The Black Rose

by James Bartholomeusz

  The four of them stared upwards, the wind ruffling their hoods.

  “I’m not the only one bloody terrified, then?” Dannie whispered.

  Jack felt as though his insides were gnawing themselves apart.

  Sardâr scanned the area and set off down the walkway, followed by Dannie. Jack was about to fall in line, but Ruth grabbed one of his arms. She wasn’t looking upwards at the Precinct but down, down into the shantytown of concrete blocks teetering below them. She pointed down to her left.

  “It was there,” she breathed, her voice barely audible over the wind. “There. I’ve been there before… Jack, I think that was my house.”

  “What?”

  “My house. Where I lived. When I was here.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense! You said you were a prisoner here, didn’t you?”

  She turned to look at him, and her hood blew off her face. Her hair was tossed around in the gale, her face drawn, her eyes set on his, brimming with recognition.

  “Everyone’s a prisoner here.”

  Jack stared back at her, trying to comprehend. “But if you lived here… how did you escape? How did you get on The Golden Turtle?”

  She shook her head blankly and turned to gaze at the slum below. “I should go down. I need to see what’s there.”

  Jack glanced around. Sardâr and Dannie were drawing farther and farther away from them, their shapes becoming almost indistinguishable from the black mass of the tower. He was very keen to not linger here. If this was indeed the prison—a prison in a city that itself seemed to be one huge concentration camp—then it was bound to have guards. It was only now that he realized Ruth’s uncomfortably close resemblance to the people who seemed to exist en masse here. Whether they were religious followers, inmates, workers, or whatever else, he was fairly certain that the Cult would pick up on one in their likeness wearing the sorcerous robes.

  “We can’t go there now. We need to get Lucy and the others out, remember? That was what the mission was for. When they’re safe, maybe we can…”

  She didn’t seem to have heard him.

  He tugged one of her arms. “Ruth, come on.” Pulling the hood up over her brow, he dragged her onto the walkway. After a few steps, she shrugged him off and followed him to the other side.

  They passed below an archway, out of the deafening wind, into a small neon-lit chamber. Four elevator-style doors lined the wall opposite, the rose symbol they now associated with the Cult etched in blue on three and in red on one. A pair of statues—hunched, winged beasts with reptilian heads—gripped the floor with knifelike talons on either side of the doors. Jack shivered as they passed. There was nothing to indicate they were anything other than statues but the recurrent neck-prickling sense that invisible eyes followed them.

  “Which door?” Dannie whispered.

  Sardâr consulted the mirror once more. The etching across the surface had changed again, now resembling the digitalized blueprints of a building, recognizable as the Precinct they had just entered. Indigo light pulsated somewhere below, linked by a thin strand to their current floor. “This one.” He indicated the rightmost of the three. There seemed to be no controls to get it open.

  Dannie bent close to examine it, muttering.

  The other two huddled behind Sardâr, fists planted into armpits, cloaks rippling in the wind, from which their alcove afforded little relief. Jack looked over his shoulder. A cross section of Nexus was visible through the gap of the archway—slum housing, the walkway, chapels, towers, and hulking mass of the Cathedral emblazoned against the sky.

  He thought about what Ruth had just said. She was right about one thing, at least. Here, there seemed little difference between living normally and being incarcerated. They still had no idea how she had managed to escape the city and eventually be picked up by Ishmael and The Golden Turtle, but if Jack had seen the opportunity to escape this place, he would’ve taken it immediately. This world made him uneasy and not just because he knew what horrors it had spawned. Every moment they spent undercover, he felt they were more complicit in the workings of the Cult. Particularly given the fiasco in the chapel, he now just wanted to find Lucy and the others and get out as quickly as possible.

  There was a clanking, and the elevator slid open. The four black cloaks shuffled inside, and it slid shut. They were in an open-top cube of metal, a keypad in one corner. Sardâr consulted the mirror and punched a few keys. There was the sound of air being sucked away, and the cube dropped.

