City of Ruin lotrs-2

by Mark Charan Newton

  'There are any number of possible origins,' Bellis declared. 'A hybrid, perhaps. Growth enhancements. It could even have evolved naturally and been imported from some collection of islands off the map! Though what possible competitive advantage its size would provide seems questionable. As for helping you, I'm sure we can think of something useful. You wish to destroy the creature, or simply ensnare it?'

  'I'd like to trap it first, then examine it, where it came from, what it's doing here.' He was starting to perspire. Even thinking about the giant spider sent a chill through his body.

  'I quite agree,' Bellis declared. 'Something so wonderfully alien ought to be investigated more thoroughly than would be possible just by a post-mortem, no?'

  'We're being rather optimistic in even assuming it can possibly be caught. I've no idea where it nests, no idea where it takes its victims. Ideally, I'd like to track it back to its, what's it called, its lair, just to see if there are even any survivors. So, do you really think you can help?'

  Bellis grinned amiably. 'Let's have a while to think about it. But I suspect we can rustle something up, right, lads?'

  'You charge for your business?' Jeryd asked.

  'Good heavens! We're not like all those other cultists. We do not prostitute the power of relics, no. One cannot assign a mere monetary value to such things, sir.'

  Refreshing, Jeryd thought, to find such an attitude anywhere in the Empire. 'I'd be owing you a big favour. Is there anything I can offer in return?'

  The cultists made eye contact with each other, then Abaris stroked his chin and said, 'Maps?' He paused, then explained: 'We could do with a decent map of Villiren. You being in the Inquisition, like, you might find us something decent and all.'

  'Maps I can do,' Jeryd confirmed. 'I've assembled quite a collection while identifying where all these people disappeared. Feels like I know the damn city better through lines on paper than in real life.'

  'In many ways, that's all it is,' Bellis said. 'But less theory. Sir, we will get you your spider-trap. Let's meet again here in three days, at the same time.'

  But he still had his secret shame to confess, and wondered if they might help him. 'Bellis, there's actually something else. It's uh, a little private…'

  *

  'And it's just that, the touching that concerns you most?'

  Jeryd nodded, embarrassed. It wasn't easy to admit this, let alone talk about it. There was an awkwardness from merely opening this region of his mind. The fact that she was a woman helped.

  'Just the thought of it touching me and immediately I can't cope. It's their quickness and unpredictability. I don't know what they're going to do. I sound ridiculous. Some bloody Inquisition officer I am – to be terrified of spiders.'

  Bellis clutched Jeryd's hand in her own, and he noticed how hers felt. 'Dear, dear man, it's a more common reaction than you think. Why, I've seen great men from the military cower when talking in front of a group of people. I've seen tribal barbarians refuse to venture out on certain evenings due to astrological phenomena. Fear – to such a degree – is often down to something that we experienced in our upbringing – but we cultists also believe many phobias simply derive from an instinct of self-preservation, a primitive echo from our evolution. Perhaps some of your own distant forebears were once poisoned by those creatures!' With a confident smile, Bellis turned to look around the empty bistro.

  The day was unwinding itself, and most of the customers had gone, including her two companions. Outside, it was getting dark, and they silently watched a street trader pitch his cart in front of the window, only to be moved on by army personnel. There was a distinct calm about the place – providing an ideal place to debate Jeryd's secret fears.

  Bellis produced a glass orb from her bag, heavy enough to require two hands as she placed it on the table.

  'Look at this marvel.' She gestured with open palms, and stared at the object with such glee that he felt an expectation for him to be impressed.

  'A relic?' Jeryd enquired.

  Although it was transparent, he could see how pulses of coloured light flickered beneath the surface, like miniature flashes of lightning.

  'We're too predictable at times,' Bellis said shaking her head. 'A relic for this, a relic for that – well, I guess we just get used to dealing with life in such a prescriptive way. Anyway, we call this one flaraor fold – which is literally translated as "the false world".'

