Mindripper

by Baron Blackwell

  “Sometimes it’s so hard to remember what she looks like,” Lulu continued in a hushed tone.

  “Your sister?” he asked.

  “Yes. . . .” She lowered her head, slumped back into the seat, eyes still closed. “Yes, my sister. She could be a little cunt sometimes, but I loved her dearly. We never got along—no, that’s not true. We were inseparable when we were nothing more than knees and elbows, then we got older and drifted. My fault. Always my fault.”

  Enk gripped her arm. Her eyes opened, stared into his own

  Warmth. Muted light.

  A tingle racing up aching fingers.

  “We will get him,” he said, suppressed passion hot in his throat. “We will.”

  Feminine lips quickened. The smile faltered then died. Great iron-shod hooves clipped the cobblestone to the front of Enk like angry gongs to prayer. His eyes left grace, panicked though it may be, and glimpsed approaching calamity.

  Ahead, traffic veered to left and the right, making room for the mad column of black-and-silver coated men, who raced their furious steeds down the one-way street. Guardians of the Flame, led by a dark-skinned man atop a white stallion. A Lord-Inquisitor of the Church of the Holy Ark here, in Dilgan.

  Enk wrenched on the reins, but it was already too late. Terrified, the horse thundered left then jerked right to keep from crashing into a shop front. Things slowed. The drill-like shriek of injured horses. The tilting of things once horizontal. . . .

  Jarring impact. Momentum, like the kick from a discharged cannon, tossing a screaming passenger into the air. The soft matter of the human form meeting the hard sum of a storefront.

  Then pain, inferno hot against the water-cool perspiration of a tempest.

  And there: a flaxen-haired maiden, leg trapped beneath the weight of a modern contraption.

  Rising to one knee, Enk vomited what felt like a lake of bile, wracked by dizziness and a bone-cracking chill. He gulped and shook his head.

  The one-way street was a ruin in the shadow of a retreating tornado. And above, the heavens spat out translucent pearls. The broad backs of the last of the Guardians of the Flame disappeared around the corner.

  The Pit. They’re going the—

  “Help,” Lulu hissed, lying on her stomach.

  Enk stumbled upright, swaying back and forth. He bumbled back into the storefront and winced. Pain heaped upon pain, but there was no time to wallow in its pitch and warble. His eyes found Lulu’s own and stilled. All around them rose the song of mayhem, serenading the canopy of dark clouds.

  “Hold on,” he told her, lurching to her aid.

  Enk gripped the bottom of the carriage, strained to lift it upward. His muscles knotted and pulsed. Feats of strength had never been his realm of excellence, but he strove now like he had never before, digging deeply within himself. The carriage shifted, yanked by alarmed horses, and, for an instant, he was able to force it upward.

  Lulu pulled her leg free, and Enk collapsed back onto his romp, spent physically and emotionally. So much had already happened, and very little of it good.

  “Are you—” He asked Lulu in between panted breaths.

  “Cat!” she shouted, leaping upright. She took two steps and slumped down onto a knee.

  Enk helped her back up and allowed her to lean on him. Together, they limped down the street, searching the carnage. Knife-voiced steeds thrashed on their bellies, their eyes wide and dark. Battered passengers climbed out of overturned and crashed carriages, most of them bloody.

  And through the maze-like ruin, Enk glimpsed Tizkar on his feet, his shrieking eyes framed by rivets of blood, a child held impossibly still in his arms.

  It never ends, Enk thought, the horrors never end.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  One Plus One

  Nigh conjoined with another, Enk bumbled through muddy pools of rainwater and toward the nearest of the doors that portaled the shuttered factory. Shining droplets drifted down from the darkling sky. The air reeked of metallic decay.

  Almost . . . there.

  Torment had transformed Enk over the past hour. He could no longer tell who supported whom more, he or Lulu, so stupefying was the pang in his lungs. Mute, she trudged the intervening ground at his side, her eyes locked on Tizkar’s back. To her, there was nothing more precious than the older boy’s load, nothing more worthy of saving than what he clutched tight to his breast.

