The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God Read online

  “Carsten, you should have a look at this.”

  Carsten walked over and saw the clay man on the floor, crumbling apart. Just moments before, he had been a mass of heavy, wet clay, now he was bone dry and brittle, flaking apart. In a matter of hours, it would be unrecognizable as ever having been shaped in the image of a man.

  Carsten asked quietly, “What do we do now?”

  About ten minutes later, Karl and Carsten had amassed a large pile of broken furniture in the room in the furthest part of the building.

  They left another pile at the top of the staircase. They braced all of the doors, so nobody could enter to extinguish the fire after it was detected. They collected all the lanterns in the house and thoroughly doused the piles. They lit the top pile then rushed to the backmost room and lit the second one on the way out.

  They strolled down the alley away from the house of Piroska.

  They found a carriage driver to take them back to within a mile of the hotel, and walked the rest of the way. Carsten said, “Thank you, Karl. You saved my life.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  They continued in silence for a few moments and Carsten laughed. “Do you think we’re going to go to hell?”

  Karl shook his head grimly. “Yes, and I think Piroska will be there telling the devil his fortune.”

  Carsten smiled and laughed again. “I don’t feel bad about this.”

  Karl looked forward. “Neither do I, but I’m not supposed to. You’re supposed to.”

  “Why?”

  Karl didn’t answer this; he just shook his head and sighed.

  “We need to get our luggage and check out. We will go to a different hotel, but not together. We are too easy to spot together. Tomorrow, we will ride the same train at the same time, but will not speak to each other, or even look at each other, until we are back in Munich. Do you understand?”

  Carsten nodded. “Yes, I understand. You’re not abandoning me, are you?”

  Karl managed a tight little smile. “No, I have a young man to protect, and that’s definitely a promotion from carriage driver.”

  Carsten nodded. “This is true.”

  After a few more moments, Carsten said, “I only wish we had longer to look around in Piroska’s house. We could have found… incredible things.”

  Karl shook his head. “That place was her place. There was more there than just the stink of her. It’s best we burned it. I only hope nothing remains that could give any hint of who we are.”

  “Do you think the Gypsies will know who we are to hunt us down?”

  “It’s possible. We might need to be cautious for the rest of our lives.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When Carsten walked back through the doors of his family home that night in Munich, he entered a life he had forgotten.

  Not for a moment in Prague did he trouble his mind with thoughts of his useless siblings.

  Never did he think about Ava.

  He only sought to possess the book.

  Down one hall, Ava waited expectantly. Down the other, Uli lay convalescing. The mundanities of his life weren’t going to cease just because he had found his prize. He would have to address them. He would have to come to an understanding with his siblings now that he had laid down his marker. He would meet the terms with Ava because he needed her. He would have to go through the motions of being an ordinary young man in Munich society.

  He steeled himself and closed the door behind him.

  He put one foot in front of the other and walked down the hall to his bedroom.

  Ava was cleaning and recleaning his room, as if by her frantic motions Carsten would reappear. She whirled to face him with tears in her eyes. When he’d left for Prague, it had been with no explanation other than he would be gone for a few days.

  He’d only left instructions for her to keep Uli alive.

  She ran to him and wrapped her arms around him. He allowed her this indulgence. When she began crying into his shirt, her face buried into his chest, he pushed her away gently and she got the message.

  She looked down meekly. “I apologize. How was your trip?”

  He sat down on the bed and opened his suitcase, removing the large wooden case containing the book.

  “It was… successful. Have the books of language translations that you ordered for me arrived yet?”

  She smiled brightly. “Yes! Yes, Carsten! I put them all out in your new study and hung the new drapes as well. I’ve arranged the lanterns in there so that there is no sunlight, but it is well lit enough to read.”

  “You never fail me.”

  She blushed a deep scarlet. “I love you with all my heart.”

  “I know. ”

  “How is Uli?”

  Ava looked at her appearance in the mirror, and for a moment was completely silent.

  “How bad is it?”

  “If it were not for those pills… for two days he turned a terrible greenish color and had fever.”

  “Has he gotten any better?”

  “The fever broke this morning. He is still in terrible pain. It’s not his nose though… it’s something else you did.”

  Though Carsten was still worried, he managed to smile.

  “Greta wanted to call a doctor, over and over she asked Uli, but he refused. Something you did to him… he didn’t want to see a doctor, there was shame…”

  She turned around from the mirror and looked at him with genuine fear.

  “Carsten, whatever you did to him besides breaking his nose… he will want revenge. I am not frightened just for myself and my mother, but I’m very frightened for you.”

  “Does Greta or Karin know what happened to him?”

  “He won’t tell them. He didn’t tell them it was you. But one time when he was passed out, they went into his room and tried to pull back his blankets to see what manner of injuries he had…”

  She looked grave. “He woke up screaming and didn’t stop until he lost consciousness again. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve changed the sheets several times a day. There was blood, blood down there.”

  “Is there still blood?”

  Ava let out a sigh of relief. “No, but for three days when the fever was worse, the blood was yellowish, and it smelled very, very bad.”

  “He will live?”

  “Yes.”

