The Pit of No Return (The King Henry Tapes Book 6)

by Richard Raley

  Still no comment.

  Watson started chuckling as we got into an elevator.

  “They don’t talk,” he told me. “Ever.”

  Sure they do, just have to know how to listen to them.

  [CLICK]

  The Pit.

  Real part of the Pit, not the bread and breakfast they had me up in.

  Lots of glass.

  Didn’t expect that.

  Everything else was stone and steel, why not the Pit? Made it back in the 1800s too, but it looked like it was from 2001. White ceramic plating, glass, and more glass. The ‘common floor’ where the ‘good’ prisoners and patients spent the day was one room that sliced the entire middle out of the Pit’s sphere. Three stories just fucking gone. No supports, nothing at all holding that ceiling up. White plates and spectro-crystal light above your head, unbreakable geo-anima strengthened glass beneath your feet.

  Geo-anima strengthened glass . . .

  As far as I knew I was the only person living who could use geo-anima on glass, which made me think it was a Maximus thing. Which makes me think about who must have built the Pit back in the day. Wonder if they got that info in their vault too?

  Make it through the day, that’s all I had to do.

  One measly day.

  Nothing blocked my vision all the way across the sphere . . . kind of view I’ll never forget. Enough space to hold thousands. Forget 2001, felt like the Death Star. The original gangster, none of that Starkiller Base wannabe shit.

  Nothing blocked my vision except for the artifact that made the Pit function, right at the very center of the room. Or at least the slice of it you could see. More went into the ceiling and down below you, all of it blocked off from contact by more glass. Not that most mancers would want to risk studying it, since that’s where the Pit Wave was strongest. Forget your sperm, forget your brain, that close it might jar loose your soul.

  Never worried about my soul none, so I wanted to study it. Makes me the craziest person in this place, then so be it. Me or that guy over there in the straightjacket with his tongue stuck up his nose.

  Prisoners and patients—prisoners in black, patients in white—walked, congregated, and gathered in groups, making the common floor look a bit like a game of Go. Guards in brown. Doctors and nurses in blue. Custodial staff in green. All them colors makes a fellow homesick for the Asylum.

  There was a cafeteria, exercise machines, various ball courts, a library, benches and seats dotted all over the place, chess and checker tables by the dozens, whole bunch more that didn’t even interest me to take a look. Had no interest in Pit society, no interest to rule the roost, no interest to buttfuck or be buttfucked. Local kingpin can stay the kingpin, just want to waste my days away as effectively as possible.

  Bench, got to find me a nice bench.

  Can see through the glass under your feet to the floor below. Walking on thin air, Winddancer-style. Was a bio-sphere—birds, small animals, plants, trees, water running in streams. Guild probably thought it soothing for the prisoners, but I just thought it was cruel. Show them what they can’t have. Forever. A person being let out of the Pit is rare; sentences for life nine-times-out-of-ten. Mancer way, ain’t it? Slap them on the wrist all the way up until they snap. Then when they kill a Boy Scout troop who trampled on the wrong fern you finally admit there might be a problem and lock said problem up where no one else can see it. Just the Nice, Quiet One, trust us!

  At least one security golem stood by each door that exited the floor, even if I was the only one with my personal duo. Guards too, as mentioned, but they were a lot less focused in their patrols, more like babysitters. Watson himself left me at the entrance to the place. “Lunch at the little cafeteria if you want it. Make sure they know not to give you the Happy Meal, around here we make it a bit more happy than most are used to!”

  Here I am. In the Pit. No anima. A few artifacts.

  Mostly just me.

  Salt and Pepper lumbered behind as I searched for a suitable bench. Important choice, I always thought. Guards, doctors, and custodians all took a notice of me, yet none dared to approach. Good, let’s keep it that way. No Guild members down here. Not enough beer or PowerPoint presentations on the latest artifacts, just the waste congregates at the bottom of the bin. Kind of nasty shit you can’t even get out with bleach, just got to buy yourself a new trashcan eventually.

