by B. J. Keeton
Tendrils of nanites moved from Damien's fingers, up Squalt's neck, and surrounded his eyes. Squalt gasped as Damien took his vision, and he screamed when the nanites contracted.
After crushing the headmaster’s eyeballs, the nanites returned to Damien. Jelly-like ichor oozed down the side of Gilbert Squalt’s maimed face.
“Where can I find him?”
Squalt whimpered. His voice was barely a whisper. “Was that necessary?”
“I think so,” Damien said. “Where can I find this new Untouchable?”
Squalt turned his head toward Damien. His face conveyed no emotion. His empty eye sockets oozed. “I really wish I could tell you that. I’ve met representatives here and there across Erlon and…in some Instances.”
“Where?”
“Three times in Ferran. At a small café run by a man named Derin Sarnt. Once in Yagh, north of the city wall. I have the Instance locations in a…a file on my tablet.”
“Where is it?” Damien asked.
Squalt was silent.
“Do you really want to play this game, Gilbert?”
The headmaster thought for a moment and shook his head. “On the bookshelf behind my desk. It's hidden inside a book called Before Our Eyes.”
“You’re a bastion of wit, aren’t you, Gilbert? Are there any encryptions?”
“None you won’t be able to break,” he said. His voice was breathy now. He was having a harder time speaking. “I promise.”
“What else can you tell me about this situation?”
“There's nothing else. The Untouchable…is a special kind of bastard, Damien. But you know all about that, don’t you?” Squalt spit black blood.
“He invaded my home. Made me break my vow. That's enough for me to want him dead,” Damien said. “But he’s taken my name. Using what I did—and I did good, Gilbert, whether you want to admit it or not—to undo everything we’ve worked for. And you’re helping him? You agree with him? Not to mention that you have Ceril. I told you years ago to act like he didn’t exist, but you couldn’t. You wouldn’t. Now I know why.”
“Get out…of my office.”
“I intend to,” Damien said. “I need one more thing first, Gilbert.”
“Which is?”
Damien reached down and took the sword from the headmaster’s hand. The dull orange-brown aura was immediately replaced with a bright purple-green fire. It illuminated the room even through the sunlight, and even though it put off no heat, the change in hue and radiance made the headmaster cower.
“How?” Squalt said. “How did you—”
Damien gripped the sword in both hands and plunged the sword into Squalt's neck. Black blood sprayed, and Damien pulled down as hard as he could, splitting the man in half. Organs rushed out of the dead headmaster, finally able to decompress from their positions in his body. Damien pulled the sword away and looked at it. There was no residue on the blade.
Damien held his arms wide and opened his hands. The Flameblade disappeared from one and appeared instantly in the other. Good, Damien thought. It’s mine now.
He walked to the wall and found the book containing the headmaster’s hidden tablet. He took a moment to look out the window, where the golden afternoon light still beamed in. Vivid greens, blues, and yellows were everywhere. He understood why the headmaster would have chosen this Instance for his office. It was a good place to spend a lot of time.
He checked the tablet, and Squalt was right. The encoding was simple, nothing his nanites couldn't bypass. Within a few minutes, Damien had access to the locations where Squalt had met with this new Untouchable's representatives. He read through the list and determined the best place to begin his search. He had a few contacts near some of these places. At least, he once had. If they were still around, he hoped to be able to call in a few favors, or barring that, make a few demands.
Still, though, there had to be something else around here. He went to Squalt’s desk, sat in the chair, and placed both his hands on the surface. Information flooded his mind—he had forgotten how much he loved that sensation—and he began to filter through the images and clips that were rushing behind his eyes. He focused on this impostor, and told the computer to project any videos pertaining to this new Untouchable. Damien wanted to see what had been done in his name.
