The Cathedral of Known Things

by Edward Cox

  ‘Then I would suggest it is time to bring the others into the discussion, and make our plans.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Namji’s large eyes were intense, her shades of grey determined. She glanced at the old tapestry of the Timewatcher, at the burning incense stick, and then offered the illusionist her hand. ‘No more time to grieve for the dead, Van Bam. The living need the Relic Guild.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Chasing Ghosts

  Labrys Town was reeling. The deliveries of cargo were not arriving, and news of Captain Jeter’s execution had spread throughout the districts.

  Little more than a day had passed since Lady Asajad had meted out justice on Jeter in Watcher’s Gallery, with the help of the Woodsman. The Resident, Hagi Tabet, had issued no statement on the cargo crisis, and the populace was frightened. The town had changed; the denizens could feel it in the air, in the stone beneath their feet. The Nightshade no longer seemed like their protector, but more a predator, watching and waiting, poised to hunt.

  Sergeant Ennis empathised with his fellow denizens, but he had other concerns to focus on.

  In the southern district of Labrys Town, Ennis stood in the dingy cellar of a disused ore warehouse, gathering evidence.

  The cellar had been gutted by fire. The walls and ceiling were charred and blackened. The acrid stench of smoke clung to the air, along with the greasy reek of roasted flesh. A few piles of ash lay here and there on the floor; but the largest and thickest pile covered the elevator platform that rose to the main warehouse above. The ash was the remnants of the police officers who had been sent to this place to deal with the Relic Guild. Their very bones had been incinerated, and Ennis knew that only magical fire could achieve that at the speed he had been informed it happened.

  Magic …

  Wrinkling his nose against the stink, ignoring a bitter after-scent that dislodged an uncomfortable feeling in his gut, Ennis moved to a puddle of metal that had melted at the centre of the floor. Dull grey and without one blemish upon its smooth surface, the metal had hardened to form a rough diamond shape.

  Ennis stared at it.

  A few nights ago, following a report that the Relic Guild were hiding in this warehouse, eighteen police officers had been sent to execute them. Only one of those officers made it out alive. The fire had fused her uniform to her skin. She had died in hospital before Ennis got the chance to question her but had lived just long enough, been coherent long enough, to give a statement to a fellow officer before she died. The account had been sketchy, confused; but reading through it, Ennis had pieced together the story of what had happened in the warehouse.

  The magickers of the Relic Guild had built some contraption in the cellar. Like a metal spear, the report said, stuck into the floor, with a star for a head that blazed with purple light. The star had shot rays of fire around the cellar, smashing glow lamps, scorching brickwork, destroying the wall that partitioned the cellar and stairwell, burning the staircase – making each step perilous. The fire prevented the police from reaching the Relic Guild, it incinerated anyone it touched – and in an instant, the report claimed.

  Ennis gazed upon the diamond-shaped puddle of metal, the melted vestige of the spear-like contraption. The police officers had never stood a chance against the Relic Guild’s magic. Did any denizen in Labrys Town?

  Ennis couldn’t recall an occasion in the Labyrinth’s history when the Resident had turned against his people. The Relic Guild were supposed to be the protectors of the denizens – putting aside that the Relic Guild had not officially existed since the end of the Genii War. Ennis had never met Van Bam, had never particularly wanted to, always preferring to keep a low profile. However, Van Bam had governed his people well during his tenure. Why choose now, after forty years of faithful service, to become the enemy?

  A conversion to demon-worship, was the official line; the Resident had fallen in love with the madness of the Retrospective, tempted into chaos by a whore named Peppercorn Clara, along with the bounty hunter they called Old Man Sam. And the threat of this trio was growing.

  Hiding somewhere in Labrys Town, the Relic Guild haunted the denizens like nightmares, parasites lurking in the shadows to feast on the blood that fuelled their magic. The police watched the streets at all times without ever catching a glimpse of their prey; yet reports of missing people were becoming commonplace, and the threat of the magical virus that turned a person into a ravenous beast loomed over the town as if the sky itself might come crashing down.

