The Mirrored City

by Michael J. Bode

  Isik laughed. “You crazy asshole! That would have taken me weeks. I might actually go home tonight. You see that cot over there? They brought it for me when they dumped all these body parts in my lab.”

  “Who the fuck is that?” Maddox asked, examining the body.

  Isik scratched his head. “I can get a name if the throat still works.”

  Isik placed his hand on the man’s head and intoned some necromantic incantation. “Speak your name,” he commanded.

  The corpse jerked to life and uttered a hideous squelching noise that sounded like a live octopus going through a meat grinder.

  Isik rubbed his chin. “He said Magar Karadjian. I have eaten at his restaurant.”

  “Hope you checked the meat,” Maddox joked.

  “I am a necromancer,” Isik said indignantly. “I always know where meat comes from. Sometimes it is a curse. I can never enjoy sausage.”

  “What did you see in his eyes at the moment of death?”

  Isik folded his arms.

  Maddox made puppy eyes and pouted. “You still have two more bodies to assemble. I bet it took you all night just to separate the pieces.” He levitated a severed toe and slowly moved it toward the other table.

  “I would kill you, and it would be just,” Isik said.

  “Yeah.” Maddox leaned on the table. “You could, but…”

  “Fine.” Isik grabbed a stack of parchment and pulled out a sketch.

  It was actually a decent drawing. Isik tended toward heavy black lines and didn’t have the precision of a trained artist, but he was better than most.

  Judging by the high boarded up window and rough masonry, it looked like a cellar hung with dozens of hooked chains at varying lengths. Four unadorned walls met at roughly 135-degree angles.

  “Not much to go on. What was the name of that restaurant?”

  Isik rolled his eyes. “Tell you what. You put the bodies back together, and I will talk to the Inspector. You can deal with her.”

  The Gourmand occupied a choice corner location on Glutton’s Row, Dessim’s district of restaurants and eateries. The names of some of the other businesses were deliberately awful: the Gravid Gullet, the Murdered Swine, and (Maddox’s personal favorite) The Eternal Feast: Buffet & Vomitorium.

  Dessim published the most definitive thesaurus of Thrycean language in Genatrova. They weren’t shy about using it.

  Inspector General Colette was a stern-looking woman with steel gray hair and a penchant for smoking thinly rolled Bamoran cigarettes. The smell was worse than the incense that burned everywhere, and it seemed to blow in his face no matter where he stood.

  “Here we are,” she announced. “Before we go in, we should go over the ground rules. Rule one, don’t touch anything. That’s the rule. Are we clear, ‘Archwizard’ Baeland?”

  “Yeah, I’ll keep my hands to myself.” Maddox rolled his eyes. The Sword had processed a few crime scenes with Heath. It had covered up far more of its own crime scenes with Heath. The fact that the building wasn’t already burned to the ground was a promising start.

  “You’re only here because Isik recommended you and Magus Winterholt is insufferable.” She took a puff of her cigarette and let the words flow from her mouth as she spoke.

  Colette tried the door and found it locked. She removed a set of tools from her pocket and crouched down to the door handle. She left the cigarette in her mouth, puffing away as she worked. He heard the click of at least three tumblers. The door popped open in a matter of moments.

  “Damn,” Maddox commented. “That’s impressive.”

  Colette huffed down the last of her dwindling cigarette and tossed it aside. “Bah. I used to be able to do it in half the time. Come on.”

  The inside of the restaurant had five large tables in white cloth with full place settings. In addition to the usual assortment of utensils and long-stemmed wine glasses, it held other less conventional implements: a small eel hammer, tweezers, a wavy dagger. Dessim was as devoted to novelty as Baash was beholden to tradition.

  “Stay close,” Colette said as she made her way back to the kitchen. The entire far wall of the restaurant was completely covered in wine racks, laden with bottles. The shelves went up so high a ladder was leaning against the wall.

  Maddox could smell it before he saw it. The kitchen was a slaughterhouse. The walls were spattered with stains, and the floor was covered in a sheet of dried blood that crunched like autumn leaves beneath his foot.

