THE CHEAT CODE
Chapter 1: Canvas of Death
WHAT IS WORST ABOUT DEATH IS ITS MYSTERIES.
Not the ones about when it may happen or how it will come to you, or what it will feel like, no. It’s rather in what conditions someone would leave, what art the death would cause, and what details the art may have. You know the sort of details like how the skin would fade, how the shades of brown will turn worm grey or green, and how prana will leave the body. Like a poof? Like a whoosh? Like a bang? Or like a stealthy slithering snake? Most important: what will you smell like?
“What will I smell like?” Ruem, the Mesmerizer, mutters.
Good people will smell like heavens, they say, like the nectar of roses or mist in a meadow or honey in the ocean. Oceans in heaven are made of honey, no joke. And bad people will smell like rotten roaches. Another law in the universe God coded while creating it all.
In the lounge of Kuhawk, Ruem, the Mesmerizer, doesn’t see any color of death, but he smells it. Death is near. He doesn't wonder whose death, for now. Instead, he thinks of a question—a random one at that. Why does God promise only food and women in heaven?
Because he is the God of men?
Because men were God’s audience when he sent his books?
Because God is the greatest mesmerizer who knows how to lure?
The Mesmerizer finds no answer; he can’t just know an answer; he is not an intuitionist. However, he knows one thing. That God is one corporate manipulator who knows what his consumers want.
Food. Women. And youthful eternity.
Could be true, could be wrong, could be a delusion created from epics or an old song. But in his mind and soul, Ruem Drohung, the Mesmerizer, knows one real truth, the truth that no one else knows. That he will stop God. He will recode fate—his fate and everyone’s fate. And he will do it using the codes God made the universe with. Nothing can stop him. Not after what God took and termed it fate.
“I do not accept it,” he mutters to his painting—yet-to-be painting. It’s an empty canvas. Someone with evolved senses could smell the handmade paper made by the craftsmen of Kappa, but the Mesmerizer smells more. He smells the forest where the paper was grown. He smells the chemicals in it that repel the pests. He smells the box in which the ream of paper was imported and the ocean air through which the boxes have traveled. It hovers in his easels three feet away from him. Light, not too bright, glows only on the canvas, making the rest of the lounge darker. In that darkness, the Mesmerizer observes it. The paper will soon smell of colors.
What should he paint tonight? Death? Or life?
Maroc Metz, the only butler of Kuhawk, comes to the lounge in his usual attire—tailcoat, polished shoes, gloves, and glasses.
“Master Ruem, it’s time for the ritual, and our guest has arrived. Should I bring her here before it gets discourteous? Or will you continue contemplating?” he asks the Mesmerizer, in a tone he would never dare to use if it were a time ago.
“I am painting.” The Mesmerizer watches the blank canvas.
“The brushes are fresh, the oil still untouched. The painting has not even begun, and you’ve sat like that for four hours. You’re contemplating.” Maroc dares again.
“It’s part of the painting,” the Mesmerizer says.
“And you’re explaining,” Maroc adds with no surprised tone, but a hint of question is there. “You never explain yourself.”
“I can explain a thing or two to the only one I can depend on.” The Mesmerizer doesn’t look at Maroc; he doesn’t need to.
“You mean the only one left for you to depend on,” Maroc says, “after you’ve killed the lot of them.”
“Sometimes, you sound as if I am the villain.”
“And sometimes you sound as if being a villain is bad, Master Ruem.” Maroc curves his lips. His eyes are gleaming, which his master doesn’t see but senses. His tone has devotion, perhaps even grief. “I’m bringing the guest. Here is your suit.” Maroc calls a suit—a three-piece, polished with ionized fiber, conditioned with fragrance, smoothened with the right temperature and humidity. It flies here with a hover-hook. Soundless, no air blows; even the blue macaw in its silver cage doesn’t flinch. The suit hangs in the air from its hook.
The Mesmerizer ignores it. “Am I a villain, Maroc?”
Maroc was about to leave, probably to serve the guest of Kuhawk in the manner she deserves, but he looks back. His master still watches the yet-to-be painting. You’re my Master Ruem, Maroc wants to say, but he doesn’t. He knows something is troubling him. He never saw this man troubled with anything, not even when the toughest cyclone of the decade hit Alpha. He was there when the King of Mesmerizers stood firm before the mountain of water when it was approaching their city. He saw him speaking to the raging water, and the water listened. Water always listens to the Mesmerizer’s voice.
“You are the Mesmerizer I would follow to death,” Maroc says and turns to leave, but the voice stops him again, and this time, it’s the voice he always waits to hear.
“Send the guest to the cave,” says the voice. “Tell her we meet where it lies. Tell her to leave if she cannot voice death. Tell her she will be a sacrifice if she bends her will.”
* * *
A SPIRAL TUNNEL taking deep into the earth.
A man humming a lullaby.
A gold anklet—one of its pair—ringing in his hand.
The man, the Mesmeriser, left the other around an Ungraded girl’s ankle. Perhaps she deserves it; perhaps she doesn’t. That’s something to see later, not now. The anklet, however, is something he needs for the time. It bells in the sweetest sound as some delicately forged gold, the sort of sound that only this anklet can make. In the cave, it creates a special frequency, a distinct ringing. Not always you find a word specifying the sounds of an anklet, not in all languages. But some do have a word or two, like Runujhunu—Bengali from the Old World.
“I didn’t want to come here,” says the symbolist the Mesmerizer has hired, Piuee Pariyeta. Her ginger hair is messier tonight, her face ashen from the dirt the path here has provided. Her analyzers aren’t broken. She appears confident but only on the façade.
The Mesmerizer remains silent, his eyes—fiery red, looking for things in the fungus-covered walls, things that only his eyes would see. It’s not the final destination. It’s not the cave, but it’s the beginning.
“Don’t you want to see the shrine you found?” Maroc Metz speaks on behalf of the Mesmerizer.
Piuee doesn’t reply at first. She was pleased with herself when she found the shrine where the Devil’s Book was forged. All discoverers feel such pleasure when they find something that could hold the truth. Still, who would visit a shrine that asks for a price?
“The shrine wants death,” she speaks her concern.
“You mentioned it,” Maroc Metz answers her, too quickly this time. “Thirty-nine times.” He also sneers, seeing the dirt on her nose. He tried not to do it all these times; his master taught him manners. “Do not use tones unobservant Low Grades use,” he said once, just once, and never again. The Mesmerizer never repeats instructions, but this woman is beyond—what you may call—acceptable. This woman makes people repeat instructions. He walks behind her, keeping distance between them as if he’s saving his valuable tailcoat from the world’s worst sewage. His gaze—scornful and repulsed—doesn’t soften.
