The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  “No, no,” Marcel said, returning the periapt. “We had a church healer back at my medical school, he used a real one.” Though even in his brief medical work Marcel had never been convinced the chaplain was doing any more than occasionally elongating the last breaths of dying men. “You’re a priest?”

  “Of a sort,” the man replied.

  Marcel stepped back, and Kayip made no move. If the two wanted to kill him they had had the chance and then some. Marcel had been, perhaps, foolish to trust them this far, yet they hadn’t betrayed that trust in any dangerous ways.

  “So you knew Desct?” Marcel asked the sort-of priest.

  The man nodded, “We worked together before. I’d like to see his work completed.”

  “He didn’t mention you in his notes,” Marcel said.

  “He did mention a warmonk, no?” Kayip gestured to himself.

  That was true. Even Lazarus had mentioned that the man considered himself some sort of battle priest or something.

  “The war part?” Marcel asked

  “A life ago.”

  “Listen,” Sylvaine said, “I’ve been holding back the urge to vomit down here for long enough. Do you want to see the mutants, or just shove your head back into sand? I’m fine either way, just please decide soon.”

  “And if I leave?” Marcel said.

  “Then you leave,” Kayip replied. “We could use your assistance, Mr. Talwar, but you have no obligation to assist. I would ask that if you leave us now that you do not mention our work to others, but even that we cannot enforce.”

  “Right,” Marcel said, pausing to think. The possibility of running back to his apartment had its appeal, but then what? If Verus were behind these abuses he’d be walking away from definite proof. As much as he wanted to trust in Lambert’s skill, if the accusations were true, he needed to make sure the foreman had no outs for denial.

  Marcel sighed, “Well then, lead the way, I guess.”

  * * *

  They left Sylvaine behind and continued down a twisting path of abandoned substructures, dry pipeways, and dug out tunnels in the direction of Blackwood Row. Marcel kept his hand near his holster and his eye on the monk. The latter task turned out to be difficult, as Kayip was not the easiest man to keep pace with. Marcel had to jog to keep up. It would be easy to slip away if need be, the monk made no effort to keep him, the only risk was the convolutions of the Underway itself. Marcel could remember some of these pathways, but the monk took a few different turns than he expected, and never needed to pause to gain his bearings.

  He did stop once, suddenly, arm out, finger to his lips. He flicked off his handtorch and Marcel did the same. The darkness was complete, the only sounds distant echo of gurgling water and an occasional mechanical groan, the only sensation the constant, still, cold.

  After a few minutes of black, Kayip click the light back on, and they continued.

  The two took a right at a smashed boiler, went down a set of concrete stairs next to rows of hissing pistons, walked through an abandoned underrail station, turned left at the collapsed basement of what once must have been some sort of factory, and followed a river of sewage.

  “Okay,” Marcel said. “Audric Avenue is above the abandoned sangleum pumps, which are there.” He shined his handtorch down a thin hallway, half flooded with brown water that glistened in reflection. “So if we turn here,” he illuminated a dark underrail track, “we should sneak right under the walls.”

  Kayip shook his head. “Chokeshrooms.”

  “Shit really? Must have grown in the last couple years.”

  “There is a smashed wall a few metres this way.”

  Kayip spoke soft and walked softer. Marcel couldn’t imagine what the man was expecting to find down here. Even Huile teenagers rarely haunted the Underway much since City Hall imposed harsh penalties on “dangerous urban exploration.” Still the muffled shadows did seem to impress some vague, sleeping threat; though perhaps that was simply Marcel’s repressed memories growling. It was far too easy to imagine glints off old pipes as Principate bayonets, to hear any echo as footsteps, to imagine every gust bringing with it that red gas.

  “So, exactly what sort of monk were you?’ Marcel asked, eager to distract himself from the creeping thoughts. “Populo Auditas? Or one of those Church-first people, what’s-it-called? Don’t tell me you were some Orthodox Imperator ass-kisser?”