  ***

  Carsten walked down the dark hallway past the main front door and down the opposite hallway to Uli’s rooms. There was a light on and Uli sat up in his bed, a pale ashen white. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t notice when Carsten entered. The laudanum was working its magic.

  Carsten sat on the side of Uli’s bed. Uli’s eyes fluttered open, and it took a few seconds for him to focus on Carsten. It took a few more seconds for him to recall that it was Carsten who’d inflicted this torment upon him.

  By the light of the flickering electric bulbs, installed less than a decade before, they regarded each other. Uli was terrified, but far too intoxicated and in too much pain to move. His big, effeminate eyes blinked in slow disarray, while Carsten’s were unsympathetic.

  “Hello, Carsten… my little brother.”

  “I trust Ava has been bringing you your medication?”

  Uli stammered. “Y-y-yes.”

  “Did you thank her?”

  Uli was confused, then his confusion turned to fear. “From this point forward, without fail, little brother.”

  “That’s good, Uli. I’m glad you’re on the mend. You’ll be out and about in no time.”

  “Thank you… and thanks to Ava, good ol’ Ava! Um… how was your trip?”

  “I found the book I was looking to purchase, but unfortunately, I had to kill the person selling it.”

  Uli looked the way a person would look when discovering they are sitting next to a lion.

  Carsten said, “But the good news is that I got the book.”

  “That’s fantastic!’

  “And I want to thank you for loaning me th
at money.”

  “Any time. I… I want you to know that I’ve told no one about…”

  Carsten smiled then leaned over and kissed his brother on the forehead.

  He asked as he was getting up to leave, “Is there anything I can get you, Uli?”

  Uli’s sallow complexion seemed to pale further, to a sickly, fish-belly white. “No… No, thank you, Carsten.”

  Carsten walked back to his bedroom and found Ava, in her maid’s uniform, asleep on the floor next to his bed. He woke her, and she explained that while he was gone, she had slept this way so that Uli would not be unattended at night. Carsten told her to sleep on the bed. She lay down and looked as if she had died and gone to heaven.

  Carsten picked up his new book and headed out to his new study in the old servants’ quarters and began to read.

  PART TWO

  GENESIS

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Wilhelm Ernst sat in his usual seat in the empty bar in Paris. The bartender knew he didn’t want to talk, at least not until he was good and drunk. He didn’t judge him, didn’t give him that look that said, “You, sir, are a disgrace.”

  The bar was completely empty save for Wilhelm and the staff, busily washing glasses and restocking for the evening rush when the Bourse closed.

  It was that kind of bar, very expensive. Wilhelm came here because those who could afford it were elsewhere during daylight hours. No one to judge him, no one to say he was wasting his inheritance, no one to call him a rich parasite on the back of the proletariat, no one to call him a bourgeois fraud, no one to notice that his hands shook until he drank enough to calm them, no one to remind him that this condition would get worse until it killed him, and no one to tell him he was halfway there. Truth was, no one said those things anyway because they knew they would receive a beating. Wilhelm Ernst was a rich fraud wasting his inheritance, but he was also a big, violent drunk, wealthy enough to get away with murder, or at least with dispensing a serious beating.

  And no one wanted that.

  But was it what Wilhelm wanted? No, it wasn’t. Wilhelm wanted to be an artist, but all he managed to paint was someone who looked like him beating someone smaller than him.

  Or scenes of someone who looked like him fucking.

  One or the other.

  Wilhelm was rich enough to have practically whatever he wanted in life, but you couldn’t buy the talent needed to be a good artist. His technique was fair, but his content was, in the words of one art critic, “Nothing more than a pornography of violence, interesting only in the fact that someone bothered to actually paint it and think others would be interested in looking at it.”

  His one and only art showing was ignored but for the penniless avant-garde crowd who dutifully showed up to drink free alcohol and roll their eyes in contempt when they thought he wasn’t looking. His “friends.” He hated them every bit as much as they hated him. There was no love in that love-hate relationship, just mutual contempt.

  Not a single canvas sold.

  So Wilhelm took it on the chin, embraced his new role as an execrable artist, and became the authority on dangerous art—the more deviant and sleazy, the better. Perhaps one day he would be seen as a visionary, but that day hadn’t come around. He was just a drunk. He was loved for his money and feared for his violence, but other than that, he was tolerated.

  And he couldn’t think of a more pathetic life.

  He took the letter from Karin and Greta out of his jacket pocket and tore it open. Ordinarily, it would take him days to get around to reading their boring, gossipy screeds, but today he’d rather read about their idleness and insipidity than reflect on his own.

  And just what on earth were they going on about?

  They were complaining about Uli.

  Ordinarily, they had nothing but praise for Uli. Karin was proud her little brother was a sadistic tyrant, her very own pet cobra. Greta fawned on Uli in a way that bordered on incestuous. It was disgusting.

  But this letter revealed that he really had crossed the line, even if there was no such thing for Uli Ernst.

  “Dear Wilhelm,

  We are writing this letter to let you know that Uli has gone too far—he’s become a laudanum addict. We’ve tried everything that we can think of to repair him, but to no avail. It is utterly impossible to have a social gathering, to have a proper party in any way. He is simply too embarrassing.