  'Looks like a crystal sphere to me,' Jeryd mumbled, still peering down at it.

  'Well, yes, it is that too,' Bellis cackled, and her laughter could almost cut through the glass.

  'What's this thing do then?'

  'Look closer. What you see won't be real, and if you want to be rid of your fears, then just touch it. Go on.'

  Jeryd yielded, and moved his left hand towards the- s u r f a c e and suddenly, shooting through insanely bright storm clouds, he was elsewhere.

  Warmth? The surroundings took shape, and he found that he was in a re-creation of his former house in Villjamur – in his cluttered bedroom, in fact – but everything was so bright, too bright. Milky light poured in through the windows, from a hazy, too-yellow sun outside, but then it faded into something more like the real world once his eyes adjusted.

  Bellis's voice came to him, from a distance or inside his head or both, he couldn't work out.

  – Remember, this is only a controlled vision, a re-created world – it isn't real!

  – What do I do? Jeryd asked.

  – Wander about, or sit down and relax. Enjoy it!

  – Easy for you to say.

  Jeryd slouched on the familiar bedsheets, crisp and clean, and there was a tang of Marysa's perfume in the air, a glass of whisky on one side. He was pleased to discover that he was imagining some of his favourite things.

  – Comfortable?

  – I guess so.

  – Something will happen now, and you must realize that it is only an image. I will control it.

  – Right…

  An image shuddered into being. Jeryd froze. There it was, on the floor by the foot of his bed, enclosed in a glass box: a spider the size of his fist. The same feelings besieged him: he felt it again in his heart, not merely in his chest; an overwhelming tightness, as if his very life was trapped. A total shortness of breath. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  – Just keep looking at it, right? It can't harm you, silly Jeryd. It can't go anywhere – and it is not real. It is just an image.

  – I know, but…

  – No buts! Focus, if you want to be rid of your fear.

  Opening his eyes with a sigh, he then regarded the spider. Though not very big, it seemed to be staring up at him, taunting him. Jeryd's tail was frozen still, and he could feel his pulse beating in his throat.

  Bellis gave him instructions from afar, and Jeryd obeyed her reluctantly. Sometimes her words seemed slurred as if he couldn't hear them clearly, but he could tell they were formed inside his head. She commanded Jeryd to walk around the room. She asked him to look down into the glass box. She instructed him to put his hand up against the side of the box. She urged him to perform a whole series of actions that seemed to go on forever, frustrating in execution, and even foolish at times. Again, her words working inside his skull. Childhood memories flickered into his consciousness once or twice: his mother standing terrified on a chair in the kitchen as a big spider scuttled across the room, his father shambling in drunk to swat it with a book.

  Jeryd did what he was told and was surprised to find that by the end he was not experiencing the same degree of paralysis as before. It helped, of course, to know that it wasn't real, that it was an image imprisoned in a false world. All through the ritual, Bellis continued explaining her secret theories about the nature of fear – things, she said, that he would forget as soon as he was removed from this setting, yet would remain lodged deep inside his mind. Jeryd didn't know what to make of any of it and suddenly-

  J

  e r y d was back in the sa
me cafe, clutching the box as if it was for real with the spider right up against his face – and there was now minimal panic, no quiver or heart murmurs, and he was totally astounded. Bellis merely sat there sipping her cup of tea, with a satisfied grin on her face. 'The mind', she announced, 'is a powerful thing. Fear is just a mental state, but it can make people behave quite oddly.'

  A girl with a mop passed their table, and suddenly shrieked. 'Get that bloody creature out of here. This instant, d'you hear me? Get it out!'

  She began to wave the mop in their faces till they slid their chairs back in haste. Bellis scooped up her orb, and the box suddenly vanished. The two of them hurried out of the bistro.

  'See what I mean?' Bellis chuckled dryly, once they were safely outside.

  As the snow drifted down around them, Jeryd had to laugh too.

