The Unnamed Way (The World Walker Series Book 4) Read online

  The Unnamed Way

  Ian W. Sainsbury

  Copyright © 2017 by Ian W. Sainsbury

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Hristo Kovatliev

  For Mum (always reading)

  and Dad (Bertrand Roy)

  Contents

  Previously in The World Walker series…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Unchapter 25

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Unchapter 36

  Chapter 35

  Unchapter 38

  Unchapter 39

  Unchapter 40

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Author’s Note

  Previously in The World Walker series…

  Join my (very occasional) mailing list, and I’ll send you the unpublished prologue for The World Walker: http://eepurl.com/bQ_zJ9

  Previously…(contains spoilers for books one, two, and three)

  Musician Seb Varden has been dragged into a world he never knew existed. Alien nanotechnology indistinguishable from magic has been used—consciously or not— by individuals and organizations throughout the history of our planet. The nanotechnology, accessed by visiting sites called Thin Places, is known as Manna. In The World Walker, Seb learns how to cope with the new powers he has been given by an alien benefactor and avoid those who wish to use him or see him dead, notably a very powerful Manna user known as Mason.

  In The Unmaking Engine, now living anonymously with girlfriend Meera Patel in Mexico City, he is initially powerless to stop himself being summoned and questioned by the Rozzers, an alien race on their way to Earth to destroy their failed experiment—humanity—and try again. The Rozzers are scientists who carefully control the evolution of new species in the universe by seeding planets with Manna before introducing cellular matter with the potential to develop into intelligent life. Seb prevents them by reprogramming The Unmaking Engine. Instead of wiping out humanity, Seb’s intervention means the Engine rewires humanity’s DNA so that future generations will no longer be able to use Manna. The Rozzers are appeased, but his actions come at a huge personal cost for Seb: he has to allow his entire body and brain to evolve and become, fully, a World Walker (or T’hn’uuth.) In the process, he again fends off Mason, discovering that he is, in fact, his brother. After Seb removes the brain tumor that caused his personality to warp so thoroughly, Mason takes the name John and joins his brother and Mee on the small island of Innisfarne, off the east coast of Britain. What should be a time of relief and celebration turns sour as Seb becomes increasingly distant with Mee, finally disappearing from Innisfarne entirely, possibly against his will. Mee has just discovered she is pregnant.

  Many years after The Unmaking Engine, in The Seventeenth Year, we meet Joni, Seb and Meera’s daughter. Conceived before Seb sacrificed the last of his physical humanity to become a World Walker and save Earth from the Unmaking Engine, Joni discovers she has unusual abilities of her own. She is resistant to Manna, which is good and bad. Good because it can’t really be used against her, bad because she can’t Use it herself - to heal or be healed. Her other ability involves the multiverse - which Seb discovered he was using every time he Walked. Joni can reset the multiverse, returning to a point she has consciously created, where the universe branches into two possible futures.

  Joni uses her ability to escape from Adam, a psychopathic remnant from the Acolytes Of Satan - the organization which tried to kill Seb in The World Walker. Adam’s belief in a demigod which created the Earth and may yet return to rule it fuels his desire to rid the planet of the most powerful Manna users to prove his worth. If not Seb Varden himself, who is missing presumed dead, then why not the next best thing - his daughter? Joni is aided in her escape by her mother and Sym - a personality construct originally created by Seb who has been pursuing his own agenda in the years since Seb vanished.

  Mistakenly believing Adam to be dead, Joni and Mee return to Innisfarne where a disguised Adam kills her uncle John and prepares to kill Joni. Seb returns and saves Joni. Sym kills Adam.

  Seb prepares to tell Mee and Joni—the daughter he has never met—where he has been the past seventeen years. It’s an incredible story, involving a mysterious alien artifact he as brought back to Earth with him: the Gyeuk Egg. It’s not over yet…

  MAIN CHARACTERS CONTINUING FROM BOOKS 1-3

  Seb Varden

  Orphan, musician, World Walker and our unlikely hero.

  Meera (Mee) Patel

  Seb’s girlfriend, a singer and Manna user. Pot-smoking, foul-mouthed and brilliant.

  Joni

  Seb and Mee’s daughter. Conceived before Seb’s final evolution to T’hn’uuth status, she has unexpected abilities, namely a resistance to Manna and the power to return to a previously chosen reset point in her own timeline and re-live the subsequent events, changing them if necessary.

  Sym

  Artificially constructed by Seb to passively observe Walt Ford in The World Walker, Sym can live online or symbiotically within a host (hence his name). He can also take over a host body if necessary. Although his personality is based on Seb’s, he has a more ambivalent relationship with morality than his creator.