  Uli Ernst an embarrassment? Yes, Uli was a verbal bully of the worst sort, but socially adept in the extreme. Women loved Uli, even though—or maybe because—he was small and effeminate.

  He has taken to sleeping all day and wakes at sunset. Then he begins drinking laudanum and absinthe and painting disgusting garbage. What he’s painting is frightful and perverted. Garbage and sickness! It could never be shown in society!

  He smells, Wilhelm. He smells like an open sewer. You can smell his room almost as soon as you enter his wing of the house.

  Uli was drinking absinthe and laudanum?

  All of them were drunks, but none of them touched that stuff. Laudanum and absinthe killed novices and the unwary. None of the Ernsts were novices; they were all very familiar with how to drink constantly and maintain their lives.

  Well, all of them except their poor father.

  Wilhelm, Uli is mad. Stark raving mad. Already Father is an embarrassment, but at least he bothers no one. Uli came out at the last gathering with no shirt on. You could see his ribs poking through his skin and his eyes were sunken and black.

  Wilhelm, he looked like a starving refugee from the Balkans.

  We have never allowed ourselves to be disrespected, but Uli has become an embarrassment and a liability. We have tried speaking to him, to remind him of his place and to find his pride, but he just laughs and babbles about divine judgment and angelic visitations. We believe that you are the only person he will listen to. Please come as soon as possible. As you know, the Munich police will look the other way as long as you don’t intend to stay permanently.

  While you stay, we will have a fantastic time; there are several balls this month and…

  Wilhelm folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. He knew the rest of the letter would contain nothing but social news and gossip. And he didn’t give a shit about any of that. Munich was a stuffy conservative backwater compared to Paris, but, right now, Munich was where he needed to be.

  Wilhelm stretched his legs and arms and Greta giggled like a little schoolgirl. Karin sat next to her on the sofa and shot her a reproachful look, then turned back to Wilhelm. “Never mind her, Wilhelm. She gets sillier by the day.”

  Greta affected a pouty face that Wilhelm found to be a bit too flirtatious for a sibling. He tried not to show his disdain, but his sisters were just plain awful in every way possible.

  Greta leaned into her sister and crossed her legs, demanding attention. Karin rolled her eyes and put an arm around Greta. “There, dear, now you’re the center of attention again.”

  Wilhelm reached over to the table and topped off his brandy, pulled out one of his French cigarettes and lit up.

  Karin’s eyebrows went up. “French cigarettes? Whatever kind of socialist nonsense have they gotten you into out there in Paris, Wilhelm?”

  Greta, not to be outdone, reached over to the table and took one out of the pack and lit it, trying to show how worldly she was. She sputtered and coughed, “Oh my God, Wilhelm! Your artist friends must taste terrible to kiss!”

  He exhaled and tried to look intellectual. “I’m focusing on artistic criticism, not painting anymore. I feel that the real revolution happens on the canvas, and man simply follows.”

  Greta squealed again, “How fabulous, Wilhelm, how daring!”

  Karin nodded. “She hasn’t the faintest idea what that means. What does that mean, Wilhelm?”

  Wilhelm sighed. “I just spent the whole day on a train stuck in a cabin with an old Rhinelander in a top hat telling me about the ‘spiritual menace of the Jew interloper,’ and now
I have to explain art to my benighted sisters… sad, truly sad.”

  Greta barely restrained herself from spitting out her red wine laughing, and she didn’t even know what she was laughing about. “You’re so witty, Wilhelm!”

  Karin took a sip of her wine and tried to maintain a straight face. “Greta, Uli is witty. Wilhelm is merely factual.”

  Wilhelm smiled modestly. “I do my best.”

  At Uli’s name, Greta pulled away from her sister and wrapped her arms around herself. She was on the verge of tears. She whispered, “Wilhelm, it’s so terrible. He’s become repellent. We daren’t entertain guests anymore. It’s made us boring!”

  Wilhelm crossed his legs and did his best concerned brother act. “Surely there’re more important considerations? I’m here, came all the way from Paris; now tell me what is wrong with Uli.”

  Greta looked confused. She wasn’t sure if she’d just been shamed.

  Karin was a better actress, or at least had a few more years of experience.

  “It started when he came down with the fever. It happened at exactly the same time that Carsten left for Prague with the carriage driver, of all people. But somehow, at least, he knew that Uli was sick and had his slave girl bring him pills and take care of him while he was gone.”

  Greta nearly fell off the couch laughing.

  Wilhelm said, “Wait, one thing at a time. Uli’s mental state began when he got sick, but this coincided with Carsten going to Prague to buy a slave girl?”

  Karin giggled. “No, Carsten went to Prague with the carriage driver to buy a book. The slave girl is Ava. You remember her? Apparently, she’s his personal property. She literally waits on him hand and foot. We’ve actually seen them in the garden, her feeding him while he reads his books.”

  Wilhelm stopped laughing. He was used to laughing off the absurd, or even the tragic. It was the way that all of them dealt with life. Drink and laugh it off. But as funny as the picture of Carsten being fed while he read a book seemed, it also spoke of something very wrong, even if he didn’t know what it was.