Silence (29 page)

He and Emili were in their walled
garden, the very one the two of them used to eat lunch together in.
The vine crept up the wooden walls around them and nuzzled Sheikoh
and Emili in a cocoon of vegetation. The few flower speckled
shrubberies slept around a single gnarled tree. The thin grass
glistened with dew drops in the moonlight, and even the weeds had
broken their fall. Sheikoh lay there for a few moments, gazing at
the twinkling stars dotting the black sky above. It looked more
beautiful than he’d remembered when he’d been trapped inside the
strange Transcendental Plane. Beside him he felt Emili climbing to
her feet, so he turned his head over to her.

“
Emi, thank god! You’ll
never believe…” Sheikoh began before trailing off.

‘
No… this can’t be
happening…’ Sheikoh mouthed, horrified.

He flicked up onto his feet and
flipped back, landing with cat-like silence. Sheikoh stared at
Emili’s eyes with numb stupefaction all over his face. Sheikoh
watched them leap and dance with a sense of bewilderment. Emili’s
eyes flared with the exact same color-rimmed, white flames that had
in the Celestial Plane.

“
Khryzt..?”

“
I
apologize for this deception. I need to borrow the girl’s body for
a short time,”
the Sycrarian told
Sheikoh in hard double-voice.

Sheikoh’s muscles blazed with
vengeance. His face hardened with a hatred that Indigo would have
been proud of. The teenager clenched his fists and advanced on the
loathsome creature possessing Emili, but when Sheikoh was close
enough to make out her freckles, he hesitated. He didn’t know if he
had it in him to attack the body of the girl he loved, even though
she was already dead. He gritted his teeth and glared at the
Sycrarian’s flaming eyes.

‘
Goes to show,’ Sheikoh
thought to himself bitterly. ‘When something seems too good to be
true, that’s because it is.’

He opened his mouth
furiously.

“
You piece of
sh-“

Emili suddenly moved so fast that her
body disappeared into a scream of speed. The teenager felt a bony
fist slam deep into the muscles of his half-tensed stomach. The
force launched an overwhelmed Sheikoh through the air. His body
blasted through the wood of the vine-bound, garden wall and slammed
into hard brick. Flying splinters pelted him like hail as he lay
there groggily, trying to stay conscious. He’d never in his life
been hit so hard.

Before Sheikoh’s vision faded to
black, he saw the Sycrarian bend over and pick something up. Then,
Khryzt disappeared into the night without a trace. The next second,
Sheikoh’s head dropped to his chest. He closed his eyes to the
oblivion of unconsciousness.

Chapter 15

Hope in Hell

There was a buzzing against Sheikoh’s
leg. He swatted at it for a few seconds, half convinced that a
purmynx was pawing through his pocket. Then this his instincts
kicked in. Sheikoh’s eyes flicked open and he rolled backwards,
away from any possible thieves. He flipped into a crouch, rubbing
the sharp pain in his ribs. His bleary, black eyes scanned the
night for a tense moment, but he quickly realized that it was all
clear. The buzzing was coming from his cellpad. In light of
everything that’d happened, Sheikoh decided to let the call go. He
surveyed the devastation around him.

   
A
gaping hole ripped the wood of the garden’s wall. Splinters jagged
an outline around it and tattered vines reached outwards like
tongues. The damage was easily apparent even under the light of the
full moon. Broken planks of wood and a mess of leaves rested on the
piece of dirty road he’d crashed into. Around him, sprigs of plant
curled into themselves forlornly. He could see almost all of the
flowers and trees through the window that his body had
made.

The memory of what’d happened slammed
through Sheikoh’s thoughts. The realization that Emili’d possessed
body was running around seemed to punch out his breath all over
again. Sheikoh had a writhing feeling in his chest that he didn’t
like it at all, but underneath the horror and disgust was the
fragile hope that Emili might really be alive somewhere deep inside
of her body.

His hand crept up to the
crux of his neck to finger the cold silver of the Transcendental
Amulet, and a shiver traced its way down Sheikoh’s spine. He
wrapped a fist around the medallion at the end of that silver chain
with a chest full of dread. If the
amulet
had become solid upon
returning to the real world then…

Where was that book?  

