Cultwick: The Science of Faith Read online

  Cultwick:

  The Science of Faith

  By J. Stone

  Text copyright © 2013 J. Stone

  All Rights Reserved

  Additional Works

  Cultwick: The Sweeper Bot Plague

  Cultwick: The Wretched Dead

  The Poison Princess

  The Untethered Demon

  The Displaced Planet

  Lockhart’s Legacy

  http://jstonewrites.blogspot.com/

  Cover Artwork Provided By

  Marjorie Davis

  [email protected]

  marjoriedavisart.blogspot.com

  For Isaiah.

  For his never-ending enthusiasm.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. Alice’s Resurrection

  Chapter 2. Crowley’s Power

  Chapter 3. Vincent’s Recovery

  Chapter 4. Viola’s Mother

  Chapter 5. Pearl’s Home

  Chapter 6. Germ’s Orientation

  Chapter 7. Viola’s Coronation

  Chapter 8. Alice’s Orders

  Chapter 9. Ryn’s Gift

  Chapter 10. Rowland’s Research

  Chapter 11. Vincent’s Arm

  Chapter 12. Alice’s Quarry

  Chapter 13. Crowley’s Death

  Chapter 14. Germ’s Guide

  Chapter 15. Ryn’s Skill

  Chapter 16. Rowland’s Serum

  Chapter 17. Vincent’s Rampage

  Chapter 18. Pearl’s Assistance

  Chapter 19. Viola’s Council

  Chapter 20. Alice’s Insight

  Chapter 21. Germ’s Cage

  Chapter 22. Pearl’s Consultation

  Chapter 23. Alice’s Dilemma

  Chapter 24. Ryn’s Birthday

  Chapter 25. Rowland’s Pocket

  Chapter 26. Vincent’s Bounty

  Chapter 27. Germ’s Escape

  Chapter 28. Alice’s Search

  Chapter 29. Viola’s Inspection

  Chapter 30. Rowland’s Friends

  Chapter 31. Crowley’s Deception

  Chapter 32. Pearl’s Painting

  Chapter 33. Viola’s Portal

  Chapter 34. Ryn’s Nemesis

  Chapter 35. Vincent’s Commitment

  Chapter 36. Alice’s Grudge

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The great and bountiful Cultwick Empire. It could be considered the seat of power in this world. In its short history, it has never before been known to be an inclusive and understanding place. Soon after the empire was established by Emperor Nero Arkmast, it gained an official national religion, the Church of Biosynthesis. When Solomon Lyons returned Nero’s daughter to life, some saw both he and the young girl, Beatrice, as prophetic at the least or touched by god by the more zealous followers. The religion was founded on the basis that the science of transcription was a direct means of communication with the creator god, and that through this discipline, one could grow closer to god. Taken rather literally, this meant that its followers would inject themselves with various chemicals, concoctions, and serums, mutating and changing their bodies into things that weren’t quite human anymore.

  When Beatrice Arkmast took the seat of power after her mother and father had died under rather mysterious circumstances, she set to ridding the empire of all traces of religion that were not related to biosynthesis. Thanks to her resurrection, she saw herself as a living miracle and believed that it was her duty to destroy what she saw as false religions while simultaneously spreading the true one.

  There were truths to the world that were erased during what became known as the Purification. Those possessing certain knowledge or having been born of particular bloodlines were purged wholly. The history books did not capture what it was precisely that had been hunted down, save for that they were unsavory elements of Cultwick’s culture.

  Operatives were created for exactly this purpose. That is why the Reclamation Bureau has such a strong influence from the church. They were originally seen as holy warriors, fighting for biosynthesis. They used transcription to augment themselves into more capable soldiers in the war against all other religions and few were able to withstand them.

  The truth was that science wasn’t the only power in the world that had developed a theological following. After the Purification, however, such religions were outright banned with the punishment of death for any of their followers. Since the days of this purge, almost all of the individuals of any significant power in the empire have forgotten what it was that had been destroyed and why.

  Those that do know the truth are aware that it was not even a religion but rather a practice that The Purification attempted to eliminate. Long ago, hekta was discovered by ancient cultures. Hekta was the word used to describe a magical power that was limited to only a small subset of people. These individuals were capable of casting spells with enormous amounts of power and devastating effects, causing those who were unable to access hekta to come to fear and hate the sorcerers.

  In the ancient days, a myriad of religions cropped up due to the knowledge of hekta. Pantheons of gods were established, each governing a separate element of the world. With the advancement of science and technology, however, Cultwick began to abandon their ancient ways, and those who had grown to despise hekta came into power. Little by little, these old religions that worshiped both hekta and their pagan gods were discarded. With the onset of the Purification, there was almost nothing left of their ancient rites, practices, and knowledge. The old gods of hekta were abandoned for the science of biosynthesis.

