The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  “Ignore him,” said Ysabel. “He’s just irked to be stuck on medical duty. He’s too taken by Celina’s talk, of being ‘the weapon to rip to pieces the men of Lazacorp, the tool to take this place apart, screw by screw.’”

  “Well he’s a tool, sure, just not the useful kind,” Sylvaine said.

  Ysabel stifled her laughter into her hand, and Sylvaine couldn't help smiling.

  Above them the door burst open, the midday light blinding. Sylvaine froze, but relaxed some when the door closed and she could make out the horned form of a mutant. She tensed back up as man dashed with a frantic panic down the stairs. He dumped a few tin cans, each full of food, before scurrying over to Ysabel and Sylvaine, Gualter following.

  “Guards,” he whispered.

  “Where?” Ysabel asked, all mirth gone from her features.

  “Up in the camp. Saw them as I was moving back. They’re cutting through in a rage.”

  Chapter 35

  Marcel surprised himself with his ability to remember the technical details of Sylvaine’s findings, even when he still couldn’t even begin to understand them. Whenever he stumbled on a word, (æther… neutralizer, he was pretty sure) Marcel would fabricate a quick anecdote about his discovery process, stealing details from Sylvaine’s work. The stories annoyed Verus some, but they bought the time for Marcel to remember exactly what he was pretty sure Sylvaine had roughly said.

  There was silence after he finished. A good minute of silence. Then a good five minutes. Verus leaned back, eye closed, finger to his forehead. Marcel waited in an equal silence. He thought he had told his story well, acted the role, but Verus’s unwillingness to pass judgment made him wonder, then fear. He could feel his heart pound, and fought against the urge to push Verus to speak. To say something, anything.

  Verus just stood there, still, mouth curled. The two guards were equally frozen. By the look on Crat’s face, Marcel judged breaking the foreman’s quiet would be close to suicidal. So he waited with him, trying not to show his panic.

  “So he’s altering the oathblood then,” Verus said suddenly.

  “Well, I don’t—" Marcel responded.

  “I wasn’t asking,” Verus said. He opened his eye and gestured toward his men. “You’re dismissed. We need to talk technical details.”

  The two men left quickly and without question. Verus tossed Marcel a key. Marcel held it for a second, unsure if this was a test or…

  “Come on, get on with it. I’m not afraid of you, Talwar.”

  Marcel nodded and undid his locks, as Verus kicked forward a chair

  “Sit,” he ordered. Then glancing Marcel up and down: “You need the rest, you look like shit.”

  Marcel took the chair, feeling every ache as he sat. “I wonder why that is.”

  “You looked like shit before this morning, Talwar. Griffon’s arse, we’re all shit in the end, its barely even an insult. Though some are more shit more than others.”

  “You talking about Roache?”

  Verus nodded, smiling. Then his face fell and with a sudden burst of speed, he picked up his knife and slammed it into the table. Marcel yelped despite himself.

  The foreman ruffled his hair back and caught his breath. “To think you, of all people, Talwar, figured it out, was able to peel back Roache’s lie. And you don’t even understand it.”

  Marcel started to speak, but Verus cut him off. “You don’t need to understand. At least not all of it.” He paused, staring at the wall. “Foreman… A stiffland job title, like something you’d see in the wanted pages of that damn Gazette. It was Roache’s idea, a joke, or something more. We are supposed to be partners, equal, and even that disgusts me. It’s his duty to handle the business side of things, to deal with the political nonsense, and the gift.”

  “The gift?” Marcel asked.

  “Shut up,” Verus said with a bored tone. “I handle the wastefolk, the day-to-day operations, the skinsick, and most importantly, matters of spiritual enlightenment.”

  “Spiri—“ Marcel started, before catching himself.

  Verus turned his eye to Marcel. “You’re not blind Talwar. You can see something larger is happening here, even if you don’t have the clarity of vision to make it all out. We’re putting an end to the lies. The lies of the Principate, the lies of your Confederacy, all the insipidity of the false Demiurge and his mawkish church.”