  To break the boundary walls; to expose Labrys Town to the Great Labyrinth; to let the Retrospective escape its confines and devour the town and its denizens; to sacrifice everything to a House of dead time and the hatred of wild demons – that was what the Relic Guild wanted, Lady Asajad claimed. But Resident Hagi Tabet would keep her people safe.

  Her people …

  Ennis gazed around at the burnt walls and piles of ash. Perhaps here, in the cellar of this warehouse, the Relic Guild had been attempting to fulfil their goals. Was the contraption, now melted and useless on the floor, a device that was harvesting the Labyrinth’s energy? The Nightshade provided power to all the districts, infused the air with ambient thaumaturgy that was as vital to the denizens’ survival as the cargo that was usually delivered every day. Had the Relic Guild found a way to focus that energy through their device, converting it into a magical battering ram that could smash down the boundary walls? Perhaps the police had sabotaged the Relic Guild’s efforts and saved the town at the cost of their lives, while the magickers escaped.

  It was like he was chasing ghosts.

  The sergeant’s eyes were drawn to the back wall of the cellar.

  An area of brickwork, slightly less blackened and charred than the rest, stood out. Stepping up to it, he brushed away thick soot, and uncovered a portion of the wall that had been smoothed to hard stone. There were no bricks, no mortar lines, just a strangely flat section. Clearing away more soot, he revealed an area roughly three-foot wide and rising at least six foot from the floor. Brushing his hands off, Ennis stepped back and stared at it. He had uncovered the shape of a doorway.

  In her report, the sole officer who had survived the fight with the Relic Guild said that the confrontation had ended with the contraption exploding, filling the cellar with wild fire. She had only made it out because she had been in the middle of a cluster of other officers who took the brunt of the blast. But she was adamant that an instant before the explosion, the Relic Guild had disappeared – vanished into thin air, she said. Ennis had reasoned that they could’ve escaped by magical means, casting an illusion or barrier that protected them from the explosion; but as he stared at the smooth, door-shaped section of the wall, his mind was filled with doubt.

  Rapping his knuckles upon the smoothed stone, he found it solid, entirely a part of the wall.

  Doorway . . .

  Moving back to the puddle of metal on the floor, Ennis bent down and ran a hand over its smooth grey surface. Curiously, its texture wasn’t as hard as he expected; it felt somewhere between solid and liquid. Cold. He rubbed his thumb across his fingers, expecting them to be wet, but there was no moisture on his fingertips. He picked at the bottom point of the metal, and was surprised when it bent upwards without much resistance. He pushed it back down. Again – little resistance. The metal was malleable to his touch.

  Ennis paused, considered, and then dug his fingers further underneath the cold metal, raising a larger point. He worked it up and down until it snapped free. The shard was thick, as large as his hand, but weighed next to nothing. It looked like a spearhead, a rough diamond shape like the metal puddle it had come from.

  Ennis stared at it.

  Diamond . . .

  Raised voices from above disturbed him – happy, joking sounds Ennis hadn’t heard for a while.

  Wrapping the metal shard in a handkerchief and stuffing it into his coat pocket,
he crossed the ash-covered floor, and carefully made his way up the charred and perilous staircase to the warehouse above.

  He paused to stare at markings on the floor that he hadn’t noticed on his way in. Strange symbols had been engraved into the stone – a long time ago, judging by the amount of dirt that was compacted into them – and they were laid out in a circle pattern. Ennis then acknowledged the two patrolmen standing guard at the warehouse’s open shutter door. The black glass bowls of their receptor helmets bobbed in return, and the sergeant stepped out into a morning sun shining in a clear blue sky.

  Five cargo trams were lined up along the street that ran before a block of terraced warehouses. A host of warehouse workers were hurrying to unload the cargo. Ennis reasoned that the supplies had thankfully started arriving through the portal outside the Nightshade.

  ‘Hey,’ Ennis called to a nearby supervisor, who was ticking items off a checklist on a clipboard. ‘When did the deliveries restart?’

  ‘Late last night, as far as I know.’

  ‘What was the hold up?’

  The supervisor shrugged and continued ticking off items.

  The atmosphere had definitely changed – laughter filled the air.