  Born long after the Purification, Alice Page studied everything she could about those days. The event was among the reasons she became an operative, when she was of appropriate age. She wished to become like the holy warriors of days gone by. She wanted to know the power that science and god could bestow upon her. Even with her study of the Purification, however, Alice was unaware of hekta or the gods of old. She had put her complete faith in biosynthesis and the Cultwick Empire. Her faith is what led her out to the western frontier, following the heretic, Erynn Clover, as she escaped from the government institution known as the lottery. Successfully retrieving the heretic, Alice prepared to take her back to Cultwick via a railway, but that was when things went wrong for the operative.

  The heretic’s allies freed Erynn, and Alice was forced to once again attempt to recapture the woman. If not for the unstable scientific experiment, Fiona Newton, Alice believed she would have managed to serve justice on the heretic, but it seemed fate was against her that day. Enhanced, augmented, and completely mad, Fiona threw Alice under the train’s wheels, dismembering her body and destroying her pride. Her journey, however, was not at an end.

  Chapter 1. Alice’s Resurrection

  Darkness. Nothingness. An utter absence of what she had expected to find in her death. Had it all been a lie? A fabrication? Why wasn’t she with her god? Hadn’t she done as he’d asked? As Solomon had taught? Wasn’t she worthy of his presence? Her thoughts were all she had, but she began to realize that she wasn’t alone. In that darkness, there was another. The experiment, Fiona Newton, had invaded her mind somehow. Fiona had not only killed her, now the woman forcefully violated her consciousness.

  The last thing she recalled was her body being crushed and severed to pieces under the locomotive’s metal wheels. Pain rushed back to her, and she knew she had a corporeal form. She knew that it was not fully whole or natural, and every inch of her body throbbed in agony. She attempted to call out from the pain, but there was no sound. Her body moved against her will, striving to find an escape from the darkness. She believed her eyes were open, but she had no way of knowing for certain. Was she blind? Her arms fla
iled about in the void. Her fingers found a metal structure sealed around her. If not for the material, she would have expected that she had been buried somewhere. None of it made sense though. She had been in pieces. Why then would she be mostly whole once again?

  Through the pain, she could feel the rough stitching that sewed each of her parts back into her current form. She was repelled by the horrible composition of her body. She now realized that despite her death, she was truly alive once again. This was not some form of an afterlife. Had her god sent her back? Did he expect more of her? Why then did she have no control over her actions? Where was she, and what did he want her to do? Questions raced through her mind, with no answers arriving.

  Instead, she was met with a crack of light, painfully piercing her eyes. Her eyelids made no attempt to cover themselves and allow her to slowly adjust to the light. Rather, she was simply forced to deal with the pain. Her body moved out from the darkness and into the light. She had been placed inside a morgue drawer from which she was being pulled out of.

  A horribly disfigured face stood over her. Blood drooled from its mouth, and skin hung loosely from its face. The eyes were dead. The hair remained only in clumps. Bone was plainly visible behind patches of absent flesh, and its teeth were brown and rotted. Whatever it was, it was vacant of any life and seemingly void of real consciousness. Whatever drove that corpse, also seemed to be controlling her.

  Against her own thoughts, she sat upright and swung her legs off the side of the drawer’s cold slab. As her head swung down, she got her first glance at her body. Partially clothed by a thin, cotton gown, her skin matched her worst expectations. Torn. Bruised. Sloppily slapped together. She understood the pain that radiated from each of her wounds, but she was unable to scream or cry out. What she didn’t understand was the ability of life she had to begin with. She felt Fiona worming her way through her mind, and she found that a door had been opened between her own thoughts and that of the psychotic woman who had killed her.

  Whatever Dr. Norton had done to Fiona in his experiments, he had granted the woman an ability to control and reanimate the dead. Alice recalled seeing the phrase Cellular Regeneration in Fiona’s sheets. She saw a flash of a memory where Fiona had drunk the blood of the devout in the Anointed Temple’s basement archives. Alice’s blood had been stored there ever since her successful baptism as a young child. Drinking that blood had seemingly allowed Fiona to resurrect Alice, along with a slew of other bodies in the morgue. Fiona now had complete control over the operative, and her orders were to assemble at the Terrace Building in the center of Cultwick.

  Alice wondered if all the others that Fiona had infected felt the same as she did. For some reason, she believed she was different. The pain from her wounds was slowly beginning to grow, as Fiona forced Alice to walk out of the morgue room. Her body seemed to be stitching itself back together at a genetic level, and the process was painful. Never mind the thick black stitches that had been used to sew her body parts together, she was regenerating deeper.

  When she was alive, one of the scientists at the Center for Empirical Research had developed an experimental serum that Alice had begun to take shortly before her demise. The doctor had named it after herself, calling it the Hart Serum, and it was intended to regenerate injuries, regardless of type or severity. The heretic that she had been chasing, Erynn Clover, had tested this effectively enough. Alice’s body was riddled with bullets during the train ride from Willow Switch to Cultwick. She was inflicted with wounds that should have killed her, but she was able to easily regenerate and continue with her objectives. Only when the train had dismembered her, did Alice finally fall.

