Furnace 5 - Execution (28 page)

It is you because you remembered
, he said.

Then, with an almighty crack, his head crumbled into itself, his face breaking into a hundred pieces, drifting to the stone like snow and ash. And with his final words I saw the rest of his story, his memories now mine, flooding into me with the last few drops of blood.

In that second I lived an entire life, Alfred Furnace’s life.

I was back in the orchard, feeling what the young Furnace felt as he drank the blood of the stranger, filled with a power he was barely old enough to comprehend. I charged with him through the trees, back towards his village, with the mind of an animal and the strength of a god. That cloud of dark energy surrounded him, the stranger somehow superimposed over Furnace’s body, looking like he was haemorrhaging black mist into the air. He tore through his own people with such ferocity that I could feel the bile rise in my throat. His viciousness left nothing behind but an island of severed limbs in an ocean of blood.

It was only when he finally found the corpse of his brother, József, that he seemed to emerge from his bloodlust. I watched him drop down onto his knees beside the boy, felt his horror, his shock as he realised that his veins now ran with the blood of his sibling’s murderer. He reached out, cradling the dead body, rocking back and forth and howling so loud that his breath threatened to extinguish the fires which had started in the village.

It does not want anger
, I heard Furnace’s voice in my head, the boy’s voice, as if he were here too watching a replay of his life.
It is not enough for it to possess a mindless creature bent on destruction. It needs somebody who can remember, somebody who will never forget the child they once were. It needs you to be able to keep control.

‘
I don’t understand
,’ I said.

The moment I saw József I remembered
, Furnace said.
I remembered who I was. József would never have wanted me to be like this; it was the memory of him that stopped me from becoming a berserker, or worse. The stranger’s blood gave me power, but it was the memories of József, of my old life, which let me control it for so long, and to make it even stronger over the centuries. You are the same, are you not?

‘
What do you mean?
’

Furnace’s lifeline sped up, so fast I could barely follow it – I saw him hiding out in a forest, years spent by himself as he tried to understand what was happening to him; I saw him spurned and cast out by the people he encountered, the men and women who attacked him without question, sensing the evil inside him, then
the armies who declared war on what they saw as a devil. The battle I had seen before, in my dreams, was but one of many, I realised. Tens of thousands had tried to kill Furnace, and they had all paid with their lives.

I saw the barn, the boy who was being kicked to death by the posse of howling adults. I watched again as Furnace shared his blood with the kid, the boy taking his revenge on his attackers. This was the first of Furnace’s children, those few droplets from his master’s vein multiplying the boy’s strength a hundredfold. I watched as, only two days later, the same kid died, the undiluted poison wreaking havoc on his flesh.

Most people cannot handle the blood
, Furnace said.
It is too much for them, it breaks them. I survived because it was not just some of the stranger’s blood inside me, but all of it – the stranger himself dwelling in my body, in my mind. And it was because I remembered my life, my name, because I had kept my mind, that he could use me. You, like me, still remember. That is what it wants, Alex, because if the host remembers nothing of the world it came from it is no more use to the stranger than a dog.

More flash-forwards, Furnace older now, trying to find a way to share his blood with other children without killing them. I saw countless victims become rats. Furnace commanded them as his personal army, their deformed bodies hidden beneath chain mail and armour, unstoppable in battle but never living much more than a week. A few survived, still growing, starting to change into berserkers, but even these would eventually fall apart before the process could complete, their bodies
swelling uncontrollably until they simply burst.

Decades passed, Furnace growing richer as he conquered his enemies, reducing entire cities to dust. Then the scene changed and I was in an old-fashioned laboratory, watching a bearded man working with beakers full of black blood. The stranger was still there, part of Furnace, his featureless face smiling and yet not smiling, watching intently as the man worked.

It was in Vienna, more than a century ago, that I created the nectar
, Furnace said.
I found a way to dilute the blood, to replicate its effects without causing certain death
.

I watched as the man in my vision pricked his finger with a needle, a tiny bead of blood dropping into a container of clear liquid. Instantly the fluid began to cloud, until it looked like a vat of oil filled with tiny golden flecks. I recognised it, the nectar that the warden and his wheezers had used back inside the prison.

He filled a syringe from the container and injected it into a child. The kid, the guinea pig, bucked and thrashed as the poison entered his veins, but he remained human. Days passed, the boy growing stronger, bigger. When his expanding body threatened to split his skin, Furnace performed surgery, patching him up with grafts and muscles salvaged from a fresh corpse until, maybe a week later, I recognised him as a blacksuit. A Soldier of Furnace.

This was the first time I managed to harness the nectar’s power successfully
, I heard Furnace say.
My soldiers were strong, yes, and fast, able to heal themselves of most injuries. But they only had the nectar, they only had a fraction of the
power of the stranger’s blood. Any more and they would simply become monsters. They would lose their minds. They were good soldiers, yes, but none could become my heir. The blood would kill them
.