  Walking along the line of cargo trams, Ennis came upon four warehouse workers, joking amongst themselves as they hefted wooden crates between them. They weren’t offloading the cargo as the others were, but loading the lead tram with a delivery for another part of town. The driver sat in the driver’s compartment, reading a newspaper, entirely happy to let the others do the hard work.

  The shard of metal weighed so little in Ennis’s pocket that he had to pat it to make sure it was still there. He pulled it out, folded back the handkerchief, and studied it. The cold metal remained dull and grey, like a storm cloud swallowing the light and reflecting not one ray from the sun. Malleable, not quite solid, it wasn’t a substance Ennis could easily identify.

  But he knew of a man who could.

  As the warehouse workers loaded the last of the wooden crates, Ennis slipped the shard back into his pocket, and stepped up to the cargo tram.

  The driver, a gruff and tired-looking woman, didn’t seem impressed when Ennis knocked on the window. She glanced up from her newspaper with an irritated expression.

  ‘What?’ she said, her voice muffled by glass.

  Ennis showed her his police badge. ‘Where are you delivering to?’

  ‘Central district.’

  ‘Good. You can give me a lift.’

  Hillem and Glogelder had decided that it was high time Samuel received a weapons upgrade. While Van Bam prayed in the chapel, and Clara lay sleeping under Namji’s care, the two Aelfir took the old bounty hunter to one of the butcher’s workshops on the abattoir level of Nowhere Ascending. It was a large room, cold and grey, all metal and stone. The rough floor was stained with old blood, and damp from leaking water pipes that dripped overhead. Meat hooks hung from the ceiling, and four long steel tables, scratched and worn, sat at one end of the room. Here and there, a few metal pails were filled with animal bones.

  The grisly surroundings of the butcher’s workshop were to double as a makeshift firing range, and Hillem and Glogelder had quickly set about replacing Samuel’s lost handgun.

  ‘Try this,’ Glogelder said, offering Samuel yet another revolver. He had removed it from one of two large trunks, each filled with an assortment of hoarded weaponry.

  Samuel took the gun and weighed it in his hand. It was clunky, much heavier than his old revolver.

  ‘No,’ he said, handing it back to Glogelder.

  The big Aelf shrugged, laid the revolver on the floor with the rest of Samuel’s rejections, and then rummaged through the stockpile in the trunk once more.

  Hillem was setting up an area for target practice. He had found an old-fashioned wooden butcher’s block, wide and thick, which he had upturned and set against the wall, where a variety of knives and cleavers hung. Against the block, he had placed a rack of metal shelving. Hillem had then collected an assortment of old animal bones, of varying shapes and sizes. He was now in the process of positioning the bones onto the shelves.

  Samuel had to admit he was warming to the two Aelfir. The more he knew about them, the more he trusted them.

  Like the agents of the human Relic Guild, fate had made Hillem and Glogelder orphans, though they were not magickers, or magic-users like Namji. They had met while spending time together at a juvenile correctional facility. Both of them were serving sentences for thievery. But while Hillem deployed a knack for avoiding violent situations and preferred to use his brain, Glogelder – as his beaten appearance would suggest – never shied from a good fight.

  They had formed an unlikely but strong friendship, one always looking out for the other, and they had conspired to escape the correctional facility together. They had been conning and hustling their way across the Houses of the Aelfir since their teens, surviving by scamming the unwary.

  ‘What about this one?’ Glogelder said, emerging from the trunk with a hopeful expression and a pistol that was almost as long as the rifle holstered to Samuel’s back.

  The old bounty hunter pulled a dubious expression and shook his head, without touching the weapon. Glogelder continued the search with a grumble.

  ‘Tell me something,’ Samuel said. ‘What happened to Sunflower?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Glogelder replied, head in the trunk.

  ‘It used to be full of farmlands and forests.’

  Glogelder looked up with a surprised expression. ‘Did it?’

  ‘Apparently,’ said Hillem. He looked over his shoulder at Samuel. ‘The Timewatcher changed it after the war – literally overnight, according to the locals.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Glogelder, returning to his search.

  ‘But why change it to such a cold and hard place?’ Samuel asked. It used to be beautiful, he added mentally.