  “Help! Help!” Tizkar shouted, his voice knifing the black-tipped heights. Somewhere along the way, he had lost his blood-colored wig and his head now lay bare, sores and all. “Help! Anad! Help!”

  Before them, the door fell away from its frame. Enk searched the greater darkness for what it concealed. Shadows yielded to familiar forms, forms that stifled questions at the sight of them. Some immediately turned back, calling for Anad with panicked voices that competed with the tempest’s song.

  “No. No. She’s not dead.” Tizkar battered aside the offer of helping hands and hurried into the building, leaving Enk and Lulu behind. “Anad! Where are you, damn it? Anad!”

  Reflective and heartsick, Enk left the stinging elements and lurched through the shadowy doorway. He tittered, steadied. The cries of an unseen dog pricked his ears, but, for an instant, he could almost swear it belonged to a different place—a different time.

  “Leave me,” he told Lulu in between wheezed breaths. “Go be with her, I’ll follow after.”

  Lulu studied Anad’s drowsy face hanging over the railing that ringed the suspended offices, studied Tizkar racing up toward him. “No.” She shook her head. “We made it this far together, we can make it the rest of the way.”

  “Don’t be. . . .” Enk trailed off as she tensed against him. Her terror lay palpable and viscous, in the way of bewildered children. Something warm and pulsing gripped his heart.

  She needed him.

  “All right,” he said finally, “together then.”

  Together, they foraged on, traveling across the factory floor, moving behind the stragglers that hung in Tizkar’s wake.

  “Sweet all that’s holy, what happened?” Anad’s called, his voice rising over the swell.

  As Enk struggled for breath, his mind turned to thoughts of the injured carriage drivers they had been forced to abandon. Innumerable lawmen had flooded the Shade only minutes after the Guardians of the Flame had vanished from sight, blockading whole streets and searching homes. It was just as Tizkar had feared, the theft of the muskets had loosed a nest of hornets upon the unsuspecting city.

  We’re running out of time.

  They needed to find the Scarlet Apron now, before the riots began. There was no longer any doubt there would be some, not to him, not after watching the carnage that the Guardians of the Flame had caused. People had died, and even more had been injured.

  Please, God, don’t let Cat be one of the former.

  Enk tracked upward with Lulu’s help. The stairs were a challenge that cut, but not as deeply as worry over the little girl’s fate. He had known her barely a day—and yet. . . . Some things had to be sacred even to the divine. If not the life of a child, then what?

  The thought rang across the accumulation of hidden milieus, loud enough to reveal its hollow depths. Was not his childhood enough to prove nothing was sacred? Right now—at this very moment—all over the Empire, little ones were dying by the hundreds, if not thousands. What made this girl, this one child special?

  “Are you. . . ?” Lulu asked as the stairs came to an end.

  Enk blinked tears from his eyes and nodded. He had neither the breath nor the will to give voice to the lie. He was not well and, it seemed, he had not been for a very long while.

  Her hand gave his side a soft squeeze, and he fought the urge to weep. Her niece lay at death’s door. Her niece! And yet she had the strength to comfort him. Him, who always fell short, who never attained the ideal.

  He shifted his gaze away from her sad, smiling eyes. A chorus of loud voices fell upon them, coming from the small
throng that lined the railing behind Tizkar, who now stood empty-handed.

  “No. No.” Anad pressed Tizkar back from the doorway. “I need quiet to work. Don’t worry, I’ll call you when I have news. Go wait in your office and leave her to me.”

  Lulu abandoned Enk and limped toward Anad. “What about me, your not going to force me to wait out here, too?”

  “Mommy,” a small voice whimpered from the room behind Anad.

  Anad glanced back then shook his head. “No, you can—”

  Lulu did not let him finish, she lumbered past him. “Auntie is here, Cat. You don’t have to be scared any. I’m here.”

  “Disperse.” Anad jabbed a gnarl finger at the gathered throng. “As you can hear, she’s terrified. I don’t need your commotion addling her anymore. Go.”

  Tizkar stood stiffly, as if the future had never seemed this capricious, blind to the commiseration proffered within surrounding eyes. He turned from the door and walked to his office.

