by Nina D'Aleo
10
‘Diurnal eyes in eternal darkness hold no use, but when the eyes cannot see the mind imagines . . .’
The echoing slither-snap of a lash and a close-by agonised scream silenced the man. He retreated into the shadows of his cage as far back as the shackles would allow. He’d worn the bindings for so long that skin and steel had fused into one. The torch flames, chained to the cave walls, quivered and flapped.
‘Show me what is to come.’ Ev’r Keets stood before him, not as herself, but as her ancestor, a dark-faced woman with glowing yellow-wolverine eyes and sharp carnivore teeth. She felt the child kicking inside her and she remembered her own baby’s kick, before the desert freaks had ripped the half-formed child from her body. The man extended a shaking chain-hand from the shadows and pointed behind Ev’r’s head. He whispered, ‘Imagine.’
Ev’r turned. The cave walls were no more. In their place stretched a land of darkness, of pitch-black silence, where nothing moved and nothing spoke. Where nothing lived. All was dust. Aquais was a corpse land battered by a howling wind. It swept along a symphony of screams, a chorus of cries from beneath the ground, from the pits of hell, where the chanting of demons trembled the foundations of earth itself. The sound was the monotone drone of the most accursed and powerful of dark magics – the Skreaf magics. Ev’r sank into the Murk and sped through its mist, until she saw ahead a well stretching down into the depths of the ground. She paused above the well and looked into it. Her sight sped down and down and down until it found the tortured hordes of prisoner slaves. Skreaf demons stood guard over them, ruled by the most horrendous of all the devils. In this monster’s eyes, rage coupled with utter despair showed the wager of his choices. This being had lost his grip on truth and set himself adrift in the desert of his mind, with death behind him, death in front of him, death everywhere he looked. He was the Morsmalus.
Ev’r gasped and jolted upright. Her chest heaved as these memories that weren’t her own, but passed down through her blood, echoed in her mind. The people of her bloodline were natural seers. Those strongest skilled, as she was, were able to travel far into the past and several steps into the future. Ev’r had denied the skill, as she had denied her heritage, but seeing the Skreaf demons hiding behind the skin of the human-breed soldiers, evil dressed in flesh, had triggered it without her consent.
Drawing her legs closer to herself, she rested her head on her knees. Saliva pooled in her mouth. The changes of her jaw and teeth were making it difficult to swallow. The Ravien could snap bones with one bite. An image, the same image she’d been seeing for hours now with increasing regularity, blared into full and horrible colour before her eyes – Silho Brabel screaming, gurgling, drowning in her own blood.
Ev’r shivered. This vision of Brabel was an adult version of the girl she had met deep in the desert after fleeing the wreckage of O’Tenery with Ismail. Brabel was in trouble – or going to be in trouble of the worst kind. That was clear. Ev’r was trying not to care. Why should she care about someone she had met only briefly a whole lifetime ago, someone who was now one of Copernicus Kane’s minions? Ev’r asked and answered the question. It was because of Brabel’s eyes – what they had reflected – what they’d said to her in their moment of re-meeting. They had said I remember him.
Ev’r sensed the main door of the interrogation area opening. She looked up into the spyer trained on her, expecting to see the witches. They were alternating with the other two guardians and she felt they were keeping a close eye on her. It was no coincidence that Skreaf were stationed in the interrogation area. They must have seen her in the desert – seeing them – and now they were waiting for the right moment to silence her. She felt their intentions like a spreading shadow, but instead of the witches she saw the soldier she called Snack-size entering the area. He was carrying a tray of food. A growl, alien to her ears, rumbled deep in her throat. The magnetic forces of the table zapped to life and dragged her across the room, slamming her down into the metal chair. The door to her cell slid open and the puny soldier stood timid in the doorway.
‘I didn’t bring you food – I mean, I brought you food,’ he said shrilly. ‘You’ll be able to eat it without your hands, if you lean forward.’
‘Trutt off,’ she snarled. ‘You think I’m going to eat like an animal?’