  T HIRTY-FIVE

  'I can't stay, Malum. I'm sorry. No matter how much money you throw at me, I want to go.' Beami was standing with her back to the window, daylight hazing around her, a few bags heaped at her feet. Her emotions were evident in her pained expression.

  A morning snowstorm rattled outside, as the city was becoming smothered yet again with white. Now and then people would walk by the window behind her, but they seemed completely unreal. He was utterly detached from this moment. Surely this was no way to start the day, was it, with the smell of bacon hanging in the air being ruined for him by his wife walking out.

  'Fine.' Malum glanced down at the table, clutching his mask, playing with the red ribbons. Seething.

  'I'm sorry.' Beami picked up her bags and began moving towards the door for the final time. 'I haven't taken much. I've got so many precious relics but I can't carry too many of them. It might be easier for me to fetch the rest when there's only one of us in the house… Malum, I really am sorry.'

  'Fuck you are,' he breathed, unable to face her – this woman daring to stand up to him.

  Beami closed the front door gently behind her, leaving him alone amidst a remarkable stillness.

  Her departure from his life was as simple as that.

  Shortly after she left, he put on his mask again in an effort to contain the emotions that overwhelmed him.

  When you can have anything you want, it's the things you don't have that will get to you.

  A trilobite lurched awkwardly into his path, so Malum kicked it. The creature screeched, collapsed awkwardly into a bank of snow, then eventually scampered away towards the docks, antennae bristling in the air. Malum was feeling bellicose, and in no mood to step around anyone or anything, let alone a giant fucking insect. He had spent much of that day in the company of expensive whores who were under his protection. He had ordered them to kiss and fondle each other, wearing corsets and thigh-length boots, while he watched, waiting for something to happen inside himself. But nothing did. Later he had taken out his aggression on minor gangs that had borrowed heavily from him and couldn't repay the interest. He killed two other young men, used them for their blood, then afterwards he berated himself in the darkness of his room, smashing his fist against the wall.

  Now he needed help.

  She lived at the other side of the Ancient Quarter, the witch, some distance away from the Onyx Wings, in a street that was perhaps the very oldest in the original city. A chilling sea mist had rolled in for the evening, smothering the streets, allowing every corner even more anonymity. Flares of torchlight punctured it occasionally, providing enough guidance for him, though he knew the route by instinct – after all, he had been born and brought up around here. Up ahead someone had abandoned a box of wasted biolumes, their impotent glow revealing only their inevitable death.

  The witch had helped him with so many things. After he had been bitten, and he discovered he could not bear to be in sunlight any more, his reaction was one of a violent allergy – but the witch had concocted one of her treatments and healed him, so that he could face sunlight again, and maintain a normal existence.

  He found her door, a squat panel of wood set in a damp corner, lichen and moss caking the surrounding stonework, and he knocked twice and stood waiting, his hands buried deep in his pockets. The door opened with a creak, showing it was darker inside than out.

  'Sycoraxe,' he greeted her.

  The old woman stood there hunched in her shawls, holding a thick wooden staff with a lizard's face carved on the top. Her hair was white and straggly, her face broad yet clearly undernourished. Two blue eyes examined him with ferocity from amid sagging flesh.

  'Another potion this time?'

  'I'm after something more potent.'

  Sycoraxe grunted and let him in, leading him through the cold darkness of her hallway and into the kitchen.

  'She left me. The bitch has left me.' He explained his predicament, and the witch watched him, just like she always did, saying nothing, reading between his words for any extra meaning.

  'Take off your mask. I'll return presently.' Sycoraxe set off through the house, shifting back and forth, humming to herself between rooms. All the while he sat in a chair feeling miserable.

  Eventually she returned, carrying an open book in her hands. She gaped at its pages as she spoke to him. 'You wish for her to be deleted, I take it?'

  He pondered for a moment about the chances of renewal, about rebuilding something. He couldn't have this sort of thing happen to him, couldn't let the lads find out, because he'd then be a joke to them, wouldn't he, a man whose wife fucked off.