  Sputtering candles in tall glass tubes and flower petals covered a butchers block that had been dressed like an altar. A naked man had been posed as if leaning back in the throes of ecstasy with his head tipped backward over the table. Maddox and Colette walked around the table from either side. He knew what he was going to find.

  “By the Host,” Colette gasped. She seemed like a hard woman to startle.

  Maddox recognized the boy Lawrence from the alleyway. His face had been removed and sewn to the back of his head. The eye sockets were filled with white roses that had turned partially red from the fluids in his body.

  “What’s in his eyes? Roses?” Colette scrutinized the body.

  “White roses,” Maddox said.

  “They come in white? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “They grow in the north,” Maddox said. “Smell it if you don’t believe me.”

  “I’ll take your word.” She took out a notebook and wrote something down. “The killer took out the eyes so we can’t use them. That I get, but why cut off the face?”

  “Fiction,” Maddox answered. “The Dark Ecliptic. There was a popular story around the 200s that the thirteen ecliptic constellations would be viewed from behind by creatures outside our universe, and recreating their marks here could signal to them to return. The books became co-opted into the forbidden occult literature of the time, but charlatans would put anything that sounded weird enough in a grimoire to make some coin. The Inquisition doesn’t even bother to ban that kind of literature.”

  “Dark Ecliptic? Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a stupid idea,” Maddox said. “The constellations of the Dark Ecliptic are perversions of the original thirteen. This is the Faithless Lover, the opposite of the Sign of the Virgin. This man was a prostitute, so it makes sense.”

  Colette nodded. “The people who owned this restaurant were arranged like a feast.”

  “And he’s going in order,” Maddox said. “The next constellation is the Scholar, so its inverse is the Fool. After that it’s the Twins, or in the Dark Ecliptic, the Broken Mirror. After that—”

  Maddox was preparing to launch into a lecture when Colette interrupted him. “So next we need to find an idiot?” Colette asked. “That could be anybody in the city.”

  “It won’t be just anyone,” Maddox said. “The victims will be perfect for the scenes the killer is creating. It’s an artist, not just a half-assed hedge wizard—”

  “It?” Colette asked.

  Maddox added, “The killer has three heads and it’s not human. But I know Leland Buckminster is involved somehow. He’d know the literature. I need to do some research. Send a message to my apartments if Isik comes up with anything tangible.”

  “Wait,” she protested, “you can’t just walk out in the middle of an investigation!”

  Maddox shrugged. “You can’t kill this thing, let alone catch it. Trust me—it tore a hole in my chest, and I am not easy to kill. Just let me know what you find. I need to do some hardcore old magic. But I have a lead.”

  Colette cocked her head. “How do I know you’re not the killer?”

  “Because Isik can vouch for my whereabouts when Lawrence was killed.” Maddox sighed. “Besides, I have better shit to do with my time.”

  “Like involve yourself in an ongoing murder investigation and then walk out in the middle of it?” she challenged, a plume of smoke blowing through her nostrils. Her face was unreadable.

  “It’s therapeutic to keep busy,” Maddox said.

&n
bsp; Maddox rented quarters in a forgettable inn on the Road of the Dormant Wayfarer. The room was cramped, minimally furnished with a cot and a shelf to serve as an altar to whatever gods’ idols the guest brought with him.

  Maddox looked at his face in the tiny round mirror over the empty wash basin. “Look buddy,” he said to his reflection. “I can’t do this without you. I’ll carry you as far as you need me to take you, but there’s one thing I can’t do.”

  He pulled out a bottle of brandy from his satchel and set it down next to a packet of euphorium and a long wooden pipe. Oddly, in Dessim, the brandy was harder to acquire than the drugs. The euphorium and alcohol were a deadly combination. He spilled half the packet into the bottle and chugged. He clutched the Sword and drifted into oblivion.