  Wind blasted around the shaft, all of their hoods blowing loose. Jack made a grab for his and had it back on within seconds but not before he had glimpsed the faces of his companions. They were all pale and drawn—more so than he thought he’d ever seen them. Even Dannie’s usually vibrant complexion had deadened. He imagined he looked much the same. This place was affecting them all.

  The elevator slowed to a halt, and two layers of doors slid open. Sardâr stepped out cautiously, the others sticking close behind him. They were in a hallway that curved slightly at both ends, lit with the familiar neon. Lines of doors were set into both walls, each with word and numeral glowing on it. The mirror had changed into a bird’s-eye view and was tracing a path to the left.

  The area seeming clear, they set off, boots clanking on the metal grill. For the first time since they had arrived, silence had fallen. No hint of the storm outside penetrated these walls. At the back, Jack kept checking over his shoulder. The sense that they were being watched had grown stronger. He had a horrible feeling that something was shifting just out of their sight beyond the curvature of the wall, keeping pace with them, monitoring them.

  Sardâr drew to an abrupt halt. They were outside one of the doors on the inner-facing wall. Jack squinted upwards through the gloom to make out the name and number etched into it: Revelation XII.

  “Is this it?” Jack muttered, careful not to make too much noise.

  “Apparently so,” Sardâr replied.

  “How do we get in?”

  “I’m not sure. Dannie, can you take a look?”

  The shortest of the black cloaks stepped closer to the door and began examining it. “This is strange… I don’t think…” She tapped the door, and the numeral dissolved. The rectangles of dark metal parted, and a cube of bright light flashed into view beyond.

  Chapter IV

  reunion

  Alex was dreaming. He was in a flat that had been trashed, furniture overturned and ripped up, grey light filtering through the ravaged curtains. He moved through the rooms: the hallway, the kitchen, into the lounge. A miasma of dust hung in the air, making him cough. A television lay shattered in the corner, crushed by a human-sized picture frame. The picture was an old-fashioned portrait in oil paints: a dark-haired and emerald-eyed young man, entirely naked, a resplendent indigo and obsidian anaconda draped around his shoulders.

  Alex blinked. The portrait shimmered. The surface was not the textured swirls of oil, as he had first thought, but the glassy sheen of a mirror. He shifted, and the man in the glass shifted too.

  His body felt heavy. He looked down. His pale skin was covered not by clothes but by the weighty meat of ringed coils. A wet tongue, forked at the end, ran in and out of his ear.

  He sat straight up in bed, blinking. He was drenched in sweat. It took him several seconds to realize he was not alone.

  The Emperor stood by the door, golden eyes luminous in the gloom. “I have something for you.”

  Alex twisted himself out of the covers and stood up.

  The Emperor opened his palm. Cradled within it was the Sixth Shard, the tiny crescent moon symbol glinting in the light from the window.

  Alex instinctively felt around his neck. He had noticed it was gone when he’d first arrived in Nexus but had forgotten about it so quickly and completely that he had at no point asked the Emperor to return it.

  “It possesses mighty power,” he continued as Alex took it and slipped it around his neck. “I thought it might interfere with y
our training, but I think it can now be applied more profitably.”

  “So why are you giving it back to me now?”

  “Because something monumental is about to happen, and this world will be utterly changed. Tonight you will see a great light in the sky. When you do, you must enter the Darkness, and I will guide you to another world. Do you understand?”

  “Yes…” Alex replied hesitantly.

  There was something different about the Emperor. He couldn’t quite make him out in the darkness, but his hands and voice seemed frailer. It was as if his body had sped up its degeneration.

  “I think the time has come to show you what I truly am.” The Emperor shuffled backwards, right against the door. Grey smoke began to surround him, and like a marionette his body slumped to the wooden floor—all except the golden eyes, which continued to burn in the air like miniature suns. The smoke swirled, resolving into a column extending from floor to ceiling. A figure became discernible: a mountainously tall man with slate skin and cloth, eyes burning with the intensity of a supernova.