  Wasn’t just the nose-licker in the straightjacket. Plenty others. Had your shakers, your moaners, your foot tappers. People watching things no one else could see or worse, hearing things no one else could hear. All of them looked doped up. Uppers or downers or whatever else was required to keep them functioning.

  For now it looked like I was in the clear. Even had some prisoners give my passage a wide berth. Massey gets desperate and he’ll yank my golems away, maybe urge some prisoner to beat me up or the like. Would need to be careful if that day came. Hell of a line to walk, Price. Can’t let him win at censuring you, but if you defend yourself too well he might have you beaten bloody.

  My day in court.

  What a farce.

  Not sure how it would all go down, since they didn’t have that information in the Guild Bylaws. Be witnesses and jurors and all that shit, I guess. Could guess at the witnesses too, but couldn’t be sure.

  Might lose.

  Probably will lose.

  Trial was always the part of my plan might go the worst for me. Part of my plan wasn’t so much plan as . . . whatever I could do to salvage some dignity. Still, had some small hope. Even a rigged trial ain’t completely rigged when you have a body as big as the Guild watching every moment of it. Putting on a show, Massey, but if five-hundred people are watching the show then it has to be legit enough to give me a slim chance, don’t it?

  Take a punch, give one back.

  I could do that.

  Still standing there getting rocked long after Massey is bleeding out on the ground?

  Hope so.

  Couple days away still, nothing to worry about for now.

  Today . . .

  Today, my mission, if I chose to accept it: find a bench.

  Done.

  Not that different from the other benches, but it did have a view of some turtles lounging on rocks and fish zipping about in a steam.

  Not bad as far as views go, granted there’s no naked college girls in it, but you can’t win them all.

  Far enough away from the chess players to not hear them arguing, but close enough so I could watch the games if I ever got that bored. Smelled food cooking, wafting over from the cafeteria. No one else sitting nearby, meant I’d hear them coming over the glass flooring. Even without anima in me, there was a reverberation to it all. Million little steps across the clear sea. Pitter patter of little feet, I thought, recalling Meteyos’ description of how he kept watch on humanity while stuck in his cave.

  Cave . . . suppose that’s what the Pit was too.

  Bit brighter in this cave of mine. Bit more crowded than a dragon’s isolation.

  Still . . . had a bench.

  “It’ll do,” I announced to the golems as I went down to my side, arm under my head. “Don’t worry, my snoring ain’t too loud and me being asleep is about the only time I don’t curse.”

  [CLICK]

  A Few Seconds After the Last Time

  T-Bone didn’t shriek so much like a girl as some type of bird being eaten alive in the middle of a mating ritual. Look at my fancy feathers, bitch! Fancy, fancy—oh fuck me, it’s eating my leg! My pretty, subtle, you-know-you-want-to-pass-it-on-to-your-chicks leg!

  “Why would you do that!” he yelled as he backed up into a tree-sized mushroom. As he turned to look backward at what he ran into and saw it was a mushroom, the words stopped flowing, replaced by a quiet hiss.

  I took a composed glance around, spotting in our general vicinity dozens if not hundreds more of the same offending fungi. “Fresno’s Geo Realm equivalent is a backwards, bum-fuck forest, why ain’t I surprised?”
The mushroom caps were thick and red . . . tried not to think about how they looked like giant, angry penises. “Say something, T-Bone.”

  His hiss went up a few octaves.

  Some type of lichen on the ground, little bush-size mushrooms about as well. Those were purple capped, with thin, white, wavy lines across the top. Was a little wet and shady too, not from night but from all the sunlight getting blocked out by the massive, veined caps above our heads. No sign of Sawaephim, the horse or the bear riding variety. No wildlife I could see, but then . . . I’m not some FIND tracker like Pocket or Jesus, am I?

  Poug had talked about steeltusks and if their pig equivalent was a massive wild boar I couldn’t imagine what else they had to ruin your day. No birds, I remember that much. Few insects, don’t count those as wildlife though, just pests. Gnats and mosquitoes, even in another Realm they’re a bunch of assholes.

  I swatted one on my hand. “Least they’re the same size as ours are, right?”