He shrugged. ‘I would. I’m going to put it on the table and then you can eat it or leave it – it’s up to you. I just didn’t want you to go hungry.’
‘How kind of you,’ she sneered.
He took small steps across the cell and gingerly slid the tray onto the table. The steel of the tray melted into the steel of the table, removing any chance of her using it as a weapon. The food sat on the table surface. Her stomach gurgled and she felt another growl starting in her throat. Scrunching her eyes shut, she managed to control it. Her eyelids blinked open. Snack-size was still standing beside the table, studying her with innocent curiosity shining in his big dark eyes.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded.
He stepped back at the force in her voice. ‘You seem well, I mean, you seem sick.’
‘So?’
‘I thought maybe there was something I could do.’
Ev’r narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m about to be executed and you’re concerned about my health?’
His eyes swivelled as his brain computed what she’d said. He responded in a small voice, ‘I can’t do anything about your sentence, but I can help you in the short term. I don’t want you to suffer.’
‘Trutt off,’ Ev’r repeated clearly and slowly. ‘I don’t need your pathetic pity. You don’t know anything about me.’
‘I know you can travel in the Murk. I know you’re strong. I know you never give up and never give in. I know you know more about ancient architecture, civilisations, customs and people than all of the scholars put together. I know you’re gifted with chemicals and substances and I know you’re very rich, but you don’t think much of money. I know your favourite colour is brown and I know you’re not well because your bag was full of regenerative potions. I tested them and found they were made from a wide variety of ingredients from all over Aquais. You must have travelled long and far to gather them all. You must have gone —’
‘Alright,’ Ev’r cut in.
She eyed the short soldier. Obviously he was intelligent and a talented inventor – no one before him had ever made chains that could hold her – but she saw he was also soft, very soft, and possibly easy to manipulate. If her efforts to sway the Ar Antarian, Jude, failed, he could be her Plan B, a second chance to get out and get back to the Matadori before she changed. If she could do that and get what she needed from the asylum, she might still be able to outrun the Skreaf scourge about to envelop the city, and cross over the Boundary Wall into the Brine as she had planned to do.
Most people believed that the land beyond the boundary was uninhabited, poisonous and corrupted into something evil, but she had once found an ancient written word book that described the Brine as a place governed by strange, indefinable magics that made it impossible to navigate or map, lands existing within lands with hidden doorways to other realms and planets and places inescapable. It was true no one who had crossed the wall had ever returned to tell what lay on the other side, but she wasn’t just any fool crossing over on a whim, dream or dare. Where others would die, she could survive – that was the legacy of a lifetime of struggle.
‘I have a growth in my stomach that keeps getting bigger,’ she lied. ‘I need something to slow my body.’
‘Okay.’ She could hear his brain ticking fast. ‘Then you’ll need something with a sapphire base.’ He pulled a black bag seemingly out of midair and clanked around in it for several minutes. He emerged with a syringe full of red liquid.
He hesitated, then darted in, injected her, and darted out so quickly she probably wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if she’d tried.
Ev’r didn’t feel the changes in her mouth and jaw reversing as t
hey had with the antidotes, but she did sense a stopping of their progression, and a slowing of her system. It calmed her.
Footsteps shuffled at the door and Ev’r looked up to see the two non-Skreaf guardians, the giant and his sneaky-eyed, sabre-toothed pal, standing in the doorway watching.
‘You right, Eli?’ the sabre-tooth asked, his voice husky and slurred around his fangs.
‘I’m fine,’ Eli held up one hand. Ev’r saw it was trembling.
‘We’re just here,’ the soldier said, ‘if you need us.’
‘Right here,’ the giant echoed.
They stepped back only one or two paces and stood there waiting. Ev’r knew if she wanted to bend Snack-size to her needs she’d have to start working on him now, while he was separated from Copernicus Kane.
‘Eli? Is that your name?’
He nodded.
‘Listen, Eli . . .’ But before she could continue, images of Silho Brabel screaming intersected her mind. She gasped, straining forward against the pull of the magnetised chains. This time she could feel Silho’s pain, feel the fear choking her. Ev’r gagged in response as though it were her own neck being squeezed.