  “We were… independent,” Kayip said, leading Marcel around a sinkhole of muck. “We maintained a monastery deeper in the Wastes, but also performed priestly rites as well when the opportunity arose. Which admittedly was rare in those lands. I suppose we traced our lineage to what you call Church-first, the Genitor Primus…”

  “Right, right.” Marcel waved his hand torch as he walked, scaring cat-sized scraprats from their nests.

  “…but we were more practical minded, and less concerned with politics. We believed that the truest form of meditation demanded the blade.”

  “So you were one of those—” He stopped himself from saying ‘lunatics’, “—uh warriors, out in the Wastes, fighting troglyns and ætheric aberrations?”

  Kayip flashed his light up to a doorway above a rusted-away staircase. Marcel put his torch away and climbed up a few metres of disconnected pipes, before pulling himself through the opening. He lent a hand to Kayip, but the man waved him back, before simply leaping, grabbing the bottom the passageway and pulling himself up in one movement.

  “Demons,” Kayip said. “That is the… proper term for those things, those ‘aberrations’. Though that is all I will speak of them. It is unwise to invoke ill presences in places such as this.”

  “Right.”

  They continued on. It had been years since he had talked to a true believer; fundamentalism wasn’t in vogue in Resurgence lands. It was strange to hear someone still use the old, superstitious terms. They conjured up childhood sermons, full of Infernofire and damned souls forever tormented by the manifestations of their sins. Marcel had found the stories silly as he grew into his adolescent faithlessness, but as a kid they had brought more than their share of night-terrors, augmented by the displays of his priest. It was too easy to imagine those horrors resting in some hidden corner down here.

  “So,” Marcel asked, “are you a miracle caster? My priest used to shoot balls of orange light from his fingers during sermons.”

  Kayip paused mid-walk, and Marcel noticed his hand twitch up to his face, but stop, as if an instinct had been shot down.

  “No.”

  “Really? I thought it was common among warmonks.” He had read in a history textbook that such ætheric skills were important in maintaining military power and prestige in the old orders of the Imperial Church. Or maybe that was from a pulp.

  The pathway ended suddenly at a puddle-strewn crossroads. The straight path was cut off by large iron bars, buried deep into the walls of what must have at one time been a large underrail station, possibly the pre-war Huile’s central station.

  “That’s new,” Marcel said.

  Kayip nodded and gestured towards the right. “I know a detour a ways down.”

  Marcel shined his light leftwards, where the pathway curved into dark. “I think this heads the same way as—”

  Kayip grabbed him as he started to walk. Silently the man took a few steps forward, leaned down, and blew. Gleaming beneath the dust and the grime was the red shine of sangleum. Marcel felt a faint pulsing pain in his leg; he was surprised he hadn’t smelled the oil.

  “A leak?” he asked.

  “That implies it is unintentional,” Kayip said. “We take the detour.”

  He led them through a series of tunnels, some concrete or tiled, some dug from the earth, to a small room, where, removing brick by brick, he made a small opening in the wall. After they crawled through, he replaced the bricks with the same care.

  “You afraid someone will notice?” Marcel asked.

  “It is wiser if w
e do not speak from here on. I would not care to be caught off guard by whatever may lurk in these shadows.”

  “You don’t need to worry.” Marcel replied, half for the monk’s sake, half to remind himself. “Ever since we cleared out the imperials, the Huile Underway has been as safe as the streets above.”

  He almost tripped over the first corpse.

  Marcel froze, then his handtorch discovered a second body in front of him, then a third, then a pile. For a moment he saw them in Principate blue, a squad of dead soldiers. A second, more sober, glance shook away the illusion. They wore mere rags, and though they were human in shape, they were stranger in features. Some had horns, others had red skin or lizard-like claws, some had brass-colored chitin or fused limbs, and a few had twisting boney growths or scars that weaved and twisted like indecipherable runes.

  Mutants.

  They sat in different states of decomposition. The one closest to Marcel could almost be mistaken for sleeping, some further down were barely more than skeletons, stripped down by hungry scraprats.

  Marcel swore under his breath. Kayip whispered something in a strange language. Before Marcel could form his thoughts, he heard footsteps echo down the hall.

