The Shadow Order - Books 1 - 8 + 120 Seconds (The complete series): A Space Opera

by Michael Robertson

  “Look,” Seb said, the desperation of his own voice coming back at him from the echoey cave. “I came here on purpose. To find you. I met a woman down here a few days ago who called me the special one. I don’t know what she meant, but I’ve come to find out. Please, you have to listen to me.”

  But the small being paid him no mind, and the others, if they heard him, reacted like they hadn’t. The small one turned back to the cooking animal and hummed again.

  It didn’t matter how Seb twisted and writhed, he couldn’t get free and every movement pulled his bonds tighter. At least his woozy head numbed some of the pain through his detachment from it. The dull throb in his wrists and ankles would have been in screaming agony otherwise.

  The fight quickly left Seb and he fell limp again. Drowsiness threatened to pull him under. The flickering glow of the firelight—washed out through his watering eyes—hypnotised him as he listened to the damp meat hiss on the spit. He’d promised Bruke and the others a revolution. Hell, he’d told them to promise their neighbours the same. But how could he lead a revolt inside the bellies of these monsters? Maybe he should have listened to his dad in the first place. Maybe he should have got a normal job and stayed on Danu.

  Just as Seb felt himself slipping under again, he saw the wall behind the fire. Several blinks later, a fresh wave of lucidity surged through him.

  Whatever technique the dwellers had used to mark the ground in the cave, they’d also used it on the walls. However, instead of letting blood run through it, they’d filled the grooves with something white. Wax maybe? Chalk? Whatever it was, it highlighted the images so they stood out in the dark.

  The pictures on the wall told a story.

  On the far left, Seb saw the image of a woman holding a baby aloft. Another child stood next to her. The second kid couldn’t have been any older than a toddler. The woman had a halo around her, white lines shooting away from her head as if she glowed with a celestial power.

  The next image showed a baby playing. The child looked slightly bigger than the previous image and it had the older child with it too. They must have been siblings.

  The baby had turned into a child by the third one. It had a ball and looked happy. The other sibling remained at its side. Despite the crude depictions, Seb understood their intent clearly. He saw two happy children living a normal childhood.

  Suddenly the images turned darker. The younger child looked to be fighting. Speed lines showed it moved much quicker than its opponent. The older one stood beside it.

  In the next image, Seb saw the older of the two being dragged away. It reached out to the young one.

  The child now looked like an adult. Image after image of it fighting. Each one had speed lines. Seb gasped and he saw the small leader of the group look at him. Maybe the speed lines didn’t mean the fighter moved fast. Although, when he thought about it, the fighter did move fast. To Seb, everything slowed down, but for onlookers, he must have appeared rapid when he fought.

  After a lot of images of fights, the adult now kneeled beside a bed of someone dying. His dad.

  A ship in the next one looked like the Bandolin.

  More fighting.

  The next image showed SA, Gurt, and Sparks.

  In the final image it had him hanging upside down from the ceiling of a cave with a fire burning in it.

  Seb shouted at the creatures, “Hey. Hey.”

  They all looked around this time.

  Because he had his hands tied, he couldn’t point. “That’s me,” he said, pushing his nose in the direction of the pictures. “That’s me on the wall. The images, they’re my life.”

  A line of blank faces met Seb’s protests.

  “Chosen one?” Seb tried.

  Nothing.

  “Please, you need to listen to me. That’s me on the walls. I’m the one you’re looking for. Please?”

  After the first creature turned back to the roasting animal, all of the others followed suit and hummed again.

  Seb tried one last time, the word dying in his mouth along with his hope of getting out of there. “Please …”

  Chapter 24

  If any of the sewer dwellers around Seb could speak to him, they chose not to. They could make sounds, and if he had to listen to their incessant hum for much longer, it felt like his eardrums would burst. As he hung upside down in the muggy cave—the flickering fire in the centre of the space—he lost hope of getting anything out of them, and his consciousness started to slip away from him again.

  However, before he went under, a noise roused Seb. Footsteps. Although not normal footsteps. They sounded stilted somehow, uncoordinated in their clumsy slap against the rocky ground. The tunnel around them amplified their sound. Whoever—or whatever—came towards them at that moment had something unique about them.

  The approaching creature cut the monotone hum dead. At least it gave Seb that relief.

  The steps seemed to take forever to make it to the cave. One foot slapped down and then a few seconds later, several footsteps came in quick succession. Then one single slap of another footstep. Then another footstep. Then another footstep. Then several quick ones again. There seemed to be no order or coordination to the thing’s gait.

  Experience had taught Seb that if a light shone in front of something, it pushed a shadow away from it. But for some reason, the approaching creature’s shadow leaned forward into the cave, entering long before it did despite the gloom behind it. The dark projection of the being spilled across the ground, shimmering and weaving with its odd movement. An octopus in the water, its limbs swayed with a hypnotic grace.

  When the creature came into view, Seb gasped. Four arms, they all seemed to move as if they had no awareness of the creature’s intentions. A constant twisting and rangy motion swirled through them, almost palsied in their unnatural contortions.