  Somber faced, Anad shut the door, and the rest did as he had asked, trailing past Enk’s panting form. Hands clapped the young scion’s back, squeezed his shoulders.

  “Enk.”

  Enk nearly jumped at the sound of Tizkar’s voice, so intent was he on weathering the sympathy of those that strolled past him. The older boy stood beside the door of his office. Somehow his eyes had regained something of their former remoteness, ash gray ringed by seeping streams of crimson. He beckoned with a hand and entered his office.

  Remember your goal. The Scarlet Apron. Merka.

  Enk pressed onward, the pinch in his chest much reduced, walking past the door that now concealed Lulu and Cat. Wild mountain heights awaited him, but only if Suni’s information proved true. The only question was did he have what it takes to murder again.

  He found Tizkar walking a tight circuit within the office; the older boy had acquired a white wig from some secret trove and now wore it upon his bowed head. The desolate curls dangled across his sullen face, sopping what little fluid still bled from the gash on his forehead.

  “The day has taken a strange turn, eh, Enk?” His hands closed and opened at his sides. “Yes . . . yes, strange indeed.”

  Enk said nothing. He watched and listened and waited. Sometimes the best comfort was another’s silence, even words had there limits.

  “Love leaves you raw and open,” Tizkar whispered. “Often I wonder, is it all worth it? Why expose yourself at all?”

  “What other choice is there?” Enk asked.

  Tizkar gnawed at his bottom lip. “I don’t know, but anything has to be better than this.” He stopped with his head unbowed. “Why? Why love when it only ends in hurt?” Tears flooded his ash-colored eyes.

  Enk swallowed, caught in a moment of indecision. Yes, his earlier judgment was correct, words would not suffice, not here. Not now. He had to envelop Tizkar in a hug—the same way Ilima had to him after Mother had taken an axe to the oak—that was the only way to bypass a lifetime of accumulated hurt and touch the older boy’s hidden heart.

  Yet . . . Enk hesitated. What did he know of hugs? Where exactly did each hand go? What if Tizkar rejected the offering, what then?

  Tizkar raised a hand, as if to ward against Enk’s gaze, and the moment passed, replaced by one of absence of thought and sound.

  Silence, both stark and bitter.

  Enk looked away and regarded the Wall for several heartbeats, blind to the sketches it contained. Something stirred with him, a sense of drifting—no, a sense of. . . .

  “We need to finish this tonight,” he said with an ache in his chest. “And we can’t let Suni’s information leak, not even if it proves true, not now. We have to handle this ourselves, just me and you.”

  “Why do we care if it leaks?” Tizkar asked. “The others have a right to know, they’ve suffered as we’ve suffered.

  Enk whirled on him, suddenly irritated. Must he spell something this obvious out? Had not Tizkar seen as he had seen? “Because,” he intoned, “the news will cause riots, riots that will cost the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Remember what we saw today, there is a Lord-Inquisitor in Dilgan, a Lord-Inquisitor and Guardians of the Flame. The Church has never been gentle to those who did not submit to the ordained order.”

  “You’re right,” Tizkar said, brushing the last tears from his eyes. “Tonight then.”

  “I’m coming, too,” Lulu said from the doorway. She had found the time to dry her hair and wipe most of the blood from her dress and now appeared almost human.

  Tizkar spun to face her. “What? No, Lulu, you’re injured—how is. . . .”

  “And you’re not?” she asked. “It’s just a strained ankle. I’m fine. And nothing you say will keep me from this, so don’t you even try!”

  “Lulu, Cat. How is she? She’s not. . . .”

  Lulu shook her head. “Do you think I would be this calm if she were?” A deep breath. “Anad said she has a broken arm, and he has to watch her for the rest of the night to make sure she doesn’t fall asleep. There’s a danger if she does, he claimed. But other than that, she’s going to be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “He gave her a few puffs of the daemon weed and she was all smiles after that. They’re in the right now giggling with each other. Had to step out before I murdered one of them.”

  Tizkar collapsed in his chair, his face etched with something like relief. “That’s good. I was worried.”

