by Mark Johnson
Cess screamed in pain. “I haven’t… I’ve never seen it in physical form.”
“Then where do you get it from?” continued Patzer, seemingly unconcerned at the man with a large stave just feet away from his unprotected head. None of the thugs watched Zale either.
“I don’t know.”
“Truth.”
Zale set the stave’s end on the ground and scratched his head. “Nic?”
“Ah,” said Nic, his bloodied face lit with understanding. “The collar.”
Puzzle pieces clicked together in Zale’s head. The collar made him invisible. No, the lack of a collar made him invisible. He’d ponder the details later. Quickly, he moved to Nic, pulling off his friend’s collar. They pulled his shackles apart in seconds.
“Then what is your suspicion?” Patzer said to Cess. “What seems the most likely reason for your abilities?”
“Play for time!” Zale whispered hoarsely. Patzer loomed above Cess like some cruel, blind pantomime king.
“Can… can you repeat the question, please?”
“Truth. He’s genuinely confused.”
Patzer rolled his eyes. By the time Paan was free, he’d asked the same question using smaller words. Cess played along, giving the right information and talking of how he’d always been able to manifest matter from nothing, and kept that ability hidden as he’d grown up. Paan made towards Cess’s neck.
“No,” said Zale. “We might just end up here again.” No one in the room seemed to hear them talking. “Keep him talking, Cess. Try not to give him too much information.”
Cess’s head swung at Zale, eyes blazing. “You can’t be serious!”
Why did Cess always get angry at Zale for doing the most sensible thing? Always with the blaming and accusations. No common sense.
“Truth. He was not avoiding the question.”
Patzer looked around to Zale, looking straight through him.
“Listen, if we free you, maybe the whole spell will break and they’ll see all four of us again and we’ll get trapped by whatever held us outside. We can’t have that yet,” said Zale. Cess gritted his teeth and nodded. “Paan, stay with Cess. Free him the moment things turn bad. We’ll look for a… distraction.”
Nic was good with details. He’d see things anyone else would miss.
Thugs turned to watch them steal away, but did not seem to ‘see’ them.
“What’s going on here?” said Zale.
“Their subconscious,” said Nic. “Their instincts are screaming something is getting away.” Nic’s facial cut had stopped bleeding, and he barely limped. “But their conscious, rational minds have been taken over, somehow. It isn’t that we’re invisible and our clothes are floating by themselves, but that it’s impossible for us to exist free of those collars, so therefore we can’t exist.”
“Can we leave without being noticed?”
“I think so. They’re in some sort of long-term hypnosis. I think they’ve been programmed to put those collars on any intruders. Captives can’t take them off: that’s supposed to be impossible. Therefore, we don’t exist. Look.”
He trotted up to the nearest outlaw, a burly Sumadan with a shaved scalp. The Sumadan didn’t react when Nic said ‘hello’, or when he held his hands in front of the man’s eyes, blocking his vision. The thug stepped sideways. Zale inhaled sharply when Nic pushed the man’s chest, but all he did was rock back on his feet and step sideways again.
“A Madman’s Bridge,” Zale whispered.
“Not necessarily,” said Nic. “It’s possible their senses have been addled so that —”
“Stay in touch with Paan,” Zale interrupted. “Tell him to call us the second there’s trouble.” Patzer had taken a break to confer with his friend. “They probably think he’s a power head, so far gone he can’t answer a straight question.”
“Power head?” Nic’s eyes widened as they quietly climbed the stairs. “That’s what these people are, Zale,” he whispered. “The suppression energy trail that led here confirms it! But their brains have been altered somehow. They don’t act like addicts, but their processing ability has been taken away, just like regular power heads who can’t do mathematics, or forget how to read. They’re addicted to something. Might be suppression energy used in another way. They could be victims just as much as Nocev.”
That might explain this bizarre village, but it was hard to think of Patzer as a victim.