  The creature’s feet flopped at the end of its spaghetti legs like it didn’t have the muscles to keep them rigid. Every step forward looked like the foot would buckle beneath the creature, but it somehow landed flat and supported its progress.

  Seb looked at its arms again. They continued to move separately from every other part of the being and one another. They danced and weaved as snakes would. The creature’s hands and fingers spread wide at the end of them as if it had zero control over them.

  Even its neck looked like a limb. Long and weaving, it appeared to fight to keep its large round head in one place. Seb frowned as he watched it, waiting for it to fall over.

  No taller than Seb, it had blue eyes, huge red lips, and shock white skin.

  Where it had walked in with its attention on the fire, it suddenly turned to Seb for the first time and stopped dead—or stopped moving forward at least. It continued to bob and weave on the spot, swaying like an underwater plant.

  A shake of his head to clear the fog from being hung upside down and Seb saw stars in his vision. Surely this creature didn’t exist. It had to be a figment of his now deranged mind. Any time in the company of the degenerates by the fire—especially while being hung upside down for so long—would be bound to send anyone insane.

  The creature’s head nodded rapidly as it weaved from side to side. It looked like it wanted to speak, its large red lips moving but no sound coming from them. It pointed at Seb with a long finger, which twisted like a worm, and its eyes widened.

  The gang by the fire watched on in silence.

  “Y-you,” it said. Its voice rang shrill in the tight space and it giggled. “You! The chosen one. You are the chosen one.”

  Despite his current predicament, Seb released a sigh of relief. At least someone knew why he’d come into the sewers. As much as he wanted to call out the little rat who’d kept him strung up, he watched the leader of the group instead. It rushed at him, its awkward movements coming forward in a swarm of limbs.

  Seb flinched as he anticipated the creature crashing into him, but it stopped before that happened. Somehow, the deranged thing managed to halt just centimet
res away from him.

  The creature leaned down and turned its constantly shifting head almost upside down. Like the others, it had a face coated in fecal matter, especially around its jaw, and it stank like they did. “You,” it said again, this time in a low hiss that rode its rancid breath. “You’re the chosen one.”

  The smell of the thing ran up Seb’s nostrils and he did his best to ignore it. Before he could respond, the creature threw its long limbs in the air and turned on the others. Its voice had previously been weak and reedy, but it turned into a thunderclap when it shouted, “WHY HAVE YOU TIED HIM UP?”

  Seb flinched at the sound, the walls of the cave seeming to shake with the creature’s roar. He turned away when the creature faced him again for fear of receiving the same brutal blast. But it returned to its low reedy whisper. “So sorry. So sorry. Let us cut you down.”

  The small creature who Seb had originally thought of as the leader rushed over and drew his curved silver sword. He cut the rope on the ground, which had been tied through a ring to anchor him.

  The wind rushed through Seb’s ears as he hurtled down. Only a short fall but he hit the ground like a sack of rocks, his head crashing onto the hard surface first. If he’d had a headache before, it paled compared to the throb running through his skull now. “Ow!’ he called and glared at the little rat, his jaw clenched, his fists balled.

  While the creature ran around the back of him and cut his bonds free, Seb blinked, the swell in his head stinging from where his body adjusted to being the correct way up.

  The rat backed away, eyeing Seb as if fearing for its life.

  Seb rubbed his wrists and ankles as he got to his feet and glared at the ratty creature the entire time. He drew several deep breaths to calm himself down, but it served no purpose. Before he could control it, his world had slowed down and the little beast’s weak spot shone out just above its left knee.

  Seb kicked out at the creature and watched it fold to the ground.

  After a second, a tingle ran through his hands to look at the thing as it lay out cold from the blow he’d dealt it. It took all his effort to refrain from putting his hands on it.

  The perpetually twisting leader looked at Seb, and Seb said, “Sorry.”

  It shrugged. It clearly didn’t care. At least, Seb thought it shrugged; many of its movements could be interpreted as a shrug. It then dropped down onto one knee, looking like it could topple at any second. The same reedy whisper it had addressed Seb with since it entered the cave slipped from its puffed lips. “Chosen One.”

  The rest of the group followed its lead, and as Seb stretched the aches from his body—his world spinning from getting used to standing upright again—he looked over at the odd bunch of shit-covered creatures.

  “This is why I came here,” Seb said to the apparent leader in front of him. “I saw another one of your lot who called me the chosen one. What do you mean by that?”

  “May I stand?” the creature asked.

  Seb shrugged, but before the others could get up, he scowled at them. “But only you.”

  If his demand bothered the others, they did a good job at hiding it.

  “Even if I knew why you were the chosen one,” the leader said, wincing as it twisted from side to side, “I wouldn’t be able to say. It’s your journey and you need to find the answers.”

  Heat flushed Seb’s face and he balled his fists. “What does that even mean? I’ve been dragged here, hung upside down, and threatened by that little rat, and now you won’t tell me anything?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know.” The creature continued to weave and twist, its large red lips moving very differently from the sounds Seb heard. Even some of the sewer dwellers had language chips in them. It must have been why he couldn’t understand the others.