  And then oblivion spit him onto the musty planks of a creaking boat. He found himself on the deck of a rotting ship, beneath a black sky where ghostly tattered sails flapped in the icy wind. The phantom traces of a glowing skeletal crew moved about the rigging. All around was an endless expanse of gray roiling fog.

  A chilling voice intoned, “The prodigal returns.”

  Maddox startled and leapt to his feet, hand holding his chest. “By the Guides.”

  He turned to face a woman in black. She wore a spiked crown covered in a veil of black spidery lace. Her eyes and mouth were sewn shut, and her hands were folded in front of her, with her forearms parallel to the deck, her fingers steepled arcanely. “You have been away a long time, Architect, but you and I knew each other once. Perhaps we will meet again.” Her voice was a raspy whisper, but her stitched mouth did not move.

  Maddox rubbed his temples. “Amnayleth… Guide of the Seal of Mystery.” Of the thirteen seals, the Seal of Mystery was practically useless, mainly because no one who had it could tell another living soul what it actually did. The Sword had used his body to bind it once for… Maddox’s memories faded.

  “You seek to unravel the broken thread that winds through the labyrinth.”

  “I don’t have time or patience for riddles,” Maddox said.

  “You have time but lack patience,” Amnayleth hissed coyly.

  “My body is dying, and this vision will end when it does,” Maddox insisted. “What can you tell me about Lawrence?”

  “You know the Grand Design. Attain the Seal of Seals and you will know all things that will come to pass and how to bring them about.”

  “Not for all the money on the moon,” Maddox said flatly. “It would take me a year to practice at least. And it’s fucking dangerous.”

  Maddox had pieced together the Grand Design during a bender of deliberately fatal drug overdoses, not knowing what it was until it was too late. Now that knowledge was burned into his very soul. It could grant him omniscience and, by proxy, near omnipotence. Seeing the future came with a price—the loss of any sense of choice. Not only did it show him how best to achieve his desires, it also determined what he would ultimately desire.

  When the Inquisition ripped his mind apart, he didn’t resist. He believed his knowledge and immortality made him a danger to Creation. He found a refuge in the Sword—it had no great ambitions or any deep passion about forbidden magic. Plus the Sword suppressed the crazy mystic visions he was having now.

  The veiled woman brushed past him. “Knowledge comes with a price, Architect.”

  Maddox frowned. “What’s the price?”

  “Knowing it,” Amnayleth said.

  Maddox complained, “Just spit it out. Tell me what I need to know.”

  Amnayleth whispered, “The answers you seek are in the Palace of Keys.”

  “Wait,” Maddox said, nearly falling over in shock. “That’s an actual location in the city. Did you just… give me a straight answer?”

  “There are no straight answers to crooked questions.”

  He feigned relief. “Oh good, I was worried you were starting to make sense. How about where I can find the thing that attacked me?”

  “You stepped over the lover’s body when you sought the two-faced killer.”

  “It had three faces,” Maddox said, but he knew it was useless. He could sense the vision ending and the weight of Amnayleth’s silence. Of all the Guides, I had to get Mystery.

  He felt the world around him dissolve. The toxic combination of euphorium powder and firebrandy was killing him.

  Darkness swallowed him. And when it did, he would wake up in his room, the Sword at his side.

  TWELVE

  Making A Play

  HEATH

  1.

  Night will fall upon Baash & Dessim

  The Dark Stars will fall to earth

  The broken mirror will have a thousand reflections.

  The Eye of the Sun will turn to the Mirrored City.

  2.

  The Queen of Lies will rise in the West

  A king is reborn in Dessim to humble beginnings

  The Red Army will bleed over all Creation.

  Baash & Dessim will be forever gone.

  —PROPHECIES OF PROSPERO, A FAMOUS DIVINER IN DESSIM

  THE STREETS OF Baash were clean and narrow, and although they were the same as the streets in Dessim, the plain alabaster city was almost completely unrecognizable. The buildings were unadorned on the outside, monolithic blocks of white granite, painted orange by the setting sun. Chants and songs came from all parts of the city as the faithful performed their final daily prayer to Ohan.