Eli rushed towards her and grabbed her shoulders, screaming at the guardians, ‘Cut the magnets! Cut the magnets!’
The guardians reappeared instantly, but neither moved to obey. They eyed Ev’r with distrust.
‘What are you doing?’ Eli yelled at them. ‘She needs help. Cut the magnets!’
‘You come out first and then we’ll cut them,’ the Twitchbak said.
‘But she needs my help!’
‘We don’t care,’ he said. ‘Come out!’
‘Silho . . .’ Ev’r managed to say with a choked gurgle.
‘Silho?’ Eli leaned in, watching her mouth.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Ev’r rasped.
‘With Silho?’ Eli grabbed the communicator off his belt and checked a small locator screen. ‘She’s at home, where I left her.’
‘Eli!’ The sabre-tooth Twitchbak stepped into the cell with his electrifier drawn. ‘Come out! She’s dangerous.’
‘One second,’ Eli called. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked Ev’r when she seemed to stop choking.
She nodded. The vision had faded and her body was stabilising. With effort, she managed to sit up straight.
Eli spoke softly to her. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Silho and I’ll keep an eye on you.’ He pressed a camouflaged spyer under the metal table. ‘When you need more medication signal me. I’ll see you. I’ll come.’
He gave her a small sharp-toothed smile, then walked to where the guardians stood and left the room.
The Twitchbak growled at Ev’r and slammed the door shut. The magnetic pull of the chains against the steel table released. Ev’r groaned and lowered her head. Momentarily, she lost sight of time and it skimmed past her. When the chains again snapped rigid against the table, she jolted into clarity. She raised her eyes and saw the Ar Antarian soldier, Jude, standing inside the cell staring at her. She felt no surprise. She looked him over from head to toe. Of course he was the epitome of high nobility – powerful blue eyes, perfectly aligned features, metal limbs. The steel parts made all Ar Antarians smell like piss – including him.
‘Speak of the devil,’ Ev’r greeted.
‘How did you know?’ He didn’t waste words.
Ev’r smiled. Her foresight had already shown her this scene, when this man – the Crown Prince Isaiah U whom the entire city believed had been dead for almost a decade – stood in front of her and asked her that exact question. And it was a good question considering he didn’t know her. She had never met him as the prince, and even if she had, he would have been veiled from head to foot.
‘Does it matter?’ She played with him.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘What do you think?’ she replied.
His eyes flicked over her chains. ‘I can’t do that. The commander would know I helped you. I can’t lie to him.’
‘Obviously you already have,’ Ev’r said.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I have told the truth – just not the whole truth.’
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I don’t care. I want out or I’ll tell Kane everything.’
‘Ev’r, what would you gain from that?’ She could see from the look in his eyes, a patient kind of searching for understanding, that he was going to try to reason with her – to appeal to her better nature. She couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Are you going to get me out or what?’
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I can’t. The commander would have to arrest anyone who helped you.’
‘Then get rid of him.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ev’r looked up at him from beneath her eyelids. She didn’t need to say the words.
‘No. No way. Never.’
She nodded and let the silence settle around them for a moment before saying, ‘What do you think your commander is going to do once he finds out you’ve been lying to him for all these year-cycles? You must already know that Kane doesn’t like liars and he doesn’t like being made a fool. And then there’s your little girlfriend. What do you think she will say? Do you really think they’ll forgive you, accept you? Kane will have you discharged, and then where will you go? When they purge my mind everyone will know what you are. You wouldn’t be able to hide and who will protect you? The military won’t back you. You’ve lied to your friends. You’ll have no one. You’ll be outcast . . . hunted . . .’
The prince sighed and lowered his head. He held the sides of his neck with both hands. She could see he was trembling.
‘But if you get me out of here, I can help you. I’ll hide you.’
The Ar Antarian raised his eyes to hers and said firmly, ‘I told you, I can’t.’
