particular way, but that is only part of what they are. The rift between them, the differences that make them fight in such spectacular ways, that has always been there. This particular spot in history may have exacerbated the issue, but it would have always occurred.”
“Then why did you even bother sending me here?” I asked. “If their problems were inevitable.”
“Because of the possibilities I see before me, many of the possible horrible futures are changed if you are here,” Time said. I snorted and pushed my glasses up my nose.
“Weren’t you just calling me arrogant a moment ago?” I asked.
“Perhaps,” Time said. He flashed me another of those lazy smiles which infuriated me. I pushed the emotion away, the act easier now that I had done it a few times. A cloud covered the sun for a moment, making me shiver.
“Charlotte is going to die,” I said once the sunshine had returned.
“Everything dies, Cal,” Time replied. For once, he seemed to be taking this seriously, because the expression he wore was solemn, his voice respectful. “You work for Death. You know this.”
“Death took my soul,” I countered. “So not everything dies.”