  'Of course I bloody do,' he mumbled finally.

  'You can't do this yourself?'

  'I don't know where she's gone.'

  'As you wish,' she replied. 'I have a little something I've been working on for some time, but never found an opportunity to use it. I'll need some of her belongings, of course. Particularly, get some of those execrable relics, if you can.'

  'Fuck are you going to do?'

  'Just fetch some of her belongings, and one or two things of your own, while you're at it.'

  *

  Malum skulked off into the night, wondering what the hell Sycoraxas planning. More than once he had called upon her to find her busy with some unnatural thing contorting in spasms, but he had known better than to ask about it. She was a legend throughout the underground, a being from another time entirely, and her name was whispered with fear.

  No doubt she would be overjoyed to have this opportunity to try out some new-fangled evil.

  He hacked his way through chill winds, reaching his home through a dank sea mist. Beami hadn't yet taken much, not that he knew precisely what had gone – just a sense of something missing from the house. The bedroom first, where he gathered a pair of her breeches, and a long skirt she hadn't worn since the ice had taken a firm grip. He then proceeded downstairs, still drunk with frustration, into her workroom. Oddly, he couldn't remember the last time he had actually been there. This had always been her space. Papers lined the walls, drenched in esoteric scribblings and sketches. Charts of territories that were, on closer inspection, layers of the known world in other dimensions. Detailed anatomical diagrams of a rumel body. Equations with symbols he could barely identify let alone understand Just get some of her shit and go.

  There was a relic standing nearby, some cone-like piece of equipment with wires leaking from the top end. At first he touched it with reverence, as if it was some cherished and holy item… or as if it might explode in his hands. But it didn't, it simply remained cold and inert, and so he picked it up and left.

  *

  'Good. Very good.' Sycoraxe turned the item this way and that, beforpitting on the ground to indicate her distaste.

  He observed her, half amused, half curious. She reeked of strange incense.

  'I may need two or three hours to prepare for the operation,' she said. 'I would meanwhile prefer it if you didn't watch.'

  'You want me to go, I'll go.'

  'You can stay if you wish. Your mind is exceedingly vexed tonight. You might do something rash that could jeopardize your followers, or
your own life.'

  You hag! I'm more than capable of looking after myself. 'Your concern for my well-being brings a tear to my eye.'

  *

  He had fallen asleep, but remembered weeping before he had drifteff. Through bleary eyes he watched Sycoraxe close the door behiner, a macabre smile on her lips, flecks of blood splashed on her cheeks.

  'I have finished my preparations,' she announced. 'Three hours it has taken me. Three hours! And during that time, my books and theories have proven correct.'

  'What d'you mean?' he eyed her with caution. Faintly, he heard a growl coming from somewhere. In triplicate? It was too dark to fathom much of what was going on.

  'Come, let me show you what has been created.'

  It took an effort to pick himself off the chair and follow her upstairs. He felt he was still involved in some weird nightmare as she pushed open the door to her workspace.

  Smoke burst out, and some smell he couldn't place, then a strong musk followed a deeply animal aroma. The rumbles grew intense, then he saw the eyes first, three pairs of them. Dirty yellow, they were focused right on him. A momentary fear paralysed any movement.

  'What… the fuck… is this?'

  'Cerberus, that's what it is. Three heads denoting the past, present and future. You look concerned.'

  Too right I am. The creature stood slightly taller than himself, with a shiny fur coat and jaws that looked capable of shattering stone. There was something almost human about each head, and when he squinted, he could make out anthropoid features shifting beneath the flesh of the skull as if trying painfully to push free. The three necks were pulled taut, tendons flaring with a deep aggression. They acted independently of one another, as if three creatures were inhabiting a single entity, then suddenly they would become as one, something completely at accord with its own evil.

  'What does it… do?' A vague question, and one more concerned with his own safety than its true purpose.