The Architect King

by Christopher Schmitz

  Zabe’s eyes widened at the implication even as the Architect King’s words rang hollow in his mind, the spirit of the Architect King will always exist. But he knew in that moment that the statue had truly been destroyed… his head wound convinced Zabe of the truth of his vision, just as the Architect King had promised him.

  Turning to the night, Zabe sprinted into the darkness. He knew where another portal location was, one of many he’d committed to memory. Zabe shifted into his lycan form in order to increase his speed, he did not care about whoever might spot him as much as he cared about getting home to protect the kingdom, guard the throne and his fiance, and stop Nitthogr from destroying the Veritas and the statue they all revered so highly. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  He’d reached the portal by early morning and he glanced at the stars which had nearly disappeared with the advent of dawn. Zabe did the mental calculations. He would have to pass through two other dimensions to find his path, but he could be back at the castle within an hour.

  Zabe bit his hand and drew a bead of blood that he wiped upon the portal site to activate. He stood in the circle. Nothing happened. He walked around within it. Drew some more blood and tried again to no avail.

  Panic wormed through his heart and he knew that something had fundamentally changed following his vision.

  The portals no longer worked. Zabe’s heart plunged into his gut; he was trapped here.

  Chapter 16

  Earth

  Half of the old warehouse lay ripped open, exposed to the sky. Something had torn free a section of wall, floor, and roof. The rubble of it laid in a pile near the edge of the building. It would have looked excessively run down and decayed, except that this was Detroit and par for the course, considering its location.

  Wiltshire closed the driver’s side door and locked the vehicle after the others got out.

  “Yes. This is it. I’m sure of it,” Sam said. “I remember crawling out of that hole right there. They’d tied me up and I was in and out of consciousness, but I remember a flurry of movement. People came and went, running off with whatever they could salvage.”

  They stood on the edge of the gaping hole and looked down. Several lengths of knobby, corrugated tubing descended into the pit.

  “They used some kind of heavy machinery and tore all this away. The Heptobscurantum didn’t care whatever else they wrecked, they just needed to make sure they got the machine out. I wriggled free several hours after they abandoned the location,” Sam explained. “They left in such a hurry that maybe they left some clues behind?”

  Shandra nodded optimistically and pulled a trio of flashlights from the plastic bag. She loaded them with batteries and handed them off to the others. The cleric looked at the scraps of trash, wondering where to put it. Finally, she dropped it down the hole and followed the others down. At the bottom, she retrieved her trash and placed it into an overturned wastebasket.

  “Ya know, you could just leave it,” said Wiltshire. “It’s not like anyone’s gonna notice.”

  Shandra stated flatly, “But I would still know.”

  Wiltshire shrugged and then delved into the laboratory. Leftover racks of equipment lined the walls. Safety gear hung from hooks and loose papers were scattered about and deposited wherever the winds had occasionally whipped up and blown them. He leafed through some of it, but nothing had any significant value. A few steel trash cans contained old ashes at the bottom. Wiltshire surmised that anything of importance had been shredded and burned.

  “Over here,” Sam’s voice echoed through the shadows.

  The trio gathered in the largest open space.

  “Right here is where the machine was,” he pointed off to the side. “And that must be where they opened the portals. They needed plenty of space,”

  Wiltshire shuddered when he walked through the area. Sam raised an eyebrow when he did so.

  “Shandra got goosebumps in that spot, too,” the archaeologist said.

  Wiltshire bent to the ground and began looking for seals, runes, or mystic signs. “You think it’s a coincidence?”

  Sam walked into that same spot. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. “No. I think there’s a kind of arcane energy… maybe a residual impact of some sort.” He thought about it a moment. “Do you have Respan’s scanner that Tay-lore sent you?”

  The detective handed it to Sam.

  “You think there might be some kind of dark power here?” Shandra asked.