  “Your life is very important. No matter how many times we tried to get away from you and the prophecy, you kept coming back up. We’ve known about you for decades now. Maybe even a century.”

  “What? I haven’t been alive that long.”

  “No, but your path has always been there, waiting for the right being to be born onto it. The child of the special one, you’ve been destined for greatness since birth.” Every time the creature spoke, its voice hissed through the caves as if the walls whispered with it.

  “What do you know about my mum?” Seb said.

  “I don’t. Other than you’ve come from greatness. We’ve slaughtered animals and held rituals in your honour. We knew you’d come to us at some point. There’s a poison spreading through this galaxy and you’re the antidote. That I know.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  For the briefest moment Seb considered swinging for the strange creature like he had its underling, but he kept his temper. Maybe it had told him all it knew.

  “Can we feed you, Chosen One?” the leader asked.

  Even if the servers hadn’t been covered in the waste from the elevated city, Seb would have said no. The charred reek of the poor beast lifted a slight heave through his stomach.

  The thought of Bruke and the others flashed through Seb’s mind. Where only minutes ago he’d given up on helping them, he could do something about it again. “Thanks for cutting me down,” he said to the leader.

  The leader nodded.

  “Had you not arrived, this band of degenerates would have eaten me.” When Seb scowled at the collection of freaks and creatures by the fire again, each of them stared at the ground. “But no harm, I suppose.” He rubbed the lump on the top of his head. “Other than my head.” He rubbed his wrists. There seemed little point in listing all his pains. “I need to go now.”

  Before any of the creatures could say more, Seb walked past the leader, picked his backpack up from where it lay in his path, checked he still had everything in there—torch, blaster, flammable pebbles, lighter—and headed down the dark tunnel the leader had just emerged from.

  Chapter 25

  Just the thought of the backpack resting against him made Seb’s skin crawl. How many of the sewer dwellers had touched it with their filthy hands? Maybe it would be fine, but it could quite as easily be crawling with disease like most of them no doubt were. He’d wash it as soon as he got a chance.

  After a few minutes of walking, Seb heard the monotonous hum of the sewer dwellers strike up again. The unrelenting sound of it bored into his brain and scrambled his thoughts. It took a lot of strength not to go back there and knock out every one of them. That would shut them up and maybe stop them capturing and eating other beings.

  Now far enough away from their cave, Seb stopped, slipped his bag from his shoulders, placed it on the ground, and undid the zip. He stuck his hand inside, flinching in case they’d put something in there he hadn’t expected. But he found no surprises and, after shifting the plastic pot of flammable wax to one side, he found his torch.

  When Seb flicked the light on, he saw the end of the tunnel just a few metres away. It had a small crack leading outside into the larger network of sewers, much like the one he’d entered through.

  Totally disorientated from his experience, he had to assume he’d come to a different gap because he saw no markings in the ground or animal sacrifices.

  The gap stretched a little wider than the one he’d entered through. So wide in fact, Seb managed to squeeze through it with his backpack still on.

  Outside in the larger space, Seb rubbed the pain in his ankles and wrists. Now he had time to focus on them, they stung worse than ever. He’d felt guilty after knocking the ratty creature out, but now he truly felt the pain they’d inflicted on him, that guilt eased. He should have hit the little rat harder.

  The sound of rushing water beside Seb somehow comforted him. Compared to where he’d been for the past few hours, the spacious tunnels seemed like a much better place to be. Especially as he’d got used to the reek of shit.

  Although, regardless of how soothed he felt, he didn’t have the first clue of
which way to go, and who knew when one of the huge squid creatures would come for him again? What a waste of time it had been to come back to the sewers. After being strung up for hours, bound to the point where he now had rope burns on his ankles and wrists, and with a pounding headache clattering through his skull, he still had no more information than what he’d entered with. He would have been better off not coming at all. On top of that, they’d nearly killed him and he’d witnessed an innocent creature get slaughtered.

  Seb swept his torch across the space. Everywhere looked the same: dark tunnels, dank and glistening walls, pathways running alongside rivers of shit. Then he saw one of the black metal ladders leading up to the elevated city. If he had to lead a revolution, the ladders would be crucial for getting up there. But how would he find them again?

  Not knowing which way would be the best direction to head in, Seb had to pick somewhere. For no other reason than going on a hunch, he turned left from where he stood and walked into the darkness.

  Chapter 26

  After ten minutes or more, Seb didn’t know whether he’d made progress or walked in circles. Everywhere looked the same in the sewers. He’d turned left and found a point where the paths drew close. He leapt across and then turned right. Then he turned left again. Then right. Then left …

  All Seb had seen of any use were several more ladders leading up to the elevated city. Or maybe he’d simply passed the same ladder. He shook his head to himself. No, he’d seen two ladders close together at one point. Multiple ladders leading to multiple parts of the city above. Hopefully they’d find them again when they needed to.

  Because Solsans never got any lighter than the brightest night, Seb had no daylight to follow. If the sun shone outside and he got near an exit, he’d see it from a mile away. But with nothing but darkness in front of him, he wouldn’t know he’d found a way out until he got just a few metres from it.