And just like that, we were inside Panopticon.
“It's quiet,” Yuka observed, and I frowned. “I can't hear any footsteps.”
Rose shrugged. “The prison's big, and the assault on the main gates had to have drawn every defender they could possibly spare.” Another low rumble sounded in the distance, followed by several smaller detonations, shaking the ground beneath our feet. “Things are still exploding. The fighting must be getting intense.”
“Let's go find Mother,” I said, not quite able to keep the urgency out of my tone. I glanced at Yuka and Rose. I desperately wanted to seek her out, to let my soul drift through the concentric terraces of cells until I could sense her, but I dared not. The absence of ley lines was keenly felt; every mote of mana within my body was precious and could not be used lightly.
Besides, we already knew where she would be held. The Panopticon was arranged in such a way that all cells were visible from a single observation tower in the center of the amphitheater-shaped depression. There was a special cell in the center—the condemnation chamber, situated inside the central tower, directly beneath the observation platform. While the overseer could watch one side of every other cell in the prison from their tower, the prisoners did have a small measure of privacy behind the low wall in front of the toilet. The condemnation chamber was set up so that nothing could be hidden from sight.
Those who had been sentenced to death would spend their final days in that bleak, empty circular room, left with nothing but to contemplate the depth of their crimes against the Empire.
Chapter 31
Execution
The breach opened directly into a set of service tunnels underneath the prison. With the Antilight assault on the main gate underway, all non-essential personnel would have been evacuated to a safe fallback position. Our route to the central column should have been clear of non-combatants. We had no idea what sort of opposition we'd face; the informant was able to get Willow Corvus a map of the facility and pinpoint the location of the Antilight agents being held there, as well as the locations of aetherium reservoirs scattered throughout the complex.
Once inside the prison proper, it was eerily quiet. I found this a little strange, as I suspected the prisoners would have noticed the assault. It was hard not to hear the low rumblings of explosions in the distance. Had we been closer to the fighting, I imagined the air would be filled with the screams of the dying, the sharply-barked commands of squad leaders…
I shook my head, as if to physically clear it of distracting thoughts. That didn't matter. The Antilight was here for their own reasons, as were we. If everything went according to plan, none of us would even so much as encounter the rebel forces.
The tunnels underneath were cramped and narrow, lined with pipes carrying water and waste, as well as fat conduit lines filled with electrical cables. It was one of the most technologically-advanced facilities in the Empire more by necessity than choice. As the prison was constructed upon a swath of blighted land, non-magical methods were required. The Empire's technical expertise was limited, however, and the Panopticon's infrastructure systems seemed antiquated compared to what little I'd seen in Fialla.
Those members of IPSB's enforcement division who displayed mediocre or no magical talent were invariably sent to work the prison, where their lack would not be felt. Only a small handful of skilled mages were assigned to this place, acting as overseers. Like us, they would be limited to the magic they carried and forced to draw energy from portable aetherium reservoirs when the mana within their bodies was depleted.
It was difficult to suppress my arcane sight. Had I not spent weeks training with the Cabal, I would have had a much harder time of it. Judging by the way Rose and Yuka looked, they were experiencing similar trouble with keeping as much magic as possible tightly locked inside. On the upside, our parsimony also made it difficult for the prison mages to detect us through their own seeking spells.
“I don't like this at all,” Rose murmured.
I grimaced. “Who would?”
“That's not what I mean.” She gestured vaguely toward the corridor we just passed through, toward the branching tunnels ahead of us. “We haven't encountered a soul since we entered the prison. Surely they should have some guards remain behind to maintain order, right? They couldn't have possibly kept the entire prison population in the dark about being attacked.”
“It just means the plan worked,” I pointed out. “Remember, it's not just the rebels assaulting the gate, but also the false army from the north… and the zombies, too. Faced with such opposition, it's entirely possible the warden will order his forces to retreat through the south gate.”