They reached the ground floor. A Sumadan woman stood in the kitchen, stirring a large pot. She looked up at their footfalls, saw them, and went back to her work. Patzer’s dinner?
“What now?”
Zale couldn’t help smiling. “We need a distraction. Let’s break something.”
16
Zale looked upward. three people sat in a room on the first floor, none on the second floor, and on the top floor… nothing. He strained harder.
The stairs led to some emptiness covering the entire top floor, as if the room were invisible. He’d not noticed the void when they’d been on the nearby rooftops.
He’d never seen anything like it before, save the bubble-shaped void of energy that had encompassed Nocev as she died.
“Whatever we’re looking for, it’s on the top floor.” He tried not to swallow as he said it. Nothing should have been able to break his vision. Nothing the Gods would approve of, at any rate.
The stairs creaked on their way up, but none saw them ascend. He kept his breaths measured. There was only one door at the top of the stairs, the only door he’d seen at Farneck Street with so much as a handle. It was made of better wood than the rest of the house. New, with an expensive lock. There could have been anything beyond that door. Cadvers, dark golem… Gods, why were they doing this?
“They’ve started again with Cess,” said Nic. “Paan isn’t too worried. But he says to hurry.”
Zale took a deep breath, twisted off the lock with considerable effort, and opened the door.
This top floor was all one room, an extended studio. The floor, walls and ceiling were made from reinforced, reused, treated wood, with a few pillars reinforcing the ceiling. Unusual odds and ends lay scattered about. A few desks were covered with blank papers. A fire burned in a brazier at the room’s center.
“What makes this room so important?” Zale said. The difference lay in how the room had been polished and cleaned. The floor had even been waxed, somehow.
“We’re not alone,” said Nic. “Something’s conscious in here.”
But that was impossible, for there were no hiding places, and Zale’s thermal sight showed little. For some reason, his vision was limited here, as if he stood within a null field that originated from the fire burning in the center.
“What is this place?” he said.
“It’s multi-purpose,” whispered Nic, shifting uneasily and rubbing his damaged face. “It serves a variety of functions, like for a rich man living in the country estates near the Armer RimWall, who comes into the urban center areas for some business. He has a bedroom for his mistress, a study, and a lounge for entertaining.” He blinked hard. “But this isn’t the house of a rich man on a visit. This looks like some sort of retreat, or meditation space.”
They rushed through the room, not knowing what to look for. There was a hiss when Zale slid some cardboard folders off a desk to the floor, reminding him of a snake, coiled and waiting. The few drawers and cabinets contained nothing of note — or worth breaking.
“Paan’s amused at something, but a little anxious,” said Nic. “I’m having a hard time getting through. There’s some kind of interference.”
There was some detail Zale knew was missing. But what?
Nic squinted, and spun toward the middle of the room. “Zale, that fire hates us.”
“That’s ridiculous, Nic. Here, what’s in this box?” He lifted the lid of a large w
ooden box in the corner.
“Gods,” he breathed when he opened it. Dozens of mangled mechanisms had been stacked up to the box’s rim. There were disemboweled, non-rusting iron cylinders, small metallic statues, torn open and hollow. Here, an old cowbell, which had once held something far more valuable where the clapper had been attached. There, an empty picture frame.
All glowed with the unholy ripples of chaos energy. Zale dropped the lid like it was white hot.
“Was that…?” began Nic.
“Mechanisms. Broken and turned to using chaos,” said Zale. He squeezed his eyes hard to rid them of the swirls of chaos energy. “This lot downstairs are corrupting mechanisms. That’s what all these reports of smuggling going around the Territories are about. This lot are converting the mechanisms into something. This box is for transporting these things. But to where, and what are they being made into?”
Nic cleared his throat. “That dark artefact we found, that the TowerMiss commanded Kemmer to burn. It was constructed from lots of smaller pieces. Gods, Zale, this is where it was made!”
“No,” said Zale. “Not here. This lot don’t strike me as weavers. And there’s no sign of a foundry. But this lot will be involved, even if they don’t know it.” He turned back to the brazier.
