F. Paul Wilson - By the Sword

"If we have time."

Julio arrived with a mug of Yuengling for Jack and pointed to Veilleur's stout. "Get you another?"

"I believe so."

"You wanna eat?" When Veilleur glanced at Jack, Julio added, "Don' look at him. He wouldn't know good food if it bit him."

Jack said, "One of your burritos did bite me—right on the stomach lining."

"Don' listen to him. You hungry? You wanna cube steak? We got delicious stuffed cube steak."

Veilleur gave him a wan smile and shook his head. "I'm cutting back on stuffed cube steak."

When he was gone, Veilleur said, "I almost feel obligated to order something, even if I don't eat it."

"The Taint?" Jack said.

"Single-minded, aren't we?"

"So I've been told."

Veilleur leaned back. "To understand the Taint you need to know some of the Secret History of the World."

That phrase again. "When I was a kid, I had a good friend who used to talk about a Secret History of the World."

"The conspiracy crowd believes in a secret history and has countless scenarios for it, mostly wrong. But they're right about one thing: The world has a history known to only a few. It was codified once in a book that I hid away for safekeeping with other so-called forbidden texts, but they've all disappeared."

Jack had a flash. "That wouldn't be the Compendium of Srem, would it?"

Veilleur straightened in his chair. "You've heard of it?"

"Heard of it? It's sitting in my apartment."

"Amazing. Well then, why do you need me to tell you the Secret History when it's at your fingertips?"

Jack drummed those fingertips on the table. "It's not exactly an easy read, what with the pages changing every time you turn around."

Veilleur frowned. "Is that so? I guess Srem wound up with a multivolume work that she had to fit into a single book."

"She?"

"Yes. Srem was an ancient, ancient Cassandra who saw the cataclysm coming and wanted to preserve a record of her times before everything was destroyed."

"Cataclysm?"

"We'll get to that. But—"

"Wait-wait-wait." Something wasn't right here. "You said you owned the book. So how come you didn't know how the text keeps changing?"

Veilleur shrugged. "I owned it but I never opened it. Her history was no secret to me. I didn't need to read about it—I'd lived it."

Okay. Jack could buy that.

"But what good is a book that keeps changing?"

He scratched his beard. "Not much. Something must have gone wrong. That sort of book was designed to have a finite number of sheets but a virtually infinite number of pages."

Jack stared at him. "I will add what you just said to my list of Things That Make Me Go, ' Huh? '"

"It's simple, really. If you have one hundred sheets in a book, you will have two hundred pages, correct?"

"One on each side of a sheet. Right."

"But in this sort of book, when you turn the one-hundredth sheet—notice I didn't say 'last'—you find another waiting for you. And another after that and another after that."

"But then you've got extra sheets."

Veilleur shook his head. "No. Because sheets are disappearing at the beginning of the book. If you flip back, you will find them again, but the sheet count remains constant."

Jack stared at him. He didn't seem to be pulling his leg.

"You're serious?"

"Of course. It's a lost art."

He realized that, after all he'd seen, he shouldn't be surprised by anything anymore, but this seemed straight out of Harry Potter.

"All well and good, but that's not what's happening. Pages are disappearing here and there about the book and being replaced by ones I've never seen that have nothing to do with what precedes or follows them."

"I imagine that would make comprehension very difficult."

"Tell me about it."

"Something must have gone wrong somewhere along the millennia. Too bad. The text would have explained everything."

At least Jack had an explanation of what was going on with that damn book—if you could call that an explanation.

Yeah. Too bad.

"So now the job falls to you."

"So it seems. Very well. To understand, you have to go back to the First Age, when the Adversary and I were born, and the war between the Ally and the Otherness was more out in the open. The laws of physics and chemistry and matter and energy were more pliable back then. Some people could perform what might seem like magic to you."

"Like Srem?"

"Like Srem. Anyway, I'd already defeated the Adversary—I was a mercenary in those days and did it for money—and it appeared I'd killed him. Because of that, the Ally chose me as one of its paladins."

" One of them?"

"There were a number of us back then, and the Adversary had his fellow plotters as well."

"But now it's just the two of you?"

"We're the only two to survive—for different reasons."

"You said you thought you'd killed him."

"Yes, but he managed a rebirth—"

"Besides the one in sixty-eight?"

A nod. "He's resourceful and resilient. We battled for centuries across surreal landscapes that would now be called dreamlike—or nightmarish. Neither side could gain the advantage. In a desperate move, the Otherness created the q'qr race."

"Cooker? You mean Kicker?"

"No. Kicker is Thompson's mangling of an ancient word." He spelled it for Jack, then pronounced it again.

Jack almost leaped from his seat. "Q'qr! I saw that in the Compendium . It called the Kicker Man 'the sign of the q'qr.' And under that it had some sort of poem about the q'qr."

" 'The Q'qr died yet lived on… the Q'qr is gone yet remains.' Something like that?"

"Yeah. That and more."

" 'The Song of the Q'qr.' A cautionary tale."

"Well, it's hard to be cautioned when you don't know what they're talking about."

Like much of what Jack had read in the Compendium, it assumed the reader shared the same reference base.

"The Otherness took a horde of its followers and inserted something of itself into their DNA."

"Did you even know about DNA back then?"

"We called it something else. Our life sciences were advanced, but the Otherness and the Ally blocked advances in weaponry, leaving us with only points and edges to fight with. Which often were not enough against waves of creatures part human and part Otherness."

"Like a rakosh?"

Veilleur shook his head. "The rakoshi were built from the ground up, so to speak; the q'qr were, in the current parlance, retrofitted. They were savage, vicious, their appearance fearsome—large and hairy, with fanged snouts. But their most terrifying feature was their two extra limbs."

"Four arms—the Kicker Man."

"Yes. But their extra limbs were boneless, tentacular, which made them all the more terrifying. What you call the Kicker Man was their symbol. They would draw it in blood wherever they had slaughtered humans—an almost continuous occurrence. They lived to kill and breed, and were prolific at both."

"How'd you stop them?"

"As I said, First Age weaponry was primitive, but our life sciences were advanced. The adepts began searching for an infection that would kill q'qr and spare humans. They were half successful: They created an agent that turned out to be deadly only to q'qr females."

Jack winced at what he saw coming. "With no females around, the q'qr males must have gone after human women."

"An unforeseen consequence. The males would tear through villages and towns, killing all the men and children and raping the women, hoping for at least some half-breeds to add to their ranks. But only a q'qr female could give birth to q'qr children. The raped women gave birth to human children—at least they looked human. Their mothers' DNA had commingled with the remnants of human DNA in the q'qr, but had quarantined the Otherness-created genes. The children seemed fully human but they carried what came to be known as the Taint. After the q'qr were defeated, the Taints were segregated—given their own land apart from the untainted population."