Rose's dubious expression didn't change. “I still think something isn't right. This feels… too easy. Way too easy.”
“Just because things are going well doesn't automatically mean disaster will strike.” I shrugged and pointed toward the end of the tunnel, where it terminated in a heavy metal security door. “Let's stay focused on our objective. We need to get through this door; it opens up into a stairwell that leads to the fourth tier of the prison. There's a narrow retractable catwalk that leads from the mid-level security checkpoint to the inner wall.”
I'd studied the map of this facility until each line, each level, every hallway and cell was etched into my memory. The central column was encircled with a meter-thick, aetherium-infused stone wall that extended upward to the fourth tier, connecting to the catwalk in such a way that the guards would need to walk the wall's perimeter in order to reach the column. The inner wall had no gates or points of entry. The only way to make it in or out of the central tower was to use the catwalks, which were typically kept retracted when the prisoner inside was present. Surrounding the column itself, contained within the inner wall, was a very different sort of cell.
Rose stopped as we came to the door and eyed our newest obstacle critically. It was thick and armored, secured with a lock and three heavy steel bolts. Without the sort of magic available to us, this would have been nearly impossible to breach, short of setting high explosives.
“That is one solid door.” She frowned at the offending obstruction and glanced back at me before stepping aside. “Okay, Lily, time to earn your pay.”
“But I'm not getting paid,” I complained.
“No big deal,” Rose quipped. “None of us are.”
I suppressed a snicker and stepped up to the door itself. To a mage of any other Aspect, knocking this door down would be an exercise in truly awesome brute force. Not only was the door armored, but it was warded against impact, heat and cold. None of that mattered to me, however, and I reached within myself to draw forth a slender thread of darkness.
Violet-black lightning shot from my palm and struck the door. Closing my eyes, I carefully modulated the spell, feeling it out, increasing the energy just slightly. I could sense the necromantic energies suffusing the metal, undermining its structure, corrupting the fundamental forces that arranged themselves to form physical matter.
There was no great ringing clang of heavy steel collapsing, nor was there any rending shatter of hardened metal falling to pieces. When I opened my eyes, there was simply no door at all. A deep pile of fine black dust had buried the toes of my boots. Beyond the threshold was a stairwell that led up and one that led down, as well as a painted mark denoting the current floor on the opposing wall: B1.
Further conversation was suspended. Rose started up the stairs first and I followed not too closely behind, with Yuka hanging back about a meter or so. If we did encounter resistance at the security checkpoint, both Yuka and Rose would need room to fight without risking hitting each other or me.
I gripped Mother's dagger more tightly as the three of us ascended upward to the fourth tier of the prison. My soul felt strangely hollow, as if a portion of it had been excised and discarded. The degree to which a single spell had drained me of mana was deeply unsettling. I hoped that I wouldn't need to use any more magic, but I doubted that we would be
so lucky.
*
The mid-level security checkpoint was abandoned, and it appeared to have happened abruptly, with little time to prepare. Chairs were left haphazardly pulled out, and a half-eaten but still warm pasty sat upon its wrapper, next to a messy stack of forms. Someone had left their jacket hanging on a peg near the wall, and the checkpoint's weapons locker had been opened and emptied out.
“They sure left in a hurry,” Rose observed as we looked around the small room. “The defenders must be in a bad way if they had to pull guards from the checkpoints.”
The checkpoint's weapons locker looked to have held four pistols and several magazines of spare ammunition. I traced a fingertip across the niches where the guns had been stored and felt the odd, fraying sensation left behind by traces of corrupted aetherium.
Yuka hung back near the door, her hand hovering near the hilt of her sword. I worried that she wouldn't have enough room to properly fight inside this cramped office, but it was probably an empty concern. There just wasn't anyone anywhere around here.
