Chapter 34

The idea of an afterlife is a cornerstone of many religions. It’s the faith equivalent of “eat your vegetables, and you’ll get something nice for dessert”. Drakeforth, of course railed against organised religion. He went out of his way to accost and annoy his own followers, and if he met anyone with a different system of belief, he would probably unload his insults on them, too. I wondered if he would show respect to the actually deceased. He would probably appreciate that they didn’t interrupt him when he was ranting.

I floated in a warm glow of feelings. The pure distillation of life. Fragments of experience. Slivers of memory. Shards of despair and dandruff flakes of joy. I did not sink, though at the same time I didn’t backstroke and squirt sparkling empathic energy into the air, either. I was a synchronised swimmer without a team. Just me and a legion of spectator moments swirling like a tornado of confused fish.

My intake of breath sparkled and fizzed.

“I know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t been where you are. Or aren’t.”

I fell silent; even in conversation with the dead, my lack of social skills made me want to shrivel up.

A tear, a freckle, the glint of an eye. An amalgam of fractal features came together. A thousand pieces of people formed into what could have been a single face. For a moment, it looked like Dad.

“Marzipan,” he might have whispered, and the echo rippled through the ether.

“Me?” Of course me. There was no one else here, and while everyone called me Charlotte, except for Drakeforth, who insisted on that faux-formality of calling me by my last name, I might have misheard the word. Dad had never called me Marzipan, for which I was grateful.

The face folded into the kaleidoscope of double-e flux. If there were others, I didn’t recognise them.

I continued doing the equivalent of treading water while I waited for Drakeforth to do something. He was probably making a rope out of Goat’s nasal hair to lift me out. I didn’t seem at imminent risk of drowning, so hanging around—floating, for want of a better description—was all I could do.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked somewhat tardily.

Immersion in empathic energy is unlike anything else. For most people it is about as distressing as being dipped into a nightclub light show. Lots of pretty colours, but no physical effects other than maybe a little retina burn.

The fine hairs on my arms waved like sea-grass at high tide as whatever I was breathing sparkled and tingled in my lungs.

With a burning sense of self-consciousness, I started to make swimming motions. It worked better than I had hoped, and I half floated and half swam through a glowing mist that both curled towards my full attention and recoiled from my touch. It was like moving through the personalities of cats.

The swirling mist cleared to sparkly murk and I felt something almost solid under my feet. I experienced the total calm akin to being the only person in a bouncy castle moments before some annoying kids come in shrieking and throwing themselves into the wall.

Landscapes require a lot of work: ask any artist or professional gardener. The scene forming before my eyes had incredible detail, from the cloud-like ground to the sweeping lines of the tree that dominated my view.

She swept into view astride a rope-and-board swing that hung from the tree—head back, legs outstretched, black hair streaming like a comet’s tail as she arced through the air.

I kept quiet and watched her fly, my stomach doing flip-flops as she sailed through the amplitude of the pendulum swing.

“You’re late,” a gruff voice said.

I jumped and felt the ground bounce gently under me. “Wha?! Oo?! Wherg?!” I babbled.

“I said, you are late. Professor Polis Bombilate, and I’m not entirely sure to be honest.”

“Are you dead?” The question came out before I had time to think of something more polite to ask.

“Aren’t we all? Eventually, I mean.” Bombilate shrugged.

“Sorry,” I apologised, realising what I had said sounded quite rude.

“No point in apologising. You’re here now. Which is better than where you were a minute ago. With any luck you will find me and stop these fractured finger flappers before they ruin everything.”

“Finger?” I frowned.

“Excuse my strong language,” Bombilate said.

“Wait… Ruin everything?”

“Yes. Everything. You should hurry up and find me.”

“Where are you!?”

“If I knew that, don’t you think I would have led with it?”

“I hardly know you! But yes! That would make sense!”

“Good. See you soon.” Bombilate faded in a swirl of empathic energy.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d be happy to stay here!” I said.

“Wake up, Pudding! We can’t stay here.” Drakeforth shook me and I blinked. The stone chamber of the pyramid came into sharp focus.

“I saw Professor Bombilate!” I was yelling over the noise of the Godden engine whining as it red-lined its RPMs or whatever engines did when they made a noise like a boulder going through a bandsaw.

“Great!” Drakeforth yelled. “It will be nice to feel we achieved something in this, the last moments of our lives!”

“What’s going on!?” A fine dust was drifting down through the cracks, and the stones around us vibrated.