Immediately, a gigantic representation of Cernt Academy floated in front of him. He hadn’t been the one to build Cernt, that had been all Roman’s doing, but he had always had a soft spot for it and Yagh in general. Something about the terseness of the people and the cold of their desert appealed to him. He hated to see the school on fire. He increased the speed of the video, and he watched as groups of impostors murdered innocents with Flameblades and nanotechnology.
Damien was a killer, but he was not without a conscience. He killed when he had to, not haphazardly, and this pretender was making a mockery of everything he had built and done. Damien would have never killed so indiscriminately. If there was a pattern to the mayhem he was viewing, it was lost on him. He was going to have to find this Untouchable and have a discussion with him about his methods. Damien would have to teach him a thing or two.
A whuff-pop sounded from beyond the projection, so Damien Vennar closed the holovid. The heavy, wooden door to the office creaked open, and a group of three people rushed through—a man and two women. Who the hell are they? Damien wondered. They hadn’t seen him yet, which was good. He would hate to have to kill them, too, so he Conjured himself invisible once more. The nanites surged from his veins and through his pores, coating his body and initiating the veil instantaneously.
One of the newcomers looked directly at him, but Damien knew that he was hidden already because of the telltale tingle of the Conjuring. Lucky for whomever that was. Damien sat stock-still as he watched the trio come further into the room, and he noticed that the man was carrying someone covered in blood, who was either unconscious or dead. Damien couldn’t tell which, but from the amount of damage to the body, he guessed it was a corpse being returned for burial.
They searched around the room for a bit, and then the man noticed Nary Thralls’s body. He inspected it, and was about to alert his comrades when one of the women screamed: she had found Nary’s head. The screamer was a small, blonde woman, and she stood directly in front of Damien. She did not see him; however, she did see Nary Thralls’s skinless skull grinning at her.
It did not take her long to find Squalt’s body, either, and when she alerted the other two, the second woman vomited. A chain reaction was started, and after much dry heaving, the three of them finally began to speak.
The blonde woman asked, “What is this? Where are we?”
“Dunno,” answered the man. “But I'm not real excited to stick around.”
“I don't see why you would be,” the blonde woman said. “Who could or would do this to someone?”
“What about that?” he said and pointed at the headless body.
The blonde woman almost threw up again, but stopped. The other woman was not quite so lucky. She dry heaved as her companion walked past Thralls’s body to stand in front of the giant wooden door.
“Oh, no,” she said.
“What?” the second woman asked.
Instead of answering, the tiny, blonde woman ran across the room, back to the halved man in front of the desk. Damien watched in fascination as she leaned down and took hold of his head.
“What the hell are you doing?” the man asked.
“Checking something,” she said. Her eyes scanned the office and then dropped to the dead man in her hands. She flipped the half she was holding over, and examined him in profile. “It's Headmaster Squalt,” she confirmed. “This must be his office.”
“What?” the other woman asked.
“It's him. It's Squalt. When the Gatekeeper sent us somewhere adjacent to Ennd's, the closest Instance must have been the headmaster's office.”
Damien blinked at what he was hearing. The Gatekeeper? No, it couldn’t be. He loo
ked at each of the people in front of him, focused on the dead body in the man’s arms, but couldn’t identify any of them.
“There’s always been a rumor that Academy headmasters were given private Instances,” the woman continued, “and now I guess we've confirmed that.”
“Who's the woman?” the man asked.
“No idea,” the blonde said. “You know, doc?”
“No way to tell.” So the second woman was a doctor. Interesting. “We’d have to run tests, and umm…”
“Yeah,” the blonde said. “Yeah.”
“So what do we do now?” asked the man.
“Get back to Ennd's. If their bodies are still here in this condition, that means no one else knows about this.”
So they aren’t a cleanup crew from Ennd’s. No one was alerted when the headmaster died? Damien thought of the implications of that.
“Can you get us out of here?”
“Yes,” said the blonde woman. “It’s just the matter of putting in Ennd's code in the panel by the door.”
“And you have the code?” asked the doctor.
