Chapter 130

Barnabas was having the worst night of his life. He had just wanted to watch the fight.

Barnabas was a man of simple birth. He wasn’t from a completely peasant background. His grandfather had been a substantial landowner far out in the wilds. Their family employed dozens of workers. They were landed, sophisticated people, as much as one could be while living far from the city, far from the tower, only witnessing technology on the rarest of journeys into the city. But they were landowners and lived comfortably.

Barnabas’s father had been the second son. His uncle inherited the estate, and his father had no place there, but the family took care of them. They had resources, so they paid for his father to go to the city and study for the priesthood. His father had great aptitude. It was said that their family had a way with books and learning. But his father met a woman, a serving girl. Priests could not marry, and his love for that young lady pulled him away from his studies. His father redirected his focus to bookkeeping and accountancy, trading the robes of the priest for a ledger, and built a decent life for himself in the city.

Barnabas hadn’t inherited his father’s aptitude for learning. But he was decent and hardworking. He was smart enough to impress and physically imposing enough to find a place in the soldiery. His father had some connections, and Barnabas had secured a comfortable position in the arena, managing the beasts. Many wouldn’t have been able to survive the horror of caring for the creatures, but Barnabas, if anything, was fascinated by them.

He had spent his years with regular hours, clocking in and clocking out. He, too, had found a lovely city girl to make his wife, and he, too, had become a father.

And so it was that he stood before the roiling blackness that he couldn’t explain, nagging regrets playing on his mind. He had had simple desires that evening. He was going to wait for the bishop to leave, then sneak up top to watch the fight. He had a few coins resting on the victory of the common boy. The odds weren’t great, as the boy had become the overwhelming favorite, but Barnabas preferred a sure thing with a simple return. Once the fight was done, he would wait for the crowd to disperse, lock up, and head home. He’d probably pick up food from a vendor—there were so many vendors open that day because of the festivities. He’d bring it home and enjoy the meal with his wife. His eldest would probably still be up, and he’d share some of the treat with her. Then, when the last child was asleep, he had harbored hopes of some nocturnal activities with his very loving—and usually eager—wife.

Instead, he was staring into the eye of a demon. He was watching something unfold before him that he couldn’t comprehend. I still don’t completely understand what happened, but I’ve studied enough to have an idea. In the eye of an entropy storm, even a tiny one like this, time loses all meaning. Millennia can pass in an instant. Generations can fly by in a breath. Other things can happen as well. Organic matter, normally immune to the effects of order and chaos under most circumstances, becomes subject to the same randomness as inanimate objects.

When that storm swelled from nowhere and consumed the cages of beasts, there had been a total of 37 creatures inside. This was an unusually large number, but it had been the Choosing, and the priests had demanded the requisition of so many creatures to give them options for the events. They wouldn’t have gone to waste. The city would be swollen with revelers for days to come, and many displays could have been put on with the surplus creatures.

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But that was not to be. I can only tell you what I imagined happened in there. I have a mental image of what occurred in the storm, but my understanding is so limited, and the possible versions of events so varied, that this might just be a fantastical notion.

What I see happening is the melting of flesh. Thirty-seven creatures howled and beat at the bars, no less perturbed by the emerging storm than Barnabas. As the storm swelled and enveloped them, they entered a different reference of time than the outside world. Things happened slower or faster. Decades may have passed while Barnabas watched, or microseconds. But I see their flesh melting.

Thirty-seven monsters. The ape things weighed in at maybe 200 pounds. The little rat creatures were perhaps a tenth of that. All told, the 37 creatures added up to almost two tons of meat and bone. And the chaos of the storm broke down the essential physics that held the cells together. This, of course, should have spelled death for them. But there is a strange iterative process in the guts of these storms. They can act again and again, in seemingly pure randomness. Cells sloughing around, puddles of ichor and gore. But the cells could pool and flow a million times in a minute. Maybe billions of times. The tides of entropy could roll over them again and again, making new shapes from the raw materials. If it took a billion random attempts, a trillion, eventually something could be made from those cells. And with an eternity speeding by within the storm, while only minutes ticked by outside of it, the possibilities were endless. It was like a million monkeys hammering away at typewriters. Organs and meat, cells and fluids, assembled again and again, for a trillion years if need be, could eventually produce something that wasn’t just stinking waste.

Entropy storms are believed to birth fiends.

The storm receded as quickly as it had come. The boiling blackness pulled back, and electricity seemed to arc through the air as the darkness vacated. Barnabas had a moment to think that things were going to be okay. He could see it receding. He had imagined for a moment that it would keep growing and devour the whole arena while he stood there, rooted to the spot, immobilized by fear.

But as the darkness shrank back to the same point it had emerged from, the world it regurgitated was different. The cages were gone. Strange plants seemed to sprout from the ground. Most of the little weeds weren’t that strange at first glance, but their colors were off—dark purples that shouldn’t exist in nature—and their shapes seemed impossible to support. One of the plants appeared to be more of a tentacle, like that of an octopus. Boston was a fishing city, and Barnabas enjoyed his seafood like any citizen. He knew what an octopus looked like, and what he saw in that plant was more octopus than anything that should grow from the earth. It twitched and waved.

If that had been the only puzzle, the only horror, Barnabas might have counted himself blessed. But the darkness receded further, folding in on itself until nothing was left except the reality that had existed before. Except everything that had been there—cages, barrels, coils of rope, crates of food, and fiends—was gone.

Something else remained in their place.

Barnabas found that for all his terror, for all the way the fear had rooted him in place, this new apparition could move him. He took in a deep breath as he stared at the strange mountain of heaving flesh. His eyes widened with disbelief, his pupils dilating as his brain tried to process what it was he was seeing.

Then a scream left his throat. It was a huge, gurgling scream of complete, abandoned terror. That scream could have summoned help from five streets away.

But it was drowned out by the surging voices of the crowd above him.