“Well!” Drakeforth bellowed, “It’s a long story, but if you really want me to tell you, I will try to get to the point before we are crushed to a pulp!”

Goat and Eade were pushing against a block of stone that fitted perfectly into the space where the entrance had been earlier.

The woman with black hair stood unmoving in the centre of the room, a black umbrella open over her head as dust and gravel rained down on it and bounced away as easily as rain.

“We need to leave!” I yelled.

Drakeforth gave me a long-suffering look that stung worse than his anger. “You think?” He managed to shout the question and make it sarcastic at the same time.

Empathic energy flowed around us. Every time I moved my hands or ducked under a stream of dust, everything blurred in a rainbow of light. I could see beyond the stone walls. Through the pulsing reservoir of energy that was deeper and stronger than anything I had ever seen. All the way to the shining light of the murrai. Standing outside the pyramid, the heavy stone block was now being pushed back into place by their masonry hands.

“I think I can help…” My voice was blurred and distorted. The slow grind of stone machines deep in the belly of the pyramid made everything vibrate. I looked past Drakeforth, Eade, and Goat, who wore glowing auras of colourful sparks. I reached through the vibrating strings of reality to where the murrai stood, mute and patient outside of the pyramid.

“Open the way,” I instructed. They didn’t move. “Please?” I tried again. Nothing. What was it Drakeforth said? Murrai are machines? Just because they were made to look like people didn’t make them people. They were tools. As simple as hammers.

I mentally slapped myself, took a deep breath and punched the air. The murrai’ stone fists smashed into the rock. It cracked with a puff of dust. I adjusted my feet and struck again, slamming my fist into the wall.

“Ow! Fruit!” I swore.

Shaking my skinned knuckles, I struck again, careful to pull my punch this time. The murrai showed no such restraint. In two blows from their massive stone fists, the block in front of me fell apart. The force of it sent chunks of rock spinning and bouncing across the chamber floor, and dust dancing through the air. The murrai stood silhouetted in the dusk as we staggered out coughing and choking in the dusty air.

“What in the hindquarters just happened?” Eade asked as she wiped dust from her eyes.

“Empathic energy overload, I suspect,” Drakeforth said. “Sound right to you, Pudding?”

“Yargh,” I spat. “The way the flux capacitor was running in there, they must be doing an emergency purge of the storage tanks and the system couldn’t handle the positive pressure.”

“It’s not the usual reference work, but it will do in a pinch,” Goat said.

Behind us, the machine howled and sent arcs of electricity crawling up the walls like the legs of neon spiders.

“We should keep moving. This place could still light up like a whale full of glow-shrimp.” Drakeforth took Eade and me by the arms, and hurried down the stone steps of the pyramid.

“I think I saw Professor Bombilate,” I said, while focusing on finding the next step down the steep slope as we rushed.

“What? In there?” Eade half turned and looked back. The stone doorway we had just left vented an explosion of double-e flux. A tornado in metallic rainbow colours erupted out of the side of the pyramid with the roar of a volcano vomiting.

“Kinda?” I suggested.

“Plenty of time to talk about that when we aren’t in danger—when we are in less danger than we currently are,” Drakeforth said. He picked up the pace, and we were soon running down the stone steps. Chunks of carefully placed sandstone block crashed down around us. The smaller bits fell like rain, with the thunder of the storm behind us.

“This isn’t like last time,” I gasped.

“Oh? Does this happen to you often?” Eade managed to be sarcastic and pant in terror at the same time.

“Duck,” Drakeforth announced. We did, and a murrai somersaulted over our heads, hit the steps and bounced down towards the sand, loose as a flying snake.

In this moment of complete helplessness, I found my mind very clear. “Last time,” I continued as if Eade and the tumbling murrai hadn’t interrupted me, “there was a massive explosion, and it was relatively silent. This one is loud enough to wake the de—the very deep sleepers. I was thinking it might be due to the acoustics. All that energy pushing though a narrow hole in the side of the pyramid, blowing a lot of air with it.”

“What the strawberry is she on about?!” Eade yelled.

“It’s an interesting theory,” Drakeforth replied. “Empathic energy contains a great deal of quantum energy, but it’s not very reactive at a larger scale. Under sufficient pressure, who knows what it might do?”

“Surely, Arthur would?” I wanted to make it sound casual, but I ran into the sand at the bottom of the pyramid and fell flat on my face.