  Marcel nodded, not knowing what else to do. It was clear enough that the man was insane, that could be the only explanation, but he seemed to have had disturbing success proselytizing his madness.

  “The Calamity was supposed to be mankind’s wake-up call,” Verus continued, “but even the end of the world can’t knock people from their dazed slumber. Not just the stifflanders, even most wastefolk refuse the truth buried beneath their feet. Talwar… the things I could teach you if I had the time. You are ignorant and arrogant, but you are full of rage, and that is the first step. We are so close… so damned close. But Lazarus Roache…”

  Verus pressed his palm onto the heel of his knife, pushing it deeper into his desk, until it suddenly smashed through the surface, wood cracking, splinters flying. He stared at his pointless destruction, then at Marcel, his lips flat but twitching. Finally, with a sigh, he slumped onto his desk, head grasped between his boney hands.

  “Do you know how long we’ve been running this refinery?” Verus asked.

  “Uh, a few years before the war, I was told,” Marcel said.

  “Seven years in total, just about,” Verus illustrated this fact with his fingers. “And I found this place for Roache. Found the man a sea of sangleum sitting under a tiny piss-puddle of a town, held together only because it still had some walls standing and other ruins didn’t. No one knew about it then, no Principate or Resurgence idiots bickered over Huile, this was just some shit town, just like the rest of them. Still is a shit town, but now it has money. Roache took the credit, of course, not that I cared. It’s all just material, the befouled rot that we toss back and forth to prove that we’ve been successful, that we’re big men somehow. But me and Roache, we had a deal, Marcel, not some coarse contract on paper, not some spoken promise worth the skin of a rat, a real contract, a true one.”

  “I don’t understand,” Marcel said, which was an honest truth.

  “I told you, you don’t need to.” Verus opened up a side drawer of his desk, and pulled out a bottle. Marcel squinted to see if it was water, or sangleum, or…

  Verus uncorked it and sucked a gulp down. It was whiskey. “You drink, Talwar?”

  Before Marcel could answer, Verus shoved a mug in his hands, and poured him a cup. It smelled strong.

  “This may surprise you, Talwar, but I have a reputation to maintain, can’t let them” and he pointed out the door, “see that I’m a man just like the rest of them. This ain’t a holy drink, it’s as profane as it gets.” He took a swig. “But damnation if it doesn’t help.”

  Marcel took up the mug and sipped. It burned, but actually wasn’t terrible.

  Verus sat down, his feet hanging off the desk, and toasted roughly. “To those who have been stung on the foot by fucking Lazarus Roache.”

  * * *

  Ecstasy. The pain was ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment beyond any lies the priests of the false one could promise. It was excruciating pain, not the tearing of skin from flesh, or flesh from bones, but of spirit from spirit. All the sins of mankind, all the collective guilt of uncountable millennia pulled from his very soul, ripping his very being apart. It was the glorious destruction of the self, and Hieronymus Lealtad Namter embraced his end if it should come. Let him not be a petty butler, let him not be an aging man with all humanities’ perversions, let him not even be a Brother of the Unblind. Let him be pure, he wailed to the pain, or let him be destroyed.

  In this agony there was no place or time. There was only the divine punishment. Visions passed through him at a storm’s pace, of a world beyond the world, of spiral
s of azure marble, of crystalline castles greater in size than cities, of titanic beings of bountiful mirth and sorrowful beauty, of machines that made mockery of all the achievements of men. He grasped for these, aching to see more, desperate to finally cut through the filth and the lies, to see the majesty of the forgotten truths. Yet the splendor overwhelmed him, burning his vision and cutting at his body, all veins and blood and raw skin.

  He faltered, screaming, and was flung back like a leaf in a storm, through a maelstrom of agony, through a second world, one of his putrid ego made manifest. His abominable humanity polluted his glimpses of perfection, rotting away the divinity. This was a world of rust and ash, of fetid citadels crumbling, of cities of skin and pus. He wailed to himself as he was flung through the nightmare, this horror that he knew he had brought in. He tore at himself, desperate to remove this pollution of his spirit, which blinded him from the incandescent truth. He screamed for it to be scrubbed from him from him violently, with all the pain he deserved—no, to be unmade completely, to be separated forever from all that which chained him to his pitiful existence.