Another gut-churning leap forward in time, Furnace much older now, his face so gaunt beneath his beard that he could have been a walking corpse. He was standing inside a bunker, surrounded by young men, teenagers. They were all dressed in long black coats, red swastikas emblazoned on their armbands, a bandolier of needles strapped to their chests, gas masks concealing their faces. I could see their eyes, though, as black as coal. Whoever these men were, they had consumed the nectar, and it had already kept them alive far longer than they deserved.

As my experiments progressed I found that some were immune to the nectar
, he said.
Or nearly so. Their new blood processed the atmosphere differently, the air they breathed setting off a chemical reaction that proved fatal. Many died before I discovered the cause, and the solution – to filter out nearly all of the oxygen using modified gas masks. I made them my scientists. They grew old with me, so old, forgetting everything but the desire to experiment, to create. I have heard you call them ‘wheezers’. Your friend Zee would make a suitable candidate …

The room was full of cages, and I realised that I had been here before, in my dreams back inside the prison. Kids crouched in the shadows inside each container, their sad eyes fixed on the men around them, and on the pile of corpses in the corner.

The problem was that I only had a limited supply of blood inside me, so could make only a small quantity of nectar
.
One or two soldiers a week. We almost developed a new nectar under Hitler, but he failed before we could finish. I offered him the chance to change, but he was too afraid. He was a weak man, Alex. Far weaker than you
.

Another scene I recognised: gas-masked men struggling through the mud carrying a stretcher, looking for the wounded, the nearly dead. I saw them carry off dozens of men, all of them screaming to be let back onto the battlefield, crying out to die. I saw Furnace himself, pulling a teenage boy from the blood and filth. I recognised the warden.

He was to be my heir
, he said, and I saw them working together, Furnace feeding Cross nectar until the warden’s eyes became a mirror image of his own twin vortexes.
He drank of the nectar, consumed more of it than I believed possible, and yet he still remembered who he was, who he had been and where he had come from
.
I knew that one day I would pass my gift, my blood, to him.

More images, changing too fast to make sense of, time peeling away. I saw the construction of the tower in the city, then the prison being built, its purpose to create an endless supply of test subjects, the warden inside continuing the same experiments, all under his master’s supervision. By now Furnace was trapped here on the island, fixed into his infernal machine, his body wasted, decayed, but his mind as sharp as ever. I witnessed him and his wheezers creating the new breed of nectar, the one that could pass from mortal to
mortal with just a bite, the one with the power to create the berserkers outside, the leviathans in the water.

But, alas, Cross disappointed me. He could not keep his house in order. Where one failed, however, another succeeded. I found somebody else, somebody more deserving. Somebody who, like Cross, had consumed far more nectar than I thought possible, and yet who still remembered who he was.

I saw myself, the boy I had once been – so human he was almost unrecognisable – the day I travelled down to Furnace in the elevator. I saw those doors opening to reveal the hell where I thought I would spend the rest of my life, the place in which I thought I would die. Donovan was there, leading me up the stairs, scowling. Then inside my cell, when his face had opened up and suddenly the prison hadn’t seemed so dark, so far underground. I saw it all, everything that happened, our attempts to escape, the day we made it back onto the streets, my fight with the warden in the tower, everything right up to this one ageless, endless second.

We are the same, you and I
, said Furnace.
We were both accused of a murder we didn’t commit, we were both sentenced to death for that crime, and we were both given a chance to right that wrong, to take revenge on the world that had condemned us. It was necessary for your friend Toby to die so that you might share those emotions with me. It is these similarities which led us to each other. Given a choice, of course, I would never hand over the gift. But I do not know how much longer I have – it may be another hundred years, it may be another hour – and if I die without passing on the blood then everything will have been for nothing.

I had a vision of myself as I was right now, strapped to the machine, the stranger’s blood pumping through me. My entire body seemed to radiate darkness, waves of absence ebbing from my pores. And my eyes were vast portals, black holes of infinite nothingness.

I wasn’t scared, though. I wasn’t excited either. There were no emotions, only the feeling that this was right, that I belonged. Another kid had been here, Alfred Furnace, a
good
kid, an innocent kid, and I was to replace him. Nothing in my life had ever seemed more logical, or made more sense.

I wanted to make a world where there is no more weakness
, Furnace said.
I still do. A world where a boy like me can never be nailed to a tree and slaughtered, where a boy like you can fight back against those who attack him. A place where there is only strength, where all are equal, where all fight on the same side. Do that for me, Alex. Finish this.

The boy I had once been, the boy Furnace had once been, would both have seen the twisted logic of that argument for what it was, would have understood that what really drove Furnace was the stranger in his veins, a creature of evil which wanted only to wreak destruction upon humanity, to turn life to rot. But the stranger’s blood was too powerful, its cry for power too loud, and that understanding was obliterated from my mind.

‘
I will
,’ I said. ‘
I promise
.’

And even as I made one promise, I honoured another. I could sense Alfred Furnace hanging on somewhere inside me, a trace of him left in the blood he had given me – just a boy terrified of the end, of what might come
next. Then I felt him leave, my body shuddering as the last of his consciousness fled. I had seen his whole life, centuries of it, flash by in an instant, and it ended just as quickly.

Furnace was dead. I had killed him.

And I had taken his place.