  ‘No one’s sure,’ Hillem replied. ‘The older Aelfir reckon it was the result of the Timewatcher’s anger, like the aftershock of Her wrath. Others think She did it to remind us that She’s still there, watching, making sure Sunflower never stops looking after the denizens in the Labyrinth.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Personally, I think She did it as a show of power, to instil fear as a legacy.’

  ‘Not that fear of the Timewatcher is anything like it used to be,’ Glogelder mumbled.

  ‘True enough,’ Hillem agreed, ‘but faith remains, at least for the time being.’ He resumed setting out bones onto the shelves. ‘Now tell me something,’ he said to Samuel. ‘When Van Bam was Resident, was his aide really a necromancer?’

  Samuel was caught off-guard by the question. ‘You know about Hamir?’

  ‘The avatar told us all about the Relic Guild,’ Hillem replied. ‘Though it was a bit vague with us on whether Hamir would be arriving with you.’

  ‘Well, obviously that question got answered,’ Samuel said gravely.

  ‘I don’t mean any offence, Samuel, but I was surprised to learn that the governor of Labrys Town had someone as … dangerous as a necromancer helping him. Was this Hamir as scary as he sounds?’

  Samuel wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘I’ve certainly seen him do scary things,’ he said. ‘But Hamir was … Hamir.’ And he was surprised to feel a sense of loss inside him.

  Hamir had always been a strange one; more of a solitary animal than Samuel had ever been. Samuel didn’t believe for a moment that anyone in the Relic Guild had ever really known Hamir properly; but he did believe that the necromancer had been killed by the Genii.

  ‘I’ll tell you this much,’ Samuel said to the Aelfir. ‘We could do with his help right now.’

  Hillem paused to give the old bounty hunter a sympathetic nod, and then continued laying out the bones.

  ‘What’s the story between Van Bam and Namji?’ Glogelder said from the
trunk. ‘How do they know each other?’

  Another question that Samuel wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘They met during the Genii War,’ he said. ‘Beyond that, I really don’t know.’

  He could have added the reason why – that he and Van Bam hadn’t spoken much over the past forty years; that the remnants of the Relic Guild that had survived Fabian Moor had fallen apart after the war, but decided against it.

  Having emptied the pail of twenty or more fragments of animal skeletons, Hillem walked over to Samuel.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, pulling a slim metal cylinder from his pocket. ‘Hold out your hand.’

  Samuel did as he was asked. The tall and thin Aelf held the cylinder out, and pressed the top end with his thumb. The cylinder whirred and deposited a glass ball into Samuel’s palm. Small, half the size of a human eye, it was filled with a clear, luminescent liquid.

  ‘A spell sphere?’ Samuel asked.

  Hillem nodded. ‘Leftovers from the Genii War. I don’t think anyone makes them anymore.’ He lightly tapped the sphere in Samuel’s palm. The glow of the liquid brightened and then dimmed.

  ‘What spell does it hold?’

  ‘An anti-magic shockwave,’ Hillem answered, almost proudly. ‘The radius isn’t very big, and it won’t have any effect on a Genii, but the spell will drain the thaumaturgic charge from power stones, and dispel any lower magic at work in the area.’

  The conversation had caught Glogelder’s attention, and he looked over at the pair, frowning. ‘I didn’t know we had those,’ he said accusingly. ‘Why haven’t I got any?’

  ‘Because you’re an oaf and you’ll use one just to see what it does,’ Hillem replied smoothly. ‘If I’m going to trust anyone to recognise when anti-magic is needed, it’ll be a magicker with prescient awareness.’

  Glogelder thought for a moment. ‘Fair point,’ he said, and then continued rummaging through his collected arsenal.

  ‘But these spheres come with a warning,’ Hillem added to Samuel seriously. With care, he took the little glass ball from Samuel’s palm, and gently pressed it back into the cylinder. ‘The anti-magic shockwave is powerful enough to punch a magicker off his feet. The effects aren’t long lasting, but if you use one, it will drain the magic from you along with whatever you’re using it against.’ He held the cylinder out to the old bounty hunter. ‘There are three spheres inside.’