  Then it was gone, and Namter fell back into the world. His memories, his failures, his individuality, his whole pathetic being jammed back together. He shouted out and thrust his bleeding hand forward, grasping instinctually at the bowl of boiling Oathblood that sat in the center of the room.

  “Calm, Brother, calm,” demanded Avitus, who held his left arm. Remius held his right, and after a moment, Namter was able to collect himself, as odious and unfortunate a task as that was.

  “Apologies, Watcher,” said Remius. “You had thrust your whole arm in, you were writhing, we thought it was too much.”

  Namter weakly nodded his agreement, his body still shaking.

  “Did you see?” whispered Avitus.

  Namter felt the warm of tears on his face. “A little, my Brother, a glorious glimpse.”

  The two led Namter to a chair in the back, and Avitus tended to the self-inflicted gash in his hand. His vision came into focus. The room was spacious and mostly empty, kept windowless and black except for the light of candles. There were no light bulbs nor handtorches, no machinery birthed out of the pitiful engineering of man. Namter’s Brothers stood around a central bowl of Oathblood, which roiled over onto itself. The Brothers studied their Watcher intently, as he sat, recovering from the rite.

  There were fewer of them than he wished. Despite his own efforts, the schism between himself and Verus had not yet healed. The Awakener still distrusted him, and many of the other Brothers refused any service that Namter led. They could not even perform the holy rituals in their usual space, the basement beneath Verus’s office. That itself had never been the ideal location, but it was at least was completely bare. The current room still held a few boxes of excess Lazacorp uniforms shoved in a back corner.

  Namter preferred the days when they’d practice their faith out in the Wastes, when they could let their screams echo across the sky. Here in Blackwood Row it was necessary to keep hidden the ecstatic screams of the Unblind. Their rites were unusual even by the lax standards of the raider-folk who Roache often hired as Lazacorp guards. The hypocrisy stung Namter. Raiders were eager to waste the blood of their slaves in gladiatorial fights, but when a follower of the Truegods harvested slaves as Tribute for a greater cause, suddenly these same raiders would develop a concern for human life. Namter shook away the thought. Such anger was of ill worth.

  He felt strong enough to stand, finally, and he pushed back any feelings of disappointment or reservation. It was not his duty to feel such things. The task of the Brotherhood was near completion, and he would lead it to its final culmination

  “My Brothers,” he said, “the time of Reification is fast approaching. The long recalcitrance of humanity shall be punished, and the rot we see infecting every town, city, farm, or any other habitation where mankind has left their mark shall soon be cleansed…”

  * * *

  “So when I tell Roache that I found a good engineer, he said I’d need to go to that cesspit of a City Hall and get the proper forms to register him before I could even bring him in the city.” Verus gestured violently as he told this story, just one of many he had already ranted out. “Dozens of forms, hours of works, nonsense back and forths with Gyurka and Lambert and Marceau and all those stiffland shitsuckers just to get one man past these walls.”

  “Really?” said Marcel, forcing incredulity.

  “Roache brought in hundreds, thousands of mercenaries, workers, even his own engineers from time to time, and not a word went to City Hall. But when it was me?” Verus drank, “I knew then he was plotting something. But the man is always plotting something. I thought I could keep myself higher than his machinations. Use his money, use his gift. That he was given such a gift…. It’s not for me to question. Still, I thought I could keep above this bickering.”

  “You know,” Marcel said, “he sent me on a lot of seemingly pointless jobs, investigating Lazacorp workers.”

  Verus raised his eyebrow and snorted.

  “Yeah, and whenever I came to him,” Marcel continued. “His questions would always lead back to you. ‘Were they talking with Verus? Did I see Verus? Was Verus doing anything suspicious? You know.”

  “Like who?” Verus asked.