  The cube hummed with light. Everything else was darkness. As the doors slid fully into the walls, neon streaks sparked from the threshold: tracing a twenty-foot-long walkway from where they stood to the other side, flashed up the surface facing, and dissolved a door-sized rectangle into nothingness. Humanoid shapes, though blurred by the light, could be glimpsed through the gap.

  Jack ran, his footsteps reverberating around the chamber. His hood slipped off. “Come on,” he called to the others, glancing over his shoulder.

  Sardâr and Dannie followed him at a jog, but Ruth was planted to the floor, a black cloak against the neon of the hallway.

  It dimly registered with Jack that she was probably having another minor panic attack, but that could be dealt with in a minute. First they had to make absolutely sure Lucy and the others were safe.

  His ribs rapped against his lungs, but he didn’t stop. The bundle of shadows framed against the light had scrambled up to stand and was now peering into the darkness. The closer he got, the clearer it became: a female form, bristles of a ragged fur coat caught in the glare, russet hair tangled around emaciated cheeks.

  He called out to her and saw her back away in shock. He was stumbling through the rectangle. He didn’t wait for words or to acknowledge the other three figures clustered around. He flung himself onto Lucy, gripping her as tight as he could.

  They stood, wrapped in each other’s arms, not speaking, and he had a flashback to a very similar scene on Earth. When he arrived at Apollo Hill, the moment he had stepped into that drawing room and his life had been irrevocably changed, he had held Lucy and known that he would do his utmost to keep them together.

  He had failed at that. He had allowed them to be parted. But now they were together again, and he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to let her go.

  He was aware of Sardâr and Dannie entering the cube behind him; of what must have been first Adâ, then Hakim, then Vince pulled into embraces; of exclamations of surprise and happiness. He could feel his ragged breath mingling with thin streams of tears, the growing dampness around his shoulder as well. So little of it seemed to matter, the passage of time irrelevant.

  Finally, after what might have been several minutes, they pulled apart and he was struck immediately by how unwell Lucy looked. Her face and hands were frostbitten, bruised, and covered with fresh cuts. She was much thinner than he had ever seen her, even compared to her elf form, and her eyes were sunken in the center of dark rings. She looked like she hadn’t slept or eaten in days, if not weeks.

  Her expression was one of mixed incomprehension and stunned ecstasy. “How… how… ?” She seemed unable to form words.

  Jack could sympathize. Now that he was here, he suddenly had no idea what to say. “We… the black mirror… We snuck into Nexus and, well…” He gestured at his Cultist attire.

  This didn’t seem to have cleared anything up.

  He looked around the cube. Adâ, Hakim, and Vince stood around them, all looking similarly physically debilitated, though some of their shock seemed to have worn off. Jack was only slightly surprised to find Adâ move forwards and embrace him, to have Vince pull him into a shoulder hug, and to exchange a characteristically wry handshake with Hakim.

  “We’re… we’re so pleased to see you…” Adâ breathed weakly, an exhausted smiled cracking a scab on the edge of her mouth.

  “You know, for people who meant to be clever, you’re not very good with words.” Dannie was cross-legged on the floor of the cube, using the rare light to inspect and clean a few of her tools. Jack wondered if there was anywhere that she couldn’t make herself at home.

  “This is Dannie,” Jack explained in response to Lucy’s confused expression. “We picked her up in Albion.” It struck him then just how much he had to tell Lucy, including that they’d found another Shard; and how much she had to tell him, like how they’d been captured and whether the Shard they were after had fallen into the Cult’s hands.

  Sardâr cut through the multitude of Jack’s thoughts. “We don’t have time for proper introductions. We need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

  “Where’s Ruth?” Adâ asked.