Sheikoh’s chest sank to his knees. He
staggered to his feet and began rifling through the piles of broken
wood, but he didn’t really expect to find it here. Khryzt had bent
Emili’s body down to pick something up just before he’d lost
consciousness. It looked like he knew what the demon was getting.
He scanned the dark street without hope, suffocated by the
knowledge of who exactly had the Transcendental Codex.

The shock that Khryzt could probably
do even more than before lurched through him. The creature inside
Emili was probably studying up spells as he stood there, growing
deadlier by the moment. His ribs throbbed with pain as if to give
its assent to his conjecture.

The punch had blown him through a
solid wood wall. Whatever magic the amulet dissipated, it hadn’t
touched Emili’s fist. Khryzt had somehow made her inhumanly
strong.

Sheikoh didn’t even want to think
about what Khryzt could do with whatever dark secrets were hidden
in the codex. He turned, kicked a plank out of his way and set off
on an aimless trek through the night shadowed streets. His memories
ran through everything that had happened to him. He couldn’t
believe that just earlier this night, he’d paid a visit to the
Celestial Randel Sanatous. So much had happened since that first
meeting with Dream.

“
I was so close,” Sheikoh
cursed bitterly. “Everything would have been perfect
again.”

He stared at his shaking
hands, riddled with splinters, for a second and then slammed his
left fist onto the concrete wall to the side of him. He did it
again, trying to hammer some sense into the world. His knuckle
split and a trickle of blood wound down one of his fingers. He
relaxed his fist and stared at the ruby line for a moment,
thinking.

Sheikoh knew that Emili was better off
dead then spending her time as the face of some kind of monster. He
knew that she would’ve begged him to stop her rampaging body, but
the words ‘better off dead’ chilled the teenager to his core. He
couldn’t imagine being the one to…

Sheikoh shuddered off the unthinkable
thought.

Emili had always made him feel warm
and safe, but Khryzt made him feel the exact opposite. Though he’d
acted amenable enough when talking to the creature in the
Transcendental Plane, staring into the being’s white flame eyes and
hearing its ominous alien double-tone… He couldn’t help feeling
cold and wary.

The thought was a peculiar echo of
what Emili had always thought of Silence. Emili hadn’t batted an
eyelash when he stole, but the second he or Dorothi mentioned
‘Silence’ her face, usually so bright and cheerful, would cloud
over with storm. Sheikoh hadn’t understood at the time but he
thought that he finally did.  

Sheikoh had worn his face over both a
dark side and a light side. It was just like how Khryzt, even
covered in Emili’s skin, didn’t feel like her at all. Emili had
disliked Sheikoh’s perception of Silence fueled on a quiet pride of
his criminal exploits rather than the said exploits themselves. She
hadn’t cared that Sheikoh had committed the crimes, but she didn’t
like the satisfaction that Sheikoh took in his criminal
rep.

Sheikoh felt a sense of hollow
rightness at the concept, like he’d discovered a serial killer’s
stash of rotting fingers in a basement. His face scrunched up at
the image.

Suddenly Sheikoh remembered his
cellpad’s vibration. He might as well get things over with. He
rifled through his pocket, searching for the battered metal of the
Trinity. His hand glanced on a plastic octagon. A chill climbed up
his arm. He’d completely forgotten that he was still carrying the
Deputy Century Badge that Dekla had given to him, back in different
lifetime. He pulled the badge out, reading the words with
repugnance. He thought back to his interview with the Centaurai,
remembering the man’s threats. How he’d somehow frozen Sheikoh’s
body, and held that silver, crescent blade to his
throat...

His thoughts stuttered on the word
‘crescent’. For a few seconds, the teenager stared at the century
badge without really seeing it, deep in thought. Sheikoh’s mind
flashed through Khryzt’s obsession with the Celestial Crescent. He
wondered why the creature had been so desperate to be forgiven,
only to follow him to the ‘Outworld’, and leave the crescent
behind. Sanatous had said that Camillio had stolen the amulet from
him. He already had the codex, what if…

Furious, Sheikoh threw the octagonal
badge as far as he could. It soared over the roofs of the many
factories and disappeared into the night.   