  “Not really,” Sam put it over his eye and activated it. None of the settings revealed anything. “But I do think that if there is some kind of errant energy signal, it could be detected. The scanners only highlight a few certain readings on the spectrum.” He made a grabbing motion to Wiltshire. “Let me see that data unit Tay-lore sent, too. They should be able to interface.”

  Wiltshire turned it over and gave him a skeptical look. The detective didn’t have a head for technology, but he did have a nose for clues. “You got a hunch?”

  Sam nodded and began connecting the scanner apparatus to the processor.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll look around for other clues.” Wiltshire wandered off and into a few office rooms nearby where it looked like some kind of science team had stationed their desks.

  Sam looked up and down at the energy readings and isolated the data. “Beta-lore, can you create a new setting on the eyepiece for me?” He punched in a wide, new frequency range for the energies he suspected were present.

  “Affirmative,” the AI said, making it so.

  “Wow,” Sam said, looking through the eyeglass at the strange location. He handed Shandra the headset.

  She put it on. “Whoa. It looks like a giant tear.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s exactly what it is, I think. The fabric of space was torn open here repeatedly. It’s created a kind of soft spot in the dimensional planes: a rift from the fabric being stretched and opened so many times… kind of like rubbing a friction hole through the knees of your blue jeans.”

  “What are blue jeans?” Shandra asked.

  “Nevermind,” his mouth kiltered into a grin. “I would bet that this kind of tear has a very specific kind of reading. Beta-lore, can you scan for this kind of anomaly on a planet-wide scale?”

  “Affirmative. Tay-lore installed certain protocols that will allow it. The process will take a considerable amount of time.”

  “Is there any way to speed it up?”

  Beta-lore responded, “I can scan locally with an effective range of one thousand, five hundred miles.”

  “That’s local?” Shandra scoffed.

  “Earth is about two hundred million miles around, so in the big scale of things I guess it is,” Sam said.

  “You will need to get above ground,” Beta-lore said. “Slowly rotate the scanner three hundred and sixty degrees.”

  Sam crawled out of the hole with the device. It was easier this time; before he had been dehydrated, fatigued, and nearly bled dry.

  Wiltshire poked around at the desks in the room adjacent to the section with weird readings. He took a printed puicture from his pocket and stared at a photo frame on one of the desks. Wiltshire compared the two and then he tapped the photo enthusiastically with a hunch of his own.

  Tossing the picture frame aside, he emerged from the offices and clambered out of the wreckage of the old lab. “I got something” he told them. His peers had crawled back out of the hole.

  “Calculating data,” Beta-lore said. “One moment. Comparing coordinates to satellite grid.”

  “You’ve got a hit, too?” the detective asked.

  Sam and Shandra nodded. They looked down as Beta-lore announced an exact reading for a set of coordinates that matched the energy signature.

  “Let me guess,” ventured Wiltshire, “It’s in Houston?”

  “How did you know?” Shandra exclaimed.

  Wiltshire twirled the keys around his finger. “I’m a detective… I detect things. It’s what I do,” he grinned.
“Come on. Let’s get back to the plane. We can get there in about five hours if we hurry.”

  They climbed into the low-grade rental vehicle and began their drive towards the airstrip. A fancy, black town car passed them, heading the opposite direction as Sam thumbed buttons on the prepaid cell phone he’d purchased when they bought the flashlights.

  “That’s a pretty fancy rig,” Wiltshire said, watching the rear-view mirror as the expensive automobile turned off in the distance. It didn’t belong in this part of town, unless some drug kingpin owned it; the detective assumed they had just dodged a potentially messy encounter by their quick departure.

  “Who are you calling?” Shandra asked Sam.

  “Just a number I’ve had committed to memory for a very long time… ever since a nasty bit of business with my local PTA group.”

  “PTA?” she sounded confused.

  Wiltshire interjected, “Like Parent Teacher Association?”

  Sam nodded. “I’m playing a hunch. We might not have found Zabe, but if we’re hunting his brother, we might need the help of another wolf.”