  “She’s—”

  There was rumbling. They all looked downwards. The floor flickered and sparked, flashing in and out of existence as if running on a temperamental circuit. In the moments of vanishing, they could see through to the pit of Darkness below, except that it wasn’t just Darkness. Dozens of red pinpricks glinted upwards out of the gloom, flickering like a multitude of crimson bulbs.

  For a moment Jack wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but then, with an audible gasp, realization hit him like a winding punch to the stomach.

  The Darkness blasted upwards through the floor like a wave of oil, a multitude of talons, fangs, wings, tails, spikes, and all other appendages ever conceived to harm. He tried to throw up an alchemical barrier, but nothing happened. He was buffeted upwards, Lucy and the rest of them vanishing in a tidal hurricane of demonic energy. Things were scraping at his flesh, raking the cloak from him. The bile sensation in his throat rose to an unprecedented peak. He was passing away into the shadows, everything fading as he lost consciousness.

  Chapter V

  remembrance

  Ruth ran. She didn’t think what she was doing. All she felt in that moment was pure, unmitigated terror of the Darkness present around her as long as she could remember. She sprinted down the corridor, footsteps echoing, cloak flapping, the obsidian mass belching from the open doorway and twisting to pursue her like a raging river. She pelted towards the elevator shaft, hammering on the door. It slid open under her fists and she tumbled inside, pressing herself against the wall.

  The doors weren’t closing. The Darkness had rolled into view, the froth at the front a surge of forming and dissolving shapes—claws, fangs, wings, spikes, will-o’-the-wisp eyes—a surge of demonic energy reeling towards her. She punched the keypad in desperation, not even looking at the buttons. The Darkness was drawing closer and closer, resolving into a single gigantic hand, extending its grip to enclose her within its grasp.

  The doors slammed shut, and the elevator shot downwards. The g-force almost lifted her off her feet as the air was sapped upwards. The shaft was dim but did not possess the same quality of Darkness that had just chased her.

  She hit the floor hard as the elevator crunched to a halt, her head slamming into the metal.

  She blinked the stars away from her eyes and hauled herself to her feet. The doors had slid open again. This must, she thought, be far below the floor where the others had disappeared. There was no curving hallway of cells here: just a straight corridor, encased in the same neon light, leading to a single door at the end. She glanced up. There was no way she was going back, so the only way was forwards.

  She initially thought it was silent down here too, but as she approached the door, she became aware of noises beyond. They sounded like screams, filtered th
rough several walls. She looked back at the elevator. Whatever was beyond this door could not be worse than that ravenous Darkness.

  Ruth entered, and she saw what Nexus truly was.

  She saw the cubes of tortuously bright light, each occupied by a proclaimed enemy of the state. She heard the endless cries of agony and despair. She tasted the harsh tang of multiple demonic presences, rising inside her throat and charring her nostrils. A screaming woman being thrashed by spiked tentacles; an amputee losing more of his limbs by the second to corrosive smoke; a child, not older than twelve, gasping as the water rose to the ceiling of his cell—a multitude of people, as human as she, were rent both physically and mentally before her eyes.

  She didn’t make it beyond the stairs. She dropped to the mesh floor, her breaths falling irregularly. Reality seemed suddenly more imminent around her. Another scene crowded into her vision like a hologram mapped onto the first, and the barrier between the present and past was blasted asunder.

  She saw the door of her home ripped down in a coil of black smoke: her mother screaming, her father grasping her in his arms and telling her to go. She saw herself running, running beyond the house and felt the heat of it explode in flames behind her. She was running, running into the dark labyrinth of Nexus streets, her ragged clothes rippling in the wind. She was running, running as far away as she could from her home and the torment inflicted on her parents. She was winding down the alleyways, her sense of direction consumed by fear. And there, before her, was a pool of obsidian: a portal from which the cloaked sorcerers always arose and snatched away her friends and neighbors.