‘Then I have no choice,’ Ev’r said.
‘There is always a choice,’ he countered.
‘Poignant,’ she smirked. ‘But wasted.’
The prince studied her for a moment longer, an edge of sadness in his blue eyes. ‘Much like this whole conversation,’ he said before turning and leaving the room.
The magnetic stranglehold cut off and Ev’r slumped back in the seat. She stretched her neck one way and then the other. The conversation had not gone the way she’d expected it to. Every high noble she had encountered to this point had been piss-weak and utterly self-centred, but this Jude . . . It was just her luck to get the one royal in all of history to have a spine. Regardless, next time Copernicus Kane came to her cell, she’d have something very interesting to share with him. The thought brought a smile to her lips.
11
It was always the same. Passing through the doors of the All Hallows Corridor and seeing the entrance to his residence up ahead felt, for Copernicus, like a long-distance runner with the finish line in sight or sometimes, when he’d spent too long in the company of others, more like a drowning man dragging himself closer and closer to the surface. Of the years he had lived in the Commander’s Quarters, he had never once paused in the corridor to study the portraits lining the walls, of soldiers who had owned the title of Oscuri Tracker Commander before him. When he was leaving his apartment, it was with a purpose, and when he was heading home, his adrenalin kicked in, his throat tightened and all he could see was solitude. While Diega’s happiness was fed by the company of others, he needed to be alone to regenerate for a time, before facing the world again.
The eyes of the fallen commanders followed him as he moved with stealth along the marble corridor.
‘Open,’ he commanded.
The security system responded, ‘Immediately, Commander Kane.’
Laser lines scanned across his face and torso, checking his retinas and fingerprints, his bloodline marks and body-heat signature, a security measure Eli had designed and implemented for him. Eli had also designed much of Headquarters’ new system. Satisfied he was the true Kane, the doors to his apartment parted from the centre and he stepped throu
gh. The doors slid shut and locked behind him. He breathed out and his shoulders relaxed, the heat of the air warming his skin. He massaged a hand over the back of his neck and took stock of his apartment. It was as he had left it – dark, silent and spotless.
On moving into the quarters, a need for open space had prompted him to smash down all but a few of the dividing walls, leaving one expansive main room. Along three of the high walls his weapon collection hung from floor to ceiling. He owned numerous antiques with years of history etched into their surfaces; many others were unique, designed by him and custom-made by Eli. Each had their own space on the wall and special place in his collection, but by far his favourite was the short blade named Solace – owned by the former commander Oren Harvey. It was designed never to lose its edge and he was sure it had hidden powers he hadn’t yet figured out how to access, but he would.
Copernicus took his ID from his pocket, slipped the chain with its protective talisman from around his neck and placed them both on the glass table beside the door. He took off his jacket and unclipped his weapon belt, hanging them on hooks above the table. He left his second blade strapped to his ankle and moved across the polished marble floor to his kitchen. He’d blacked out the wall of the window inside the kitchen. It had given spectacular views across the entire city, but a view was low on his priority list when compared with privacy. His automated bar system poured him a drink, half-guinapple juice, half-Araki, the potent human-breed spirit. He took the drink and sat down at his desk. It was one of his favourite possessions. Diega had given it to him when he’d made Commander, even though he knew she was secretly upset it hadn’t been her.
‘Boot up.’ He voice-activated his computer system. A holo-image of Eli’s face appeared above his desk and grinned at him. He shifted uncomfortably. He had tried to change this default image after Eli had installed it, but had, so far, been unsuccessful, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask Eli to do it. It would hurt his feelings too much. If it had been anyone else he wouldn’t have cared about how they felt, but Eli had been a friend to him through too much to disregard him, and the imp-breed was far more sensitive than most people knew. He joked about himself, he put up a good front, but he had a soft heart, too soft for his own good. He put the needs of others far above his own and felt driven to help people even when it put him at a disadvantage. Copernicus saw in his friend so much potential as a soldier and as a person, but Eli didn’t have any confidence in himself and he was too swayed by his pity for others.