  Enk frowned at his hand. This was good—no, great news, and yet he found himself unable to match Tizkar’s joy. Why was that? And what was with this sudden premonition of doom? He always did this, it seemed, always picked away at his scabs to persevere the festering wound.

  “What about the blockades,” Lulu asked, stepping fully into the room. “How are we going to get past them?”

  Tizkar laughed. “Leave that to me. There’s more than one way to get around the city, Lulu.”

  As he listened to Tizkar and Lulu plan the mission, Enk finally understood what was bothering him. It was the hug he had failed to give Tizkar. An opportunity had been missed.

  Again, he realized. He had fallen short again.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Right Thing

  Disgusting.

  That was the only way to describe Dilgan’s underground sewer system. Winding tunnels of seamless stone, no different from an animal burrow. A knee-high river of filth flowing endlessly, and generations of shit coated walls inscribed with boil-like ornamentations.

  Enk trudged through it, sucking in air through the alcohol-soaked rag wrapped around his face. His eyes stung as his stomach twitched into slimy knots. Why had he ever agreed to this insanity? No wonder, no one ever spoke of criminals escaping into the city sewers. Only psychopaths would do anything so foolish.

  Madness! Why was Tizkar so against them using their power? All it would have taken was a—

  “Enk.”

  The young scion nearly jumped at the sound of Lulu’s voice, so intent was he in his own misery. She walked beside him with a satchel slung over her shoulder, her limp almost gone, following behind Tizkar. For an instant, the lamp Tizkar held aloft made her seem no different from one of the stuffed elks that lined his father’s trophy room. He swallowed. The resemblance was uncanny.

  Thoughts of his father led to a memory he had almost forgotten, to the night his father had carried him down into the basement when everyone else lay fast asleep. The mystery of that night pricked him now as it had then.

  Father, I haven’t forgotten about you.

  “Enk, are you all right?” Lulu asked in a muffled voice. She had traded her dress for a pair of Tizkar’s narrow breeches and an overlarge coat. She wore a rag much like his own, but tied over her face in such a way that it only added to her allure. Even surrounded by the filth of thousands, she shone.

  Enk shook his head. “Memories and. . . . I thought I understood the depths human reek could reach, but it seems not.”

  �
��Be thankful that it stopped raining,” Lulu said, tugging on her satchel, “otherwise we would be swimming instead of walking through shit.”

  “No.” Tizkar chuckled. “Be thankful it rained at all the last two days, the sewers are rarely ever so clean.”

  “And memories? What sort of memories could this place possibly stir in you?” Lulu asked Enk, arcing a thin eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you were a sewer child like Tizkar.”

  Tizkar shot them a glance over his shoulder, but said nothing. He simply shook his head and turned back around, murmuring something that sounded like a curse. Lulu snorted in laughter.

  “No,” Enk said with a shade of amusement. “A family secret of sorts.”

  “Oh,” she said, her eyes waxy with curiosity. “Go on.”

  “Nothing much to it. I was just reminded of the secret escape route my father showed me once. It led down into the sewers.”

  “Secret escape route? You nobles sure are a paranoid bunch.”

  “We’re here.” Tizkar stopped beneath a row of small iron-bars bound by a ring of stone.

  “We are?” Enk frowned. Every tunnel they had traveled through appeared much the same as this one, and he could see nothing that separated it from all the others. “How can you tell?” he asked.

  “Practice.” Tizkar placed the lamp in a little nook in the wall that seemed designed for that purpose and turned to face them. “Despite what Lulu said, I wasn’t a sewer child—”

  “I was just teasing you, Tizkar.” Lulu threw up an exasperated arm. “Men, always so sensitive.” The last part was muttered under her breath.

  “But,” Tizkar continued, “my sister, and I were forced down here on a number of occasions.”

  “What could have possibly driven you two down here?” Enk asked.

  Lulu’s eyes twinkled with something bleak and ungleaming. “He’s sweet, ain’t he, Tizkar?” Her pinched tone gave the question something of the dimensions of guarded silence.

  Tizkar grunted, eying the faint starlight that made the iron bars above their heads shimmer. Enk nippled his lower lip. This conversation treaded unwelcomed ground, it seemed, but he understood well the deep grooves trauma could leave.