  “Mush . . . room,” T-Bone finally got out.

  “Anything else you want to add?”

  “Giant mushroom!”

  “You ain’t gonna throw up, are ya?”

  “I can’t decide,” he managed to get out between quick, hyperventilating breaths. “I might faint instead.”

  “Sit down on a mushroom then.”

  His eyes got big as he noticed the smaller purple ones surrounding us. “ . . . I don’t think that will help.”

  “Don’t be like that, T-Bone.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re being Realmist.”

  Indignation was enough to get his voice back to normal. “That’s not a thing!”

  “Sure it is . . . you’re prejudiced against shrooms. You’re a Tree Supremacist.”

  “I like them just fine! Just in my soup! Or a salad . . . if I have to eat a salad.”

  “No trees as such here, just weeds and the like.” I knelt down to dip my hand in a water puddle and slurp a bit up. “Cleaner than that chlorine-lead sludge comes out of the faucet,” I decided after a while. “Try some?”

  “Do you know what microbes are? I can’t even imagine what all this is doing to our systems. The contamination we’re committing and . . . what if we spread smallpox to these people?”

  I nodded at the deserted mushroom forest. Though I thought I caught sight of something moving in the distance, it didn’t look very humanoid. “See any people?”

  “It would only take one stumbling upon us to wipe out millions! They say ninety percent of the Native population died off just due to Columbus stepping foot on their soil.”

  “All the rape, slavery, and corporal punishment probably didn’t help much,” I grumbled.

  “This is no joking matter, King Henry!”

  “I’ve already been here, I walked through a whole village without a problem, ate some weird tasting bacon, and I’m fine . . . well, not sick at least, we won’t get into psychology. Also, last I checked neither of us have smallpox. Pretty sure the clinic would’ve said something about that.”

  T-Bone finally sat down on a mushroom. It held his weight like a perfect little stool. As in toadstool, get it?

  Who’s slaying with the dad jokes?

  This fuckin’ guy!

  “I’m actually here . . . I’m in another world,” T-Bone whispered.

  “That we are,” I agreed.

  Geo Realm.

  Was more than the mushrooms or the wildlife, was the anima of it all. Few seconds of pooling and I had ninety minutes of the stuff inside of me, saying nothing about the oceans of it swirling around me, as untouchable as the natural stuff was on Earth. The World-Breaker in my hand filled to the brim as well, an earthquake or hundreds of anima vials just waiting to be claimed.

  “How’s anima doing for you?” I asked T-Bone.

  “There’s none around me,” T-Bone answered after a moment’s sensing, “not that I expected any outside of some thunder storm in a pre-industrial society—”

  “They have some electricity in the cities, some amount of gunpower as well, even if they haven’t put two and two together when it comes to firearms.”

  T-Bone’s eyes got extra big. “Well, let’s not teach them that, shall we?”

  “You’re killing my dreams of being an inter-dimensional gun-dealer,” I sarcastically threw back at him.

  He ignored me, the brightest sign yet that he felt more himself. “So no natural electro-anima. But I can pool . . . it’s just very hard and very slow. It feels like I’m all blocked up . . . or that I have a boulder on my back, if you will.”

  “Huh, that’s interesting.” Val couldn’t pool at all here, but T-Bone could just barely manage it. “Think it has to do with anima weight? Pyromancers can’t, you can . . . wonder what happens if I bring a spectromancer here?”

  “Leave my girlfriend alone!” Tyson protectively snapped at me.

  “It’s for science.”

  “No! And we aren’t telling her we’re doing this just like we haven’t included her in everything else that’s going on.”

  I gave him some canines. “I would again point out how hypocritical it is of you to be the one lying to someone close to you—”

  “Vicky has enough on her plate adjusting to living here, we aren’t telling her about fairies and the Divines or anything else!” T-Bone put his foot down. “You especially aren’t using her as a guinea pig to see what happens when the lightest anima mancer steps foot in the heaviest Realm! It could kill her! If you want to find out so bad, then find a way to get yourself to the Spectro Realm . . . assuming it exists.”