  The two jumped behind a rusting drilling machine, eyeing the dark. Kayip rubbed his bracelet and whispered more of his strange words. Marcel felt something, an odd fluttering sensation in his torso, as if a light gust had flown through him, through him, that instead of blocking that force, his body had swayed like wheat in the wind. Kayip’s bracelet started to change. It unfurled and widened, bits opening up along invisible fault lines as the metal stretched out into a long, silver-blue sword in the man’s grasp.

  The blade was unadorned, but beautiful. Marcel had read about such artifacts, ancient Ascended artifacts of protean functions and near indestructible make, but mostly in pulps. He had never seen anything like it in person. Marcel was also instantly furious, somewhat at Kayip for lying about being unarmed, but more at himself for believing the monk.

  There was no time to stew in the anger, as the footsteps had gotten closer, and he could make out two men talking.

  “Oh, bleeding bloatbeast’s arsehole, this one is heavy,” came a scratchy voice. “Didn’t know we were feeding them enough to get them this big.”

  “The weight’s all in the horns,” said a second voice, deep.

  Something heavy was being dragged, bumping against the floor and sloshing through muck.

  “I don’t see why we don’t just burn the skinsick bastards in the incinerator,” said the first voice.

  “Waste of sangleum,” the second grunted.

  The two figures finally lurched into view, walking towards a great corpse pile in a distant corner. The first had a scraggy beard, the other was completely bald. Both were heavily tattooed and wore Lazacorp uniforms. With a coordinated swing they added a body to the pile; a short man with a cleft lip and a hole in his forehead.

  “Wish they just pumped him fully,” came the scratchy voice beneath the scraggy beard. “Then he would be transport’s problem.”

  “Heard from Gax that he died after some tiny, routine injection,” said the bald man, shaking his head.

  “Eh, Gax probably just botched it,” the scraggy man stretched, glancing over the hallway of corpses with no discernable concern. He paused, his eyes widening suddenly, gaze not far from Marcel and Kayip’s hiding place. Marcel held his breath, Kayip angled his blade.

  “I know where I saw this taurshit before.” He turned back and kicked the corpse. “He was that Steinmann guy, that lazy-arsed mailman. Stiffland-be-fucked, he complained endlessly. ‘Innocent, innocent, I didn’t do it.’ What in Inferno did he think this was? Why would that matter?”

  The bald man started to walk back they way they came. “Surprised he made it this long.”

  Scraggy beard followed, rolling his head. “Eh. Just wished he starved away bit more first, my neck is killing me.” The voices echoed down from the hallway. “Need to get myself on transport duty. Be a relief to be back out in the Wastes.”

  “Eh, don’t worry, won’t be a need for this soon. We’ll be out of this pisshole for good.”

  After a long silence, Kayip folded his blade back around his wrist, and they started to move again. He said nothing, and Marcel could not manage to get words to mouth himself. It was the bodies, the abstractions of the photographs congealed into cold flesh. It was Kayip’s blade, proof that the situation now stood widely outside Marcel’s grasp. It was the Lazacorp guards, callously tossing a corpse with the familiarity of a newsboy chucking the daily paper.

  And the corpse they tossed. Marcel tried to convince himself it was a coincidence, but as he walked by it he recognized the face, even past the horns, the mutated skin. Steinmann, a petty mail-thief with Principate leanings, supposed to be in a jail cell somewhere. It was Marcel who had found the evidence, Marcel who had followed the trail, which started when Roache told him...

  Marcel stumbled, his cogleg giving way. He caught himself on the wall, nauseous, pain burning up from a shin he no longer had.

  “Are you all right?” Kayip whispered.

  Roache.

  There was always stuff on the ground level that those above didn’t see. Soldiers looting when the eye of their general was focused on the battlefield, mayors unaware of the grift of the common clerk, poor conditions hidden in the workshop. And Roache was very much high up. Was it possible he didn’t see, didn’t know? That for years he had never become aware of what was happening in his refineries? That no one had spoken to him, that he never toured unexpectedly, that he never asked? That he never signed the documents ordering it?