  This made it an ideal time to go undetected. Curfew would come shortly after, and phalanxes of Patrean guards would patrol the narrow streets in meticulously timed patterns, making it nearly impossible to move at night undetected. The good news was that Heath had practiced moving through those same streets in Dessim and had learned their quirks and shortcuts.

  He wore a black hood and half mask over the lower part of his face. His tunic left his scarred arms bare except for the leather gauntlets that held his trusty springblades. For a man pushing into his fourth decade, he was still in good shape. He kept to the shadows that lengthened as the daylight receded, like fingers beckoning him forward. Bracing himself between the walls of a narrow alley, he climbed to the roof of a squat building just before a patrol marched past.

  His reflexes were incredible since becoming a Stormlord. When he needed to react, it felt like things were happening in slow motion. It also helped that he’d stopped taking his morning remedies. The medicine made him sicker than the illness growing inside him, and he had more energy than he’d had in months.

  It felt good to be out in the field, doing honest work with nothing but his wit and skill to keep him alive. Mastery of the elements was intoxicating, but sometimes magic felt like cheating. This was like old times… except Sword wasn’t by his side to enjoy it.

  He bolted across the roof and vaulted to the next building. Although he landed fine, he was sweating and had a stitch in his side. “I’m getting too old for this,” he whispered to himself.

  Sword would have agreed and made some kind of joke. Heath missed his partner but meant what he said: Maddox wasn’t a criminal and didn’t need to be. He’d been a young wizard with a promising future that involved writing papers and giving lectures. Heath and Jessa owed it to Maddox to give him the life he wanted.

  Heath also had to admit, as he tiptoed across the top of a high archway, that he missed Sword. Since becoming Maddox, the Sword had changed and not for the better. It was arrogant and constantly annoyed with Heath over everything. It would be happier in another body with a more affable persona.

  Heath paused.

  A pair of women, a blonde one laughing quite loudly, darted through the street hand in hand. She was shushed by the Turisian woman as they hustled down an adjacent alleyway.

  Heath shrugged and moved on, finding purchase on a higher level of buildings. He made his way without incident.

  Before him was the palatial square compound of House Qaadar, the First House of Baash and home of the ruling Patriarch. Like all buildings in Baash, it bore no outw
ard decoration aside from some magnificent stained glass windows. Its size and deepening shadow were the only indications of its importance. Heath hunkered down and waited for night to descend.

  He slowly willed clouds to move in over the city, blotting out the stars and moon. He did it as subtly as he could manage. Satisfied it was dark enough, he made his move.

  House Qaadar had a mirrored structure in Dessim. Over there, it was a government office with embassy quarters for the representatives and dignitaries appointed by the other six Free Cities. He’d visited the Rivern office on numerous occasions and “gotten lost” in the labyrinthine structure many times, so he knew the layout perfectly.

  Under the cover of night, he leapt from the roof where he was perched and shot one of his springblades into the wall of the compound. The abraevium alloy pierced the marble while a thin filament anchored him to the blade. The metal was elastic yet sharp. Once he hit the wall, he jammed his other springblade into the stone. He retracted the first and repeated the process of stabbing the wall as he made his ascent.

  The cuts from the blade were razor thin and difficult to see.

  He mounted the summit of the building. Like in Dessim, the square compound surrounded an open atrium filled with lush palms and flowering fruit trees. Each of the three stories featured an exposed balcony overlooking the gardens. Heath wiped his brow and took a minute to catch his breath.

  Patrols were light. Single Patrean guards strolled around casually. It would be a mistake to think they weren’t alert. Patreans didn’t get bored as easily as other humans, which made them more ideal than dogs for security.

  Heath made his way across the roof to the master bedroom, taking extra care to tread quietly.

  He winced at the loud pop of his knee as he crept forward. This is probably my last time doing anything like this. Better enjoy it.

  Heath waited for the passing patrols to walk by before leaping over the edge of the roof and swinging onto the balcony. He entered the room quietly, unnoticed by any patrols.