Sheikoh reached back into his pocket
and extracted his Trinity from the mess of weapons and lock picks.
The teenager flipped it open and the screen informed him that he
had five missed calls from ‘Dream’ and three more from
Ghost.

How long had he been out? He checked
the date on the Trinity and was relieved to see that it was still
the same night. The time at the corner of the screen said 4:16. But
he’d already known that it was the same night. If it hadn’t been,
he wouldn’t have had anything in his pockets.

Sheikoh knew that if he’d lain
unconscious through the day he wouldn’t have his cellpad, or
anything else in his pockets, for that matter. With a yawn, Sheikoh
keyed redial. A bold word ‘Dream’ along with the number that the
Celestial had given him popped up onto the flickering screen. He
held the device up to his ear.

“
Silence, where are you?!”
the cellpad snapped sharply.

Sheikoh rubbed his temples, massaging
the beginnings of a throbbing headache.

“
Dream, that you? What have
you been up to, old bean?” Sheikoh tiredly asked the
Celestial.

“
Silence, what the hell
happened? Where did you go? Were you pursued?” Tyche asked in a
voice as hard as blacksteel.

Sheikoh opened his mouth to answer,
but he didn’t know what exactly to say. He wasn’t sure if Camillio
Tyche had said anything about putting the amulet into the codex’s
indent. Sheikoh was too tired to get into it with the Celestial.
Luckily Tyche went on without waiting for reply.

“
Never
mind that, were you able to obtain the codex?” the Celestial
demanded in a strained voice. “The leather book from Spanius’s that
is,” assuming that Sheikoh had never heard it called
the
Transcendental
Codex
.

“
Hmm… define obtain. Are we
talking past tense or present only here?” Sheikoh asked Tyche
slowly. On the other end, Tyche cursed explosively.

“
You
idiot, what the hell were you
doing
when you tore Sanatous’s house
apart?!” the Celestial spat over the line. Sheikoh
bristled.

“
Yeah,
Dream
, for your information, that
wasn’t me! You forgot to mention the three other Celestial that
Sanatous was hiding in there! They took the dude’s roof down! I
barely made it out alive!” Sheikoh shot back, indignant.

“
Celestial..? Again..?
Hmm…” Sheikoh heard the man on the other end of the line say
contemplatively. After a long pause, Dream finally said;

“
You weren’t the only one
to fail your task. You might as well flee Interium. Hidden inside
of the codex was our only hope of surviving the Imperial Army’s
impending siege,” Tyche went on in a frustrated voice.

“
Wait, what?!” Sheikoh
half-choked into the receiver, shocked.

“
Ghost and Indigo managed
to take care of the Coascendant, but they failed to eliminate the
Supreme Centaurai. As they describe it Centaurai Vest was cornered,
but when they advanced on him they found themselves unable to
move,” the Celestial explained with mild annoyance, like a mosquito
had dodged his swatter.

Sheikoh felt a jolt, remembering the
Centaurai. He opened his mouth to explain how the Centaurai had
controlled his body back in the Solitarium, but Dream went on
without pausing. His tone changed into one of interested
speculation.

“
A laughing Celestial woman
swooped in and spirited the Supreme Centaurai away. According to
the two, the Celestial had ‘burning white eyes’,” Dream mused over
the line. “In all of my life I’ve never even heard of any
Celestial’s heartlight bearing that color…”

Sheikoh almost dropped his cellpad in
shock. He knew exactly who the ‘Celestial woman’ was. Only it
wasn’t a Celestial. And it wasn’t a woman either.

What did Khryzt want with the Arch
Centaurai?

He thought that he knew.

Sheikoh had no idea how it had
happened, but, somehow, Supreme Centaurai Cylium Vest had gotten
his hands on the Celestial Crescent. He had no idea what that
meant, but he didn’t much want to find out. Tyche’s running away
idea didn’t sound so bad to him at the moment. The Celestial’s next
question startled him from his speculation.