Mechanisms and artefacts were forged from iron wrought with the ability to store energy. Though stones could also be used for the same purpose. Were these mechanisms being made into dark golem? Had a dark golem inexplicably saved them from suffocation in the Immersion Pods?
Nic hadn’t taken his eyes from the fire.
Zale approached the brazier. It was a wide, black bowl, burning what looked like a fist-sized stone. Stone didn’t — or shouldn’t — burn. What was this? He hadn’t looked closely when they entered, but the flame was a lot darker than the usual yellow. Almost black. The tongue of flame was as tall as a hand, and oddly smooth, where the edges would usually flicker. Ornately carved tiles engraved with writing were precisely stacked at the side. Out of curiosity, he picked one up. Each tile was a prayer. But not to Polis. And those prayers asked for things people were not supposed to ask for…
Zale dropped the tile like it had bitten him. He’d heard adventure stories of people worshipping the Enemy, but this was real. They were within a dark shrine. Gods help them, they had broken into a place where people worshipped the Enemy! People were killed, sacrificed in these things. Poltergeists lived in these unholy places. Slowly, things clicked into place in his head.
That black flame hated them, did it?
Begone worm.
A voice in his head, oppressive and vitriolic, it towered above him, making him cower where he stood. Nic whimpered.
Be grateful you are nothing. Leave. Do not return. Touch the flame and you will know torment.
There was nothing left in his head but the voice and pitiful desperation to back away and run. It seized his will, his resolve, his pride, and he knew fear.
And there was only one thing to do.
He kicked the brazier. It sailed through the air, the burning stone landing far from the rolling black metal bowl. The stone flickered as it settled.
Storming to the desk he’d rifled through earlier, Zale pulled out a small box of matches. He’d never been religious, never really prayed. But years ago, he’d read a fiction book about Seekers who’d found a dark shrine but were out of vibration dispensers.
“Lord Sumad,” he intoned, “God and Polis, hear me.” He struck the match on the sandpaper and held it to the curtain. “With this fire, destroy this place. With this fire, remove this blight upon the world. With this fire, remove every trace of evil.” He dropped the match.
“Burn this place to Hell.”
Flame leapt up the curtain, spreading to the roof in seconds, the sudden heat pushing him and Nic back. The flame produced both vibrations and layers of their own, silver energy. Absently, he remembered Nic saying this wood wasn’t supposed to catch fire, watching as yellow tongues charred and dissolved the wood. Flames spread over the ceiling faster than reason or science should have allowed.
Get out, Zale. A familiar, welcome voice in his head. She didn’t need to tell him twice.
“No, stop,” Nic said as Zale pulled him by the arm. “Look.”
The brazier’s dark fire was spreading toward the wall, reaching for Zale’s fire. “They’re reacting to one another!” Nic pointed, as two expanding, parallel lines of fire stabbed toward one another with angry tongues in some furious dance of gods.
“I can hear them, Zale. They’re battling!”
When Zale expanded his sight, he was forced to avert his eyes, as the flood of colors dizzied him. He couldn’t make sense of what he’d seen. He could only imagine what Nic sensed.
“The Divine Link comes from nature,” Nic said, mouth falling open, his red scar faded into pink by the frenzy of competing fires. His swelling subsided even as Zale watched.
“What?” Zale shouted, over the rapid rise of the roaring fire.
“That!” Nic pointed at the fire. “That’s the Divine Link!”
Fire was the Divine Link?
A beam crashed from the ceiling, landing near their feet. Nic could explain later.
Zale shouted as he pulled his friend off-balance and down the stairs, jumping from landing to landing, missing every stair in between. Above them, the top floor glowed bright as the heavens.
Paan couldn’t carry much more. It seemed that if he held an item, no one down here could see it. He’d gathered every instrument that could be used to hurt Cess. Patzer had become furious when he learned his torture toys had gone missing in plain sight and he was obliged to improvise with spanners and the like. When those had gone missing as well, he began yelling about being surrounded by fools and degenerates. Thus flustered, he would round on Cess and ask badly phrased questions.