  “We ain’t lucky enough that this place is the only one . . . you just know there’s thirteen of them. Hey, you think . . . maybe, just maybe it would be a good idea to steal some information about them?”

  “I don’t care how sarcastic you get; this is still an outrageous plan,” T-Bone decided.

  “I never said it wasn’t . . . I just know it’s what needs doing, no choice about it. Time to steal the truth in the Promethean tradition, T-Bone, and what we’re doing here, right now, is the first step. Hades Mission Fucking One, man. Successfully used the World-Breaker to arrive in the Geo Realm. Now, how do we figure out traveling back and forth without popping around at random?”

  “A GPS, surveying equipment, and at least four data points to triangulate it all,” T-Bone thought aloud. “Then I make a program and we run it, to see if the data is correct on getting us where we need to go. Make corrections and try again and again until we get it right. As you’ve pointed out: anima is involved. So who knows how complicated it will all be.”

  “That sounded suspiciously like we might need geometry.”

  “What’s wrong with geometry?”

  Now it was my turn attempting not to throw up. “I’ll ignore your depravity just this one time, T-Bone.”

  “Also, can we not call it the Hades Program?”

  “Greek God of everything under the earth, what else would we call it?”

  “I suppose . . . there’s just that whole death thing.”

  “Bad publicity, Zeus probably fucked the reporters back then, knowing him. Might have even done it as a barnyard animal. Them Greeks are kinky, man. Also,” I muttered, “we need some financing and Hades is the guy to talk to about that.”

  Just as T-Bone was about to ask what I meant, I threw all the anima I had pooled into the ground beneath my feet, sieving and leeching it, drawing the element I wanted towards me. Each pool coalesced it further together and brought it closer to the surface. I sent four or five after the first before it was near enough and large enough for me to just focus on the clump in question, making it pop out of the ground and into my waiting hand.

  “Ain’t so much dirt under our feet as it is metallic soup,” I told him, hefting a nugget of pure gold. “You know any good pawn shops?”

  T-Bone’s eyes were bigger than they had been looking at the mushroom trees. “Holy—”

  [CLICK] />
  Someone tapped on my shoulder.

  Someone human, since if one of those security golems tapped my shoulder then I’d no longer have a shoulder.

  Being I was in the middle of the prison, surrounded by a bunch of crazy people liked sticking their tongues up their noses, my reaction was instinctively trained into me by the late Fines Samson when I was only fourteen years old. One hand grabbed their wrist, another hand grabbed their upper arm, then I rolled off the bench for all I was worth, flipping them over me and to their back below me.

  I landed on top of them, fist cocked and ready to . . .

  Oh.

  Oh shit.

  “You are so very lucky I don’t have the anima to light your ass on fire!” Valentine Ward yelled at me from where I’d tossed her on the floor.

  “I thought I was under attack,” I grumbled like the idiot I often am.

  Like right now.

  Idiot.

  Totally an idiot.

  Her expression softened. Val. Here. Eyes without irises, cheekbones that cut, that sunshine hair of hers. Even more . . . that laugh, that laugh I try so hard and so often to bring into existence. Shitty world is a better place with that laugh. I’m a better person when I’m hearing it. At least . . . I try to be better, which is a whole lot more than I do most days.

  Part of me hoped. Part of me always hopes. Get thrown in a prison that happens to be in the same city where the ex currently resides, well . . . you hope she’ll show some concern, hope she still cares. Hope all the excuses about having a career and doing important work stop mattering when shit hits the fan.

  Hope she shows up to see if you’re okay.

  Hope you can pull her down the rabbit hole into the Crazy with you one more time.

  She set me free six months ago.

  Cruelest act of kindness I’ve ever witnessed.

  The tiny, weak, barely existent unselfish part of me sees the logic in it all. Sees the outcomes. Sees how she managed to split us up without me fucking it all up again . . . which would’ve destroyed any shot we had at Try Number Four. Try Number Four . . . Fuck Your Third Time’s the Charm, We’re Doing This Live.