“Yeah, unless they’ve changed the code.” She let go of the dead headmaster, wiped her hands on her pants, and walked determinedly to the door.
She keyed the code and waited. She heard a slight buzzing, and when she pulled on the door, it opened with a whuff-pop. She peered through the opening, then threw the door open as far as she could. “It's Ennd's,” she confirmed. “Let's go.”
Damien Vennar watched them leave the office. If the Gatekeeper was involved…
He got up from Squalt’s desk and looked at the two corpses he had made. He wanted to feel regret, but he couldn't.
With a sigh, he Conjured his Flameblade. Its green-purple aura was brilliant. He concentrated on this new Untouchable and what he had done to Damien’s name. Anger flowed through him, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the hilt of the sword. He raised the Flameblade above his head and slashed downward as hard as he could. He heard a whuff-pop as his weapon sliced through the membrane that separated this Instance from the others.
He stared at the portal in front of him, released his Flameblade, and stepped through.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The lights came on, and Saryn froze. Chuckie dropped to one knee and pressed his back to the wall. He wiggled his fingers, prepared to Conjure something—anything—at the nothing in front of him. He waited a moment and asked, “What did you do?” He never looked at Saryn.
“Nothing!”
“Right. Because lights just come on by themselves when you're underground.”
“These did,” Saryn said. “For all we know, Ceril might have had something to do with it.”
“Maybe,” Chuckie agreed. “If so, he’d have a lot more luck than we are right now.”
“Let's hope so. I'm just about tired of walking down this hallway.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of tired of staring at the same walls, too. It’s been over an hour, and nothing has changed. Not even a little. It’s kind of getting to me. But hey,” Chuckie quipped, “at least it's not purple.”
“I know,” Saryn said. “But that's one of the things that bothers me about it. Everything was purple since we got there.”
“The lightning wasn't. I don’t think that acid was in that tree, either.”
“Details,” Saryn said. “And here we are in a gold and silver bunker or something.”
“It’s freaking me out a bit.”
“A bit.”
Chuckie stood up. “Do we keep going, then, or double back the way we came?”
“We keep going. If Ceril is the one who turned the lights on, then we could be walking directly at him. We could turn a corner and find him in five minutes.”
“Or, we could find another set of nasty, purple angels who want us dead.”
“Well, we know Ceril isn’t behind us. There’s no way we missed him. No doors, turns, corners, nothing on the way here. Unless you saw something I didn’t.”
Chuckie shook his head.
“Then forward it is.”
“You’re the boss, boss.” Chuckie started walking. Saryn looked around at the ceiling and walls before she joined him. She didn't like the place one bit.
***
Saryn watched the floor as she walked, trying to make sense of the octagonal tiles and the symbols on them. She didn’t see Chuckie stop, which caused her to run into him. She grunted and started to say more, but he shushed her. She edged around him and saw why.
The unchanging hallway had finally come to an end. Like a river flowing into the ocean, the hallway opened into a gigantic chamber that seemed like the one they had jumped into earlier. Only this time, instead of a pile of rubble and dust, a dais was suspended three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. From their low angle, they couldn’t see what was actually on the platform, just flashing lights and changing colors.
“What's that?” Chuckie asked.
Saryn put a finger to her mouth to shush Chuckie, then whispered, “How should I know?”
Chuckie shrugged. “I'm going to find out.” He took a couple of steps forward, but stopped when he heard a familiar voice coming from the dais.
“Saryn! Chuckie! Good to see you.”
“Ceril?” Chuckie asked. “That you, boss?”
Ceril appeared at the edge of the platform and beckoned toward them. “Come on up!”
“Ternia!” Saryn said, relieved. “How are we supposed to get up there?”
“Just walk,” Ceril shouted. “It's fine.”
Saryn and Chuckie shared a look. “Umm,” Chuckie said.
“Really, just walk up here. It’s fine.”