  Billy Joe

  A T’hn’uuth (World Walker) who evolved from the Rozzer species thousands of years ago. In The World Walker, he awoke from a dormant state on Earth in order to accelerate Seb’s own evolution into a World Walker, giving him extraordinary powers.

  The Gyeuk

  A swarm-mind, artificially intelligent. Just as nanotechnology provides the physical makeup and power of the T’hn’uuth, so it provides the countless tiny intelligences that go to make up the group mind of the Gyeuk. The Gyeuk’s ambitions and motives remain opaque. It was a Gyeuk ship that carried the Rozzers on their destructive mission in The Unmaking Engine. As Seb found in his encounter with H’wan (the ship), the relationship between the Gyeuk and the T’hn’uuth is characterized by a slight unease on both sides.

  Chapter 1

  The moons were full that night. Usually, this would be considered an auspicious omen. Usually.

  Two figures, silhouetted against the evening sun, walked into the meeting circle and faced the three Elders. No other tribe members were present. Sopharndi had requested a private audience for herself and her son. The orange tinge of sunset gave the illusion of warmth, although back in the settlement fires had been burning for a few hours already.

  Sopharndi stood silently before the Eld
ers. She could not quite bring herself to lower her eyes, despite her love and trust for those who led her tribe. She fidgeted while they bowed their heads. The thin scar on her chin itched, but she resisted the urge to scratch it.

  Beside Sopharndi, Cley started his tuneless humming. When, at five years old, her son had first started this curious habit, Sopharndi had felt a wild and desperate hope pierce her broken heart. Perhaps Cley wasn’t a Blank after all. Maybe he was just a late starter. After all, he was able to feed himself a little, and sometimes he seemed to show interest in a bright flower or the flight of a particularly raucous lekstrall. But the humming, despite hours of patient coaxing, had never led to a single intelligible word, and Sopharndi had felt her hopes slip away, replaced by the quiet despair that accompanied her every waking hour and haunted her dreams. She wondered why the Singer had chosen to inflict such cruel and torturous punishment on her and her blameless child. Sopharndi had always tried to live according to Her silent song. Perhaps trying wasn’t good enough for the Singer.

  Laak, Leader of the People, raised her head and held both palms toward Sopharndi and Cley.

  “Sopharndi has asked. The Elders will answer.”

  Laak dropped her hands and took a step forward. “You are a mother. Your love for your son is a reflection of the love the Singer has for all of us. We honor this, Sopharndi.”

  The two Elders flanking Laak were parents and grandparents. Hesta had two boys. Gron had outlived both of his children and was bringing up his granddaughter. Laak’s daughter Cochta was strong of arm and was considered by most to be the obvious next First, replacing Sopharndi when the time came. Some suspected Cochta’s desires were greater still, and she intended to follow her mother as Leader. When Sopharndi looked at Laak, she saw a woman entering her final years, her strength beginning to ebb away. Cochta was certainly strong enough to lead but lacked her mother’s patience and wisdom. The girl had a little too much to say for herself.

  Better too much than nothing at all.

  She looked at Cley, then automatically took out a cloth and wiped away the saliva spilling from the corner of his mouth. He stopped humming for a second while Sopharndi dabbed at his face, then picked up where he had left off. Sopharndi looked back at the Elders and—just for a moment–saw a flicker of pity in Laak’s eyes.

  The decision had gone against her, then.

  “It is our way,” said Laak. “We cannot make an exception.”

  Sopharndi, Hesta and Gron intoned the age-old response. “As the Singer wills.”

  Cley would have to make the Journey. He would go into the Parched Land. For any other of the People, it was just a ritual marking their transition from adolescence to adulthood. For Cley, it was a death sentence.

  Without another word, Sopharndi took her son’s hand and led him back to the settlement.

  Chapter 2

  Innisfarne

  When Seb opened the door of the crofter’s cottage to find Jesus Christ standing there, he was—for a moment, at least—nonplussed. He regarded the figure in silence. Jesus looked back at him steadily. The slowly falling snow was part of Seb’s reason for his lack of reaction. There was something uncannily familiar about the scene.

  “Seb,” said Jesus, with a friendly nod.

  “Jesus,” said Seb, returning the nod. Being brought up by nuns made politeness habitual.

  And it’s Jesus, for Chrissakes.

  Seb spent a moment trying to unpick the sheer wrongness of that last thought before mentally shrugging and giving up. He was dressed for the weather, his usual jeans and T-shirt supplemented with a thick woolen sweater, a greatcoat that looked like it belonged in nineteenth century Russia, gloves, hat, and scarf. He had no need for clothes for warmth, but he was making a determined stab at being normal. On his back was a knapsack, inside which—carefully wrapped in an old blanket—was an object that had been created by an Artificial Intelligence made up of a swarm of beings that were both many and one, countless light-years away from where he stood now, outside a cottage on the tiny Northumbrian island of Innisfarne. Looking at Jesus. Maybe this whole attempt at normal wasn’t going perfectly, but Seb could be a stubborn and resolute man, and he wasn’t done trying just yet.