  “And what… you just happen to know a bunch of werewolves serving on your hometown school board?” Wiltshire laughed. He’d heard of stranger things in his line of work, actually.

  “Something like that.” He put the phone to his ear. “Yes, hello Archie… by any chance is your daughter there?”

  ***

  The Desolation

  Caivev stood at Basilisk’s side on the overlook of their stronghold. They could watch the majority of Limbus from here. Though they couldn’t see much for detail, they got the general overview of a situation below. The Black were rioting again in Jeerzha’s district; the social organizer had already formed his own militia. Caivev suspected the trouble went deeper than her husband let on.

  Basilisk didn’t watch the anarchy below. He looked worried, but he stared into the sky in silence instead. The horizon was still unfamiliar and empty—and that worried him more than a few unruly vyrm.

  Something about that clear skyline made Caivev infinitely more fearful than knowing where the Devourer lurked upon the veil of existence. At least then she felt certain that the threshold of reality still constrained him. Now… who knew?

  Caivev’s scowl matched her husband’s. Together they had finally made a new and strong alliance and put actual thoughts towards building something. Both had finally chosen, and their choices led them away from the vyrms’ old order of things. Caivev and Basilisk had re-aligned their warring people and established a proper kingdom… and now an unstoppable evil chose to finally rise from its slumber.

  She sighed at the implications.

  “You have thoughts?” Basilisk asked, his eyes remained locked on the skyline.

  “Yes,” she said curtly.

  Basilisk turned his gaze to her. A smile tugged at the corner of his lip; they had not been together very long, but she had already learned how to needle him in all the best ways. “Will you share?”

  “I am upset,” she admitted. “Until recently I don’t believe I knew what I really wanted. After your proposal, I finally realized what that was: to create, thrive, and prosper. I was once the servant of your brother, Nitthogr—more so I was the servant of Sh’logath. That path may have brought me here, but I would have never found purpose inside of that road… it led only to destruction and disappointment.”

  Caivev stared down at her feet and pushed a few pebbles over the ledge with her toe. “I keep wondering what you want? You were a Herald of Sh’logath once—one of the two Brothers of the Apocalypse: the Thinker and the Beast. Wasn’t it your role to release the Devourer? There was a prophecy, you know.”

  Basilisk nodded slowly. “I feel much the same way as you, though I had the secret words of the Architect King as my anchor. At first, I thought those whispered words crippled me, forced me into indecision and waiting. In the end, they freed me. They caused my proposal to you. I used to think about the old prophecies… but time passed and they became just that. Old… nothing more than words meant to steer me. Not all ‘prophecies’ foretell. Eventually, I yearned for something new.”

  Caivev met his eyes. She spoke tenderly, not demanding an answer. “What did the Architect King say to you?”

  Basilisk lowered his voice, but spoke freely with his wife. “‘You will not destroy me because you can not destroy me. You know the nature of eternity. Some day you will choose new allegiances and forsake Sh’logath. It shall come to pass because of a girl who changes everything.’”

  “Claire Jones,” Caivev stated, recognizing her part in starting this revolution.

  Basilisk took his wife by the chin and made her look into his eyes. “Perhaps. But perhaps it was you.”

  Caivev’s eyes sparkled, and she smiled warmly at his unexpected words. She mulled the implications over in her mind and decided that the vyrmic prophecy must have been wrong. Sometimes prophecies were just as Basilisk said: words spoken by fools and addicts.

  “Sh’logath is gone,” Basilisk returned his eyes to the empty spot in the sky. “The only way for that to happen, short of his banishment from the multi-verse by the Architect King, would be for him to be unleashed—and that would require some kind of herald. I am not that herald.”

  “Could something else have banished him? You sent the Architect King to the Prime and we know that the vyrm shade Vylar, who was disguised as General Zahaben, was freed from petrification before his death. Perhaps they found a way? And if the Architect King had access to the Tesseract…”

  Basilisk shook his head. “Perhaps the Tesseract caused it, but not likely. If the humans learned to channel its power to that end, they would have released all the others as well. My spies say that is not the case… and then there is the matter of Shjikara. The priest is alive and well—my last act of obedience before forsaking the Devourer was to petrify that man.”

