The False Martyr by H. Nathan Wilcox Page A

and staggered in shock. Dasen
was dead. White skin, sunken cheeks, dead blue eyes staring into
space. She panted, cried, nearly lost her balance as her knees
buckled. “Dasen!” she howled. She fell to her knees by the bed,
grasped the corpse, tears welling in her eyes, vision blurring. She
looked down at her husband, lying cold and lifeless.
    And saw an old man. She
shook her head. It had been Dasen. She had seen him, had seen his
face, his eyes. But that was not who she held. She held the corpse
of an ancient man. His hairless head and face were a mass of sags
blotched with spots of age. His lips were pursed around a toothless
mouth, his unseeing eyes were clouded with cataracts. How had she
thought this was Dasen?
    Teth fell back to sitting
and wept. Her head fell to her hands, supported between her knees.
She trembled. “By the Order, what’s happening to me?” she asked no
one. Hands shaking, eyes streaming, she pulled the blanket back
over the old man and stumbled to her room. Wrung out,
despondent, and fearing for her own mind, she pushed the door open,
fell onto the bed, and cried herself to sleep with images of
Dasen’s dead face burnt into her mind.
     

Chapter 7
    The
16 th Day of Summer
     
    The web stretched forever,
connections infinite, possibilities endless. The Book called it a
tapestry, a great weaving of threads extending to the ends of the
world, to the end of time. Lius could see it all, every thread,
every connection, all the patterns and possibilities. It was beyond
overwhelming. He could not hope to trace them any farther than a
few connections before he became as lost as a toddler in a wood,
unsure even where he had begun and with no idea where to
go.
    Running from the
creatures, even escaping from the city had been easy. There, he had
only needed to trace one or two connections to create the outcomes
he needed, and there had been countless threads to pull to make
those changes: A crumbling brick brings down a section of the
catacombs. A frightened horse creates the perfect distraction in a
busy intersection. A guard twists his ankle on a rock. His fellow
helps him, leaving a gate unguarded. Lius had been able to see the
outcome he wanted and trace it directly to himself, had only needed
to understand the smallest possible section of the possibilities
that stretched out forever.
    The swampy wilderness
outside the city was another matter altogether. Here, alone, wet,
tired, hungry, and hunted, there were almost no changes he could
make, and those available led to outcomes that were small, distant,
and uncertain. People were easy to influence, and the multiplied
effects of their changing choices could alter the world around them
in ways that were immediate and real. But the wind, the trees, the
animals were nearly impossible to influence and the implications of
any changes were slow and indistinct. This was the Order in its
purest form, an all-powerful clock of great, grinding wheels that
cared nothing for anything done by so small a grain of sand.
Considering all the things he could possibly do at that moment –
throw rocks, break sticks, climb trees, run, walk, jump, yell, cry,
sleep – Lius could not see any of them altering the movement of
those great gears in the slightest, at least not within the scope
of the connections that he could trace, the span of time that could
possibly save him from his hunger, his thirst, his exhaustion, or
the things that followed.
    Lius traced the threads to
those things, could see them as a jumble of chaos a few short
connections away. He imagined them as another horde of the things
that had followed him through the Hall of Understanding, but there
was no way to know exactly. He could see them only for the way they
affected the Tapestry around them, created chaos, distorted the
patterns, made it almost impossible to predict what would be
present when they had passed. The only thing that Lius could be
certain of was that they were close, they were following him,