Rose busied herself examining the control panel set in front of a trio of bulky monitors that looked far older than the slim and elegant type I'd seen everywhere in Fialla. She frowned at the display and tapped a series of commands into the yellowed plastic of the keyboard. I caught the not-so-faint whirr-click of some mechanical contrivance inside the computer.
“This stuff is older than I am,” Rose muttered.
“Can you extend the catwalk?”
“I'm working on it,” she grumbled, casting an irritated glare at Yuka. “I haven't seen a terminal with a mechanical hard drive in forever. Where the hell did the Empire dig this shit up, I wonder… a Fiallan junkyard?” A few more taps and Rose bit her lower lip in frustration. “Damn it, you colossal piece of shit, work.”
I fixed her with a dubious look. “If you don't know how to use it, just say so.”
“I do know how to use it, thank you very much—it's just old. And slow. And terrible.” Rose glowered at the screen and slammed on the “enter” key with far more force than was truly necessary. “There we go.”
There was loud grinding sound, and then a much more audible whirring as a large and powerful electric motor kicked in. Rose turned toward me with a smug smile and pointed out the window just as a metal walkway began to extend from within a hidden compartment beneath the fourth tier's concrete floor.
“That was it?” Yuka inquired.
“Yeah. Both catwalks are extended. Whoever called these guys out of here, they didn't have time to lock down the system, so it was just a matter of flipping the switch.” With a hateful glare at the ancient terminal, Rose crossed the small office and opened the access door leading to the catwalk itself. A moment later there was a resounding thunk as the opposing end of the extended catwalk locked into place, fitting snugly into a steel collar mounted against the top of the inner wall.
“Let's move.”
“Be very careful once we get to the inner wall,” I warned, my tone becoming deadly serious. “You do not want to fall into what's down there.”
Rose's nod of agreement was uncharacteristically lacking in quips or sarcastic remarks, and it was easy to figure out why. As the three of us stepped out onto the catwalk and began to slowly make our way closer to the inner wall, it would start to become visible over the edge.
“Seven Holy Stars,” Rose breathed as she stepped onto the ramparts… and looked down.
Contained between the inner wall and the central column of the Panopticon was a seething, roiling mass of what looked like a moat of viscous, oily black liquid, but upon closer inspection was something different. Something far worse.
“So the rumors were true, then,” Yuka mused, and she peered down at the mass with what seemed like professional interest. “I didn't expect any mages in the Empire capable of containing them, but clearly I was mistaken.”
I stood by the edge of the wall, mindful of the handrails, and gazed down into the pit. The interior of the aetherium-infused walls were etched with countless intricate binding diagrams that glowed a faint silvery-white in the gloom, but didn't appear to provide any real illumination. It was the overhead electrical lights that revealed the truth of the pit. Constrained into this “moat,” kept as eternal prisoners by powerful astromantic bindings, were billions of black insect-like creatures known as legion, otherworldly creatures summoned to our world from a distant and terrible reality.
“Demons,” Rose growled, her tone filled with hatred and foreboding.
We'd learned about such entities at the Academy: creatures from an adjacent reality to ours, a plane of existence colloquially referred to as the Yawning Hells. Much like the entities that existed in our reality, the abyssal world was itself filled with all manner of creatures. These legion were the least of all demons; mindless, non-sapient magical creatures that ravenously hungered, rending life and aether from anything unlucky enough to get too close.
“Did the Empire summon them?” Rose demanded.
“No.” Yuka shook her head. “Summoning is one of the Divine Aspects, lost to the People when the gods departed. The Empire could not have summoned or banished the swarm of legion. It's likely that this facility was originally constructed to seal these abyssals away where they could not harm anyone.”
“Unless they toss you down there on purpose,” Rose said acidly.
Neither Yuka nor I responded to that. A person that was eaten by a demon would not simply die; their soul would be torn apart, its energies consumed and absorbed to strengthen the demon's vile essence. The energies of their spirit would be unable to return to the soul of the world, effectively erasing them from existence.