  He had not shared every secret with his wife. “I played many angles over the years and kept many stratagems available to play. There is only one way Vylar was released: an enchanted rune of return, stolen from a Veritas cleric many generations ago. He claimed a secret knowledge in crafting them. He’d sneaked into the Desolation in the hopes of freeing his lord, the Architect King.”

  “Can he make more?” Caivev asked excitedly.

  He shook his head. “He died before surrendering the secret. I possessed only the one rune. At the direct command of Sh’logath, I put this rune stone into the hand of Shjikara as I petrified him. It is still trapped within the High Priest’s hand.”

  Caivev swallowed. “Is he the Herald?”

  Basilisk nodded slowly. “I believe so.”

  “Chartarra was right, then… Nitthogr is alive,” Caivev whispered. “In spirit at least.”

  Basilisk shot her a surprised look. “Chartarra is dead. I killed your general when we were still at war—he tried to kill me, you know.”

  “Those were certainly his orders,” Caivev shrugged playfully. “He is returned. Chartarra sought me out… he become a Seeker of Maetha after his first death.” She pointed to the civil unrest below them. “He tells me that the Black have been stirred to violence because of visions and dreams… they come with the return of your brother who is calling them again to prepare for war.”

  Basilisk bit his lower lip. He had not foreseen this move and was put in an odd position: he had to play a game with rules he did not understand and could not exploit. “Shjikara… is… Nitthogr?” Voicing the question only determined his answer.

  He focused on his own words for a few moments. A melancholy smile stretched upon his lips. The sorcerer’s return meant that Basilisk’s final moments of obedience to the agod weren’t somehow responsible for whatever had happened… at least not directly. Basilisk had not accidentally freed the agod.

  “If Sh’logath has been loosed upon the multi-verse, he could destroy everything we have been working towards,” Caivev said. “If he has been somehow conjured, whether by your brother or by an
other, there is no force in existence that can stop him. Well… there might be one, but I do not know the Maethan prophecies well enough; only the Seekers remember them.”

  Basilisk always knew everything that happened within his walls and knew the reports from his dungeons. “We do have a few prisoners in our dungeon right now who claim to be Seekers of Maetha.” He gave his wife a knowing look, certain she was already aware of them.

  Caivev had kept as much of that under the radar as possible. She weighed the options and then told Basilisk everything: how she was rescued by a rover at Sharonash, how Jeerzha and his allies murdered a woman and child and how it bothered her, and about the Maethan’s new belief that Maetha was dunnischkte.

  He had been the Herald of Sh’logath for many lifetimes before she had been born—and Caivev worried that his first instinct might have been to kill her. The stakes were large. He listened to her words and at the end of them, Basilisk nodded slowly and thoughtfully.

  “Then we must go and hear from these prisoners below the keep.” He took her hand in his and they walked towards the door.

  Approaching them stomped Charsk, the leader and High Priest of the Sh’logath Cult. Some new zeal burned in the vyrm’s eyes; it was a change from the glassy, drunken shine that usually characterized him. Some new purpose had sobered him.

  Both emperor and empress knew that Charsk was Blackborn.

  Charsk passed by the two guards at the entrance and closed the door. “I assume you have both heard the news?”

  Neither of the royal couple indicated one way or the other.

  Charsk continued, “The Awakening might well be at hand, your servant Jeerzha, a member of the Black nonetheless, is organizing his countrymen. Sh’logath has called and Limbus shall answer!” He rubbed his hands greedily. “And what have you planned to do with those rovers he says are in your dungeon? I hear they are a part of a larger company that is even now moving towards the capital.”

  Basilisk cocked his head at the news. “I plan to go now and speak to them.”