  The Hart Serum appeared to be the cause of this continued regeneration, but she couldn’t imagine that her previous dose would last forever. Perhaps it too was responsible for her ability to feel the pain radiating throughout her body. The serum didn’t seem to give her any advantage in wresting control of her body back from Fiona’s grasp, as, for the time being, she was forced to do the psychotic woman’s bidding and travel toward the Terrace Building.

  Outside, she was met with the soot-covered, dirty, cobbled streets of Cultwick. The city was mostly as she had left it - a collage of grey, black, and silver buildings stretching ever upward into the sky. Though it had grown colder and snow now covered much of the streets and walkways, it remained the same as ever. Her last recollections were of late autumn, and she was unsure how much time had truly passed. She delved once again through the open door into Fiona’s mind to try to find answers. Following Alice’s death, Fiona had returned to the city on the train. She had killed and converted everyone on board. Alice also learned that Fiona was comprised of two separate minds. There was the one that identified itself as Fiona, who was the dominant and more chaotic personality, but another going by the name of Newton was also inside her. Alice had discovered that Newton was gifted with the ability to see the future in some small regard.

  Following a vision of the submissive personality, Fiona had set to unraveling the empire of Cultwick. Much of the corps had been destroyed in a battle against the Chromework Confederacy, where Fiona intervened by converting many of the soldiers. Her next action was an attempted assassination of the empress. Alice could feel the mind of Mary Elizabeth Arkmast somewhere inside Fiona, but it seemed to be fighting control somehow. After the attack on the empress, Fiona moved to find another scryer named Simon, and he guided her toward the archives that had brought Alice back from death.

  Fiona and her hordes of undead followers now made for the Terrace Building, where the heretic was located. Even in her state of suspended undeath, Alice’s hatred seethed for the chromesmithing woman that had escaped her grasp. She vowed then that she would not rest until Erynn Clover had paid for her crimes against the Church of Biosynthesis and the Cultwick Empire. Her vengeance would have to wait, however, until she had gained some control over her actions.

  Though Alice still traveled, she knew that Fiona had arrived at the Terrace Building. Erynn and she had begun to converse. The chromesmith futilely attempted to talk Fiona out of the path she had already chosen. When that didn’t work, she jabbed a syringe at Fiona’s neck, hoping to separate the woman from her thralls. The attempt had failed, with Fiona grabbing Erynn’s wrist inches from her own neck. Alice looked on through Fiona’s eyes, hoping to see the psychopath eviscerate the heretic. Her own freedom might just be worth such a sight. She was let down, however, when a rebellious pet controlled by Newton picked up the syringe and injected Fiona with the concoction. Though Erynn lived, it successfully separated all of the thralls from Fiona.

  Alice was free. Suddenly, she realized that whatever pain she felt through the connection to Fiona had been severely numbed. Her skin burned from the freezing cold wind blowing through the cluttered and winding streets of the dark city. The blood in her feet boiled, covered in the dirty snow. She crumpled to the ground, crying out in severe pain. The joy of her escape was cut short by the realization that she might very well die before she could do anything with her freedom and rebirth. The thin layer of the gown offered no protection against the frigid air of winter.

  Her pain suddenly seemed distant though, as she was attacked by one of the dead minions. Released from Fiona’s control, each of the undead creatures became feral, lashing out instinctively at whatever was near. The corpse’s gaping, blood-spewing maw lunged toward her face. Her combat training as an operative kicked in, and Alice defended herself, pushing the feral cadaver away from her. Without giving it much thought, she willed her left arm into the bone blade that she occasionally relied upon. Flesh tore itself apart, flinging blood to the snow below, as the bone reformed into a jutting weapon covered with discarded skin and muscle. As the wild creature came back for a second attack, Alice swiped her arm with precision, slicing its head clean off its body. After its head landed with a thunk on the streets, its body followed suit. The cold immediately restored itself at the top of her priorities.

  Reforming her a
rm so that it ended in a normal hand, she knelt down at the body of the creature and stripped it of its clothes. She managed to squeeze into them, and though they weren’t sufficient to protect her from the temperature, it was a start. Pulling his thick, wool socks over her freezing feet offered a slight relief. The chaos unleashing itself on the streets surrounding her now seemed a more pressing concern. Looking around, Alice realized that dozens of other feral undead were flooding the nearby areas, attacking the living, gnawing on their flesh and feasting on their bowels.

  Nearby, a pale, blood-spattered ghoul attempted to tear at the flesh of another freed thrall of Fiona. Mutating her left arm into the blade once again, Alice impaled the creature in the back, piercing and shattering its spine. The corpse fell limp, held upright only by her bone blade. She waved her arm to the side, and it slid off her limb to the ground.

  The young woman looked up at Alice silently, horrified by what was happening around them. Lines streaked from her eyes down her dirty cheeks. Whoever this woman had been, she had been faithful. For Fiona to have controlled her, meant she had gone through the baptism as well. Through their faith had the mad woman been able to control them. The corps had nearly been devastated by the battle at Pendulum Falls. There was no one to restore order to Cultwick. Keeping the peace wasn’t her domain, but Alice knew that it had fallen to her to protect the city and its citizens.