  The man in front of him, dressed only in a loincloth, his head crowned with thorns, bloody wounds on his hands and feet, looked every inch the Catholic Christ of Seb’s childhood. But icons or statues didn’t place Jesus in a snow scene. It wasn’t that Catholics were shy about portraying their savior in myriad ways. Seb had seen images of Christ as a shepherd, a teacher, a stern judge, a healer, a friend to the poor and needy. He’d seen statues where the man of sorrows pulled open his own chest to reveal a stylized, golden, sacred heart. He remembered one of the sisters pinning a page of a magazine to the noticeboard at St Benet’s, purporting to show the face of Christ in a pretzel.

  But snow?

  “So, yeah, Seb,” said Jesus. “Hey. What’s happening?” Despite the sub-zero temperature, the apparition didn’t shiver. Apparition was the wrong word. Seb had no doubt that, were he to place a hand on that wound on the man’s side, he would feel warm flesh and blood. Not that he intended to try it.

  Instead of feeling as if he were in the presence of a miracle, Seb felt irritated. Snowflakes were settling in the figure’s long, deep-brown, lustrous hair, with its unlikely shampoo-commercial shine. The beard covering the chin of the otherwise flawless white skin was neatly trimmed. Jesus’s barber was obviously a perfectionist. The eyes were an unlikely shade of cornflower blue.

  Why did it seem so—

  Then, suddenly, he had it. Sister Theresa’s office. On the windowsill. Next to her bowl of plastic rosaries, which she had handed out with unrelenting generosity and optimism to everyone she met.

  A snow-globe.

  When he had been very small, way before he was attending any classes, Sister Theresa had sometimes let him sit in her big leather swivel chair. She was in charge of the orphanage accounts and had spent hours every day hunched over bills and receipts. A bad back didn’t allow her to sit still for extended periods, so she had made sure she stood for at least ten minutes in every hour. And that had been when the two or three-year-old Seb, looking at picture books or playing with donated toys in the corner, had been allowed to sit in the big chair, his outstretched feet not even reaching the edge of the leather. As the only resident orphan abandoned on their doorstep just after his birth, he had enjoyed certain privileges.

  While she’d stretched her recalcitrant spine, or moved paperwork from an eternally refilling in-tray to a similarly overloaded out-tray, Sister Theresa would hand Seb a plastic rosary—because not to do so would just feel plain wrong to the dutiful woman—and, after a few seconds during which he looked at her wide-eyed and ever so slightly reproachfully, she’d cave in and give him the globe. She did it just to see the child’s face break into that broad, delighted smile that not a single Sister in the place could resist. They weren’t going to spoil the boy, God forbid, but if an opportunity arose to take any action that would produce that wondrously uplifting expression on Seb’s chubby, innocent face, well, who could blame them? If any Sister in the place had ever harbored any doubts about their calling, a few seconds’ exposure to that boy’s smile would set them right.

  So, maybe once a week, when it was Sister Theresa’s turn to babysit, Seb would get the chance to shake the snow-globe, and watch the tiny flakes swirl around the figure of Jesus, as he stood in a frozen gesture of blessing. But that figure had been robed. Seb couldn’t remember any other details apart from the blue eyes of the plastic statue. All other colors had long disappeared, the materials used in the globe’s construction having been chosen for cheapness, rather than durability. Over the years, the figure of Jesus had become as white as the scene around him, only those two minuscule flecks of blue remaining in an almost featureless face. The contours had worn smooth, no details discernible. Christ’s plastic form had literally become part of the world inside the globe, littl
e by little, shake by shake, his own body falling around him with the flakes of snow.

  Seb found he was losing patience. His Manna was providing information he had already half-guessed.

  “Jesus Christ was a Middle-Eastern Jew,” he said, “not a Woodstock hippy.”

  Piercingly blue eyes narrowed into a slightly petulant glare.

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  The voice was pleasingly soft and nondescript, unmistakably American, but geographically vague. The kind of accent an actor playing Christ might settle on.

  “Well, you thought wrong. I don’t.”

  Jesus mumbled something and rolled his eyes. Then, with such swiftness that it seemed to happen instantaneously, the figure lost about a foot in height, its skin darkening to a sun-baked brown. The eyes were dark now, the eyebrows bushy and wild. The beard now looked unkempt, matted with blood. The face was completely different, older, weathered…tired. For a moment, Seb felt a deep sense of shock as the Christ he had sometimes pictured as a teenager, rejecting the toothpaste commercial poster boy he kept seeing, stood before him, silent and solemn. Then the man winked, and the spell was broken.