They’d concluded Cess was a hallucinatory lunatic.
Paan often wished he had Cess’s quick wits. It was why they’d always let him speak for them. And tonight, those wits had evaded that fellow with some sort of inbuilt lie detector. Fortunately, Cess had convinced Patzer they still lived rough homeless lives, near the borderlands, avoiding mention of HopeWall.
Patzer massaged his forehead. “But even if these ‘friends’ who are ‘always with you’ came back,” he said patiently, “you’d have to first beat all of us senseless, and then get away. Your leg has three inches of steel buried in it. Even if you live, which you will not, you will limp for the rest of your life. As it is, you won’t be able to walk for a week.”
“Yes, I understood you the first time, but I’m a quick heal. I think, by the end of a week, I’ll be running without any problems.” Earlier, Cess had begun giggling uncontrollably, and Patzer had jostled the embedded dagger to make him stop.
“Truth,” said Patzer’s friend with the long face.
Patzer put his head in his hands.
“Can I ask a question?” said Cess.
Patzer cocked his head. “Yes.”
“Who are you people?”
“What will you give me in return?”
“I have nothing to give you.”
“Truth.”
“Who do you think we are, then?”
“I’m not sure. I think you’re destabilizing Humility Territory with cadvers. We know about the cadver attack at HopeWall, and you’re likely in charge of them. Meaning, you’re Enemy worshippers.”
“Truth.”
Patzer burst into laughter. The rest of the room joined him.
“Why would we worship It, or use chaos?” he chortled. “You think we’re mad?”
“Yes.”
“Truth.”
“No, Cestin Rortiin of Armer, we are not mad. We are righteous.”
Cess blinked. Patzer shrugged amiably and smiled. “We seek freedom for mankind. We are many
, we are powerful, and we will bring humanity to stand by themselves, on their own, with pride.” An unsteady light wavered in his eyes.
Paan swore. Of all the bumbling zealots to capture them…
“You’re Escapers,” groaned Cess. “We have them in Armer, too. But, when they get too loud, they’re banished from Polis and get exactly what they’re wanting.”
“Cestin,” said Patzer with a smile, “if we rid ourselves of the Polis, we rid ourselves of cadvers. It’s simple.” He chuckled indulgently. “And you think we want to use chaos? My poor young friend, we hate it.”
Cess said nothing, for once.
“Cadvers, my young friend, are created by Polis.” Patzer waited smugly for Cess’s reaction.
“That’s impossible.” Cess spoke for all of civilization. Every so often the idea came up, but was easily defeated when applying the logic of cause and effect. Cadvers were caused by chaos. They oozed it from their very pores. Polis was incapable of creating the energy.
But that didn’t stop Escapers from believing the opposite of proof. They thought Polis was neither conscious nor intelligent, and that royals controlled Swallowings. They believed that the gods wanted humans to escape the prison that was each Polis, and to live the way the gods had first intended humanity to live. There were other Escaper ideologies, each more stupid than the last. The end result, was a section of humanity in each Polis who may as well have been living on the moon, for all the similarities in their worldviews.
Patzer smiled like an indulgent teacher. “Cadvers came into being with the destabilization of the Polis, five thousand years ago. Correct?”
“Yes,” Cess sighed despondently.
“It was a plot to enslave humanity with fear, to make them plead for the chains that debase them. And it has worked so, so well.” He continued in that vein for a while, tutoring Cess in a way that sounded practiced.
“So, what are you trying to do with all this then?” Cess interrupted after some time, clearly trying to bring Patzer back to the point.
“Dispose of some… corrupted Walls. There are other, more complicated plans to make Polis, well, not relevant, any more.” He chuckled again, as if Cess were a lackwit, ignorant of the noble company he kept. “We have friends in high places.”
