Read Online Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey by Forrest Aguirre - Free Book Online

Vienna, burning, lay to the west. He was far enough away that he could not see the smoke, but he knew it was there, swirling around the soldiers and gypsies, carrying the screams and groans of the wounded and dying up into the vast, unheeding sky.
    Had he reason to feel sorrow up to this point? Of course he had. But there was something in the quality of sorrow suffered at the hands of another that was different than the sorrow that one brought on others, whether through one’s own stupidity and neglect or by intentional acts of hatred. The latter carried the sharpest stings of guilt, regret, self-berating, whereas the former was more easily dissociated from one’s self.
    “Mowler suffered for his evil actions,” Heraclix said to himself. “I suffer for my ignorant acts.”
    He thought of the hand, looked at it, studying this thing so alien yet so much a part of him. He wondered if the same silver ichorflowed through it that had flowed, and only recently staunched, from the wound in his thigh.
    “And I bring and suffer pain for those things over which I have no control. Is there no end to this pain and suffering?”
    He looked down the side of the stone pillar on which he stood. Twenty feet below him, the tops of the pines scratched at the open air. Beneath their green tufts, a chlorophyll ocean whose depths he could not fathom coursed in waves. Could a dive into such a place hold salvation for him? He had been born, that he knew. And that which was born must die, was it not so? Perhaps he could end his suffering and the suffering of all those around him who had paid for his ignorance.
    Yet he felt, somehow, that this would be a cheat, that, though his life might cease, suffering would continue on in the world. And who knows what suffering awaits the dead, if there is a life after?
    For him, there was a life after. This was evidenced by his very existence as what he was. He had been “born,” but he had been born of that which had died, which must have had an earlier birth at a time or times completely veiled to him by the bloody cauldron-womb of his inception as Heraclix. What had these men suffered or caused to be suffered before their deaths and his birth?
    He could not in good conscience make a decision to end his existence without knowing all there was to know about these men—their desires, their hopes, their stories. Perhaps it was cowardly guilt, perhaps a clinical curiosity—he knew not which, but something simply drove him to know, a lust for information about those whose constituent pieces, together, made him him .
    With great difficulty, owing to his leg, he climbed down the stone pillar and continued over the mountains, the Kőszeg Mountains, he thought he recalled from one of the many maps that he had perused in the time before the fire, toward Bozsok, the home of the once-boy who had delivered the Serb’s hand to the sorcerer.
    “. . . sickly and stooped, a runt, but a good, innocent lad . . .” This is how the boy—perhaps a man now, perhaps not, Heraclix could not know—was described in the Serb’s letter. He pictured a lad somewhere in his midteens, his face long, eyes sunken, bonycheeks pronounced from poverty. The boy’s skin was smooth, not yet creased by age or worry, lost hope, and regret. But there was a knowing glimmer in his eyes. Innocence still held sway, but cruel experience camped around the borders, sending assassins in to lie in wait, anticipating the signal to set fire to the foundations of the boy’s emotions, to burn his sense of trust to the ground. Perhaps there was time, Heraclix thought, to save the lad, or at least to steel him for what life would bring him, if it hadn’t already arrived.
    The mountains crested not far to the east and gradually lost their elevation as they stretched southeast. Even with Heraclix’s great endurance and speed, he was not out of the mountains by evening. The thickness of the trees sped the fall of night, blanketing him in darkness. Beyond