  “Oh, uh,” Marcel searched his memory for plausible names, as Roache rarely introduced his staff. “Setius, Garson, and uh, Martus.” That last one had been a real case.

  “Ah, Martus,” Verus nodded. “I suspected you had been meddling with him.”

  “Roache would complain,” Marcel continued, “to me and Lambert, and others, about you. About your manners, your clothing, accent, even your smell. I didn’t take part, of course, but Roache seemed to have a new joke about you each week.”

  Verus drank some more. “My father taught me many things, Talwar, taught me the secrets of the world, taught me the wisdom of the whip, also taught me this,” he pointed to the bottle, “which may have been accidental. But he always told me that you can trust no man. But if you must trust someone, never trust a stifflander.”

  “Wise words,” Marcel nodded. He had finished his mug of whisky under Verus’s gaze and was now on the second. It was an oddly relaxed conversation, considering the man and the situation. He moved side to side to feel his bruises, to remind himself of the danger, and not let his attention become lax.

  Verus got up and pulled down one of the blinders of the window, glaring at the sunlight streaming in. “We own this town, Talwar, you know. Lazacorp built it, and then rebuilt it after its mayor got uppity. But it was never supposed to be more than kindling. And now Roache wishes to burn me with our own kindling?”

  “Kindling?” Marcel asked. “I thought it was abattoir.”

  Verus snapped back a sneer. “I’ll mix my metaphors as I damn want, Talwar.”

  Marcel muttered out an apology. Verus leaned on the wall. “He’s made this impossible from day one. Insisted that his voice was enough to keep these mutants in line.”

  “And you think?” Marcel asked.

  Verus smiled. “Mutants are like any other. Men foolishly seek to avoid pain. Give them the pain they deserve, and they won’t bother you none.”

  The foreman sat back down, chuckling to himself. “These red fucks used to be trying all sort of trouble, coming up with escape plans, ambushing guards. All because Roache trusted himself too much. The one bright spot in this whole pond of shit is that Roache has been distracted long enough from the day to day, what with his Icaria traveling and his City Hall arse-kissing. Got them all to my own devices, used my own methods.” He smacked his backhand against front. “Not a peep from them.”

  “Showed them who’s boss,” Marcel said.

  “And when you worked, did they give you any trouble?” Verus jabbed his finger.

  Marcel shook his head. “Did as I said without complaint.”

  “Tools, Marcel, they’re just tools. With a lit
tle discipline you can remind any man, mutated or not, of that truth. They serve their purpose and are disposed of, as it is with us.”

  Marcel nodded along, trying not to think on the reality behind that statement.

  * * *

  Sylvaine tuned her ears for the sound of the guards. It wasn’t hard, as there was no subtlety to their movement. It was all shouting and kicking and the occasional gunshot. She kept her finger out, tracing their exact location, while Ysabel and Gualter led her through the maze of structures in the pointed direction.

  “What are they doing here?” Ysabel said, “Ever since we’ve kept peaceful, they haven’t tried a raid.”

  “Desct’s nonsense for what it is,” Gualter muttered. “We lie on our backs, and they step on our legs anyhow.”

  “Ssh!” Sylvaine said.

  They snuck through an empty scrapshack and down into a path of torn-up piping. The camp was near silent, aside from the shouts of the guards, and the occasional footsteps of a few mutants. One stumbled past, pausing only to point, frantically and silently, in the direction that he came from, before running off. They circled round past, climbing over a rusting autotruck frame, where another mutant hid. Sylvaine was able to make out the voices now, two men.

  “Damned shitwork here, this place smells like a taur’s arsehole,” came first voice.

  “Figures you’d know,” said the second.

  “Ahh eat my—hey!” A loud shout. Then a gunshot.

  “Damn bastard scurried off.” The first again.

  “Be careful you don’t spark something. Lost a whole camp-load of the fuckers to a fire last year.” The second.

  “Eh, I wouldn’t mind torching this whole place.”

  “Keep your focus. Never know when one might come swinging a hammer from some shitpile.”