  Yet Roache had pointed him in Steinmann’s direction. Had lavished such exuberant praise when Marcel finally found the missing mail under the man’s floorboard… In a Lazacorp owned apartment… Demiurge, he had never made the connection! The pitiful man had acted so surprised when Marcel found his half-written letter admitting… No, Steinmann was never the one acting.

  How many cases had Roache brought to Marcel? He struggled to count them. Dozens, at least, if he was including those incidental suspicions dropped in conversations, hints that near invariably lead to an arrest. Were any of those faked? Marcel stomach turned at the notion that the real question was if any of those cases weren’t faked. That if he started to inspect those rotting, red faces he would find familiar grimaces.

  Marcel vomited. The bile burned up from his through his throat and splattered on the ground. He coughed and spat, before glancing up at Kayip.

  “You both knew it wasn’t just Verus,” Marcel said.

  The monk nodded back. “I thought it best to ease into the truth.”

  Then Roache had betrayed Huile. Betrayed the UCCR. Betrayed Marcel. Perhaps even what the man had played off as a patriotic defection had just been another of his games. The savior of Huile, just a rat seeking a new ship, willing to use brave soldiers as his escape raft. It disgusted Marcel to think that even his friends’ sacrifices might be tainted by Roache’s scheming. There was no dagger large enough for such a stab in the back.

  The monk opened his mouth with concern in his voice, but Marcel shook his head, and forced his leg forward.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He wasn’t going to shrink away from the truth now.

  * * *

  As they continued on, further signs of Lazacorp security started to appear. Chain-link fences covered dry sewerways, old basement hallways were completely barricaded by scrap and stone. Three times they had to stop when their torches came over glints of tripwire attached to jury-rigged shotguns.

  Stranger still was the voice that echoed like a spirit, increasing in volume with each step. As they got further into the heart of Blackwood Row’s Underway, the voice became clearer, its source dictaphones bolted to the ceiling, the tone distinctly Lazarus Roache’s.

  “Return to your workstation. Return to Blackwood Row. Return to your workstation. Return
to Blackwood Row.”

  It felt mocking in its monotone, its bland complicity, its indifference. That the truth was all just kilometres away, yet the man had been grinning out his lies to Marcel for years over wine and expensive cheeses.

  Finally, Kayip tapped Marcel’s shoulder and pointed to a rusting ladder. They climbed up out a sewer grating, and into the night-chilled air above.

  Chapter 21

  Marcel wasn’t quite sure where in Blackwood Row they had popped up. It was clear enough, though, that they were beyond the façade, beyond the clean streets, the fine offices, and the well-maintained show units. This deep, everything was covered in red-black soot, from the skeletal iron refineries to the dense towers of shanty-structures that sat between them. Detritus lined the street, rusting mechanical junk left by the wayside, often sunk into pools of fecal-smelling liquids. Sharp spotlights shined some of the structures into blinding contrast, but the streets, for the most part, wallowed in shadows. Now and then the torchlights of guards would appear, moving in languid patterns, stopping occasionally as they shouted at some scampering mutant.

  Kayip led Marcel around the edges of the streets, through pathways of tightly-packed metal, into and out of mutant shanty towers, built of scrap metal and cloth, looking more like decaying scaffolds than true buildings. In these hovels twisted figures scurried and sat. Some cooked pitiful meals in rusty buckets over weak embers, others slept shoulder to shoulder in minuscule tents. Many stared at the two men, some gazes curious, others fearful, but not a one of them made a sound. Marcel fought the urge to stop and thank them for their silence. If a single mutant had wanted them dead, all they would have needed to do was shout.

  Once or twice on their several block journey they almost ran into the guards, but despite the occasional shouted threat, the guards seemed more focused on their spiritless conversations than the mutants they were supposedly keeping in line.

  They turned into a nondescript alley beside a large brick structure. A putrid smelling pile in the alley’s corner several metres away was proof enough that Lazarus had skimped on toilet facilities for his workers. Marcel made a note to report that too, as a footnote to the torture, murder, and slavery.