I felt a violent shudder run through my shoulders. My composure nearly shattered as I imagined the executioners lowering my mother into the swarm of legion below.
“Don't think about it,” Yuka said. “It's not going to happen. We're here to stop it.”
“Yeah.” I tore my gaze away from the roiling mass of demons contained within the wards, scant meters below our feet. “Okay. Let's go get Mama out.”
Chapter 32
Turn of the Wheel
Our harrowing journey across the inner catwalk was thankfully short. We stood upon a wide balcony affixed to the central column's exterior, containing the mechanism for extending and retracting the catwalk we'd just crossed.
From this side, there were no controls whatsoever. No panel, no switches and certainly no terminals with which to manipulate. The balcony itself was sturdy and wide, perhaps six meters across, and jutted out another six meters from the west side of the pillar. I glanced up, my eyes following the spire at the center of the Panopticon, until my gaze reached the observation platform at the very top. From underneath I could see the same sort of retractable catwalk mechanism connecting it to a series of walkways that extended from two checkpoints on the tenth tier.
The balcony we stood upon was dominated by a sealed gate. Behind this final obstacle, Mother awaited the date of her death sentence. A death beyond all other deaths; the executioner would cast her into the legion pit alive, with her soul still anchored to her body. The insect-like demons would shred flesh and shear bone, then devour the leavings and drain every mote of aether from the soul within.
A person devoured by an abyssal could not be returned to life, no matter how powerful the magic used to repair or rebuild their mortal frame. The soul itself would be digested, consumed, made into food for demons. There would be no chance of resurrection, no hope for the soul's light to return to the waking world or to pass into the spirit of the earth.
I tried to block the incessant metallic chittering sound from my awareness. The legion below could smell the magic in us and it inflamed their hunger. The chittering grew deeper, seeming frustrated and angry. Sparks of white light flashed from the warding diagrams as the demons tested the strength of their magical prison.
“There's no way to open the door from this side,” Rose mused aloud as she studi
ed our surroundings. “Looks like you're up again, Lily—though this particular gate seems to be warded against magic of all types.”
“All?” I queried, half to myself, and closed my eyes. I laid my palm against the cold black iron of the gate and felt a strange and intensely unpleasant sort of weakness. A queasy sensation formed in my gut and I backed away a little more quickly than I intended.
“What's wrong?” Rose asked.
“I don't know. It does seem like some kind of warding, though.”
Yuka stepped forward and examined the door for a long moment before she slowly began to move her hand closer and closer, not quite touching it. A hairsbreadth before her fingers could brush the metal, her face paled noticeably and she stepped back.
“It's not a spell,” she explained. As Yuka moved away from the door, the color rapidly returned to her face. She scowled at the gate in frustration and loathing. “It's the metal—the door is iron, not steel, and it's been… blessed.”
I blinked in confusion, then glanced at Rose to see an identical expression on her face. Yuka looked only slightly less shocked than we did.
“I have no idea how that would be possible,” Yuka continued, her ruby eyes wide, “but the sense I get of the magic is unmistakable. This gate is blessed with divine protection against the children of the land—the fey.”
But that made no sense. The gods were gone, or dead, or left this world for others. Even the Celestial Prophecy didn't try to hide that fact; the priests of the Church were simply mages, never once claiming that their power was granted to them by their god. The fact that a blessed gate warded against fey beings existed today, and inside the Empire's prison for criminal mages, simply made no sense at all.
Rose tapped me on the shoulder. “Can you tell how old the blessing is?”
“I wouldn't even know where to begin.” I glanced to my left, at Yuka. “What about you?”
“I know of no spells that would yield up the relevant information.” She gestured to the door, paying close attention to the contact surfaces that would show the most wear over time. “However, the iron of the door itself appears to be of recent manufacture. It's possible the Empire located some ancient blessed iron and used it to construct this door, though I have no idea where they would have obtained such a thing.”
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