Chuckie toed the ground in front of him, and he finally took a tentative step. The ground rumbled beneath his foot. He took another step and noticed rather quickly that the ground was rising with him. He turned to Saryn, gave her the all-clear, and then the two of them made their way up the rising incline to the dais.
“Glad to see you're okay, boss,” Chuckie said upon reaching the platform. He clapped Ceril on the back.
“Same for you, Chuckie.”
“How did you survive that fall, Ternia?” Saryn asked, an edge of minor hysteria in her voice. She had been fine all the way—until she found out that Ceril was okay, and then she allowed herself the luxury of a small freak out.
“I…don't know,” Ceril said honestly. “I woke up under some rubble. I worked my way out from under it and started walking. Eventually, I made my way here.”
“Where is here, anyway?” Chuckie asked. He looked around the platform and pointed at the silent man standing beside the desk. “And who's he?”
Ceril turned his head toward the hologram. “That's the Archive,” he said. “He’s…sort of a curator for the database that's housed here.”
“I see.”
“He’s a hologram, isn’t he?” Saryn asked.
“I am indeed.” The hologram stepped forward and waved at the newcomers. “Hello, Charons.”
Saryn blinked twice. “Excuse me?”
“This place, this Archive, was built by the Charons,” said Ceril.
“And he knows we're Charons how?” Chuckie asked.
“Because I told him you were.”
“And he knew to trust you because?”
“I…don't know that, either. He said that I have authorization to be here, though.”
“That’s handy,” Chuckie said and stared at the hologram. It stared back at him, periodically flickering. “I don't like it,” Chuckie said at last.
“Me, either, Ceril,” Saryn said, changing the subject. “By the way, about this meeting we were supposed to have with a priest of some sort?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“We missed it,” Chuckie said.
“Obviously,” Saryn shot back.
“The audience was scheduled almost three hours ago by now, I think,” Ceril said. He walked back to the desk and sat down. “Have a seat.”
�
�Where?” Chuckie asked. The rest of the platform was bare. There were no chairs, except for the one Ceril sat in.
“Archive, we need chairs.” Swirls of what appeared to be dust rose from the ground, and as they rose, the legs materialized, then the seat and back and arms. In seconds, two chairs grew from the platform. They could see them forming from the ground up.
“Did that hologram just Conjure?” Saryn asked.
Ceril nodded. “I think so, yeah. Somehow.”
“I don't like this, Ternia,” Saryn said. “Not one bit.”
“I'm not the biggest fan, myself,” Ceril said. He gestured at the chairs. “They're safe, though.” Chuckie and Saryn sat down, and once they were sitting, Ceril continued. “I have found a few pieces of information in the Archive that could be useful. I don't understand a lot of it. It’s written in the script we saw outside on the tower. The language really is a mixture of Erlonian symbols, and it doesn’t use anything resembling modern syntax. I can glean a little meaning from it, though, here and there. And, as much as I hate to say it, there are pictures that I get a lot more from than I do the words.”
Chuckie snickered. Ceril rolled his eyes.
“Not just illustrations. Maps. I think that this whole world, this whole Instance, was an experiment the Charons were conducting. It may have been the experiment they were conducting, actually.”
“What do you mean?” Saryn asked.
“If I'm deciphering it correctly—and just so you know, I may not be—this Instance was the first one that ever successfully took.”
“Took what?” Chuckie asked.
“Took, expanded, grew, worked, whatever,” Ceril said. “And even if it wasn't the first, it was one of the first. It was called Jaronya—”
“That's familiar,” Saryn said, and Ceril nodded.
“—and was used as, I think, a headquarters for Charonic activity.”
“Like the Sigil?” Saryn asked.
“I think so, yeah. There was a war, though.”
“Between who?” Chuckie asked.
“Charons,” Ceril said. “It was pretty nasty stuff. The order had broken into two factions, and they just about wiped each other out. Or, at least out of, Jaronya. At one point, there were five major cities on Jaronya.”
