by Ian Whates
Despite their apparent confidence, their air of assumed infallibility, coming here was an act of desperation, a gamble they were driven to take; one in which the odds were stacked in their favour only for as long as he failed to recognise their peril.
The gamble had just backfired.
"Hang on, Kat, he yelled. "For Thaiss's sake, hang on!"
He could feel it immediately once he knew what to look for; that summons: a relentless insistence that tugged at them. Now Tom knew exactly what to do, how to beat them. He didn't attack, he didn't fling his talent impotently against the unyielding might of the Demons' combined magnificence; he simply grasped the bond that tied each individual Demon to Thaiburley's core, the tether that even now sought to reel them in, and held fast while he summoned his talent. Feeling it burn, feeling it swell within every last corner of his being until he could contain it no more. Only then did he let go, pouring everything he had into that link, strengthening it, boosting it, until the summons ripped through the Demon's fragile indifference, battering at their carefully constructed resistance.
And they did resist. At first. For desperate seconds they clung on. Futilely. First one and then another succumbed, their defences shredding as they were sucked into the vortex of the core. Two more followed immediately and the trickle became a rush. Tom felt them go, each parting scream a testament of despair and frustrated ambition, every single one of them indistinguishable from the last.
Finally it was over. He came back to himself and discovered he was on his knees, without any recollection of how he came to be there. Kat stood beside him, her sword lying on the ground, both hands held stiffly open at her sides. She looked petrified, her face as white as a freshly starched shirt.
He climbed shakily to his feet and drew her into his arms, hugging her close, an instinctive act which he would have suppressed if he'd stopped to think about it. She didn't resist but instead hugged him back, clinging to him until the trembling stopped. "It's okay," he said. "They're gone." He said this as much to reassure himself as her.
After a few ragged breaths exhaled against his shoulder and neck – their warmth a tickle on his throat – she pulled away. There was a little more colour to her cheeks now. "Thaiss, that'll be something to tell folks on a cold dark night!"
Tom grinned. "Should be worth a drink or two."
"You're not kidding." She stooped to reclaim her sword.
Jayce was in the process of pushing himself up from the floor, one hand spread on the ground for support, the other clutching his head, finger and thumb either side of his eyes as if to hold them in place. Flecks of drying spittle marked his cheek and chin. He lowered the hand, blew out his cheeks and gave Tom a shallow nod to indicate he was all right. Tom realised that, bizarrely, he was probably in the best shape of any of them.
"They've really gone?" Kat asked from beside him.
He nodded. "Sucked back into the core, where they belong."
"Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you."
"Oh I will, don't worry."
"Now what?"
"Now we do what we came here for. We replenish the core." Interesting how Kat was deferring to him all of a sudden. He reckoned he could get used to that.
Despite his confident words, Tom wasn't entirely clear how he was supposed to replenish the core, but there was no point in admitting as much just yet.
The room was unchanged, which struck Tom as wrong; there should have been some disorder, scorch marks on the floor, a hole, or at least some slight difference to mark the fierce, brief struggle that had just taken place here. But the impassive walls and logic-defying platform remained the same. As did the dual-nature of the core wall, alternating rapidly between functional neutrality and the writhing energy of the city's heart. Even the core looked no different. It had just swallowed an entire generation of Demons without even belching.
Tom walked slowly forward, mesmerised. He felt that he was being offered a choice of two different realities. Inevitably, he chose the core, concentrating on those shifting energies, until they stabilised and became permanent, the mundane blandness of solid masonry no longer interfering.
"Wow," Kat said. "Did you do that?"
"No, not really," he replied. "It was there all the time."
Tom knew what to do now. It was obvious. He clambered up onto the platform. Kat and Jayce followed, though he was barely paying them any attention now.
Calmly, almost reverently, he took the rucksack from his back and eased it onto the floor. He lifted the canister free of the bag, his hands tingling at the touch, a sense of pins and needles running in ripples up his arm. He placed the cylinder on the ground and flipped open both catches. Holding it with one hand, he tilted the tube towards the core, as if aiming a stunted canon. With his other hand, he lifted open the lid.
Tom had braced himself, not knowing what to expect. In the event there was no recoil, no physical reaction from the canister at all, as blinding light erupted from its mouth. Tom cried out, screwing his eyes shut and instinctively lifting his free hand to shield them. In doing so, the edge of his hand – perhaps his little finger – must have brushed the stream of escaping energy. In a panicked instant he was gone, his consciousness sucked from his body and propelled into the core.
Tom felt abruptly huge – not in a bloated, physical sense, rather it was his mind which seemed to be expanding at exponential speed in every direction at once. He panicked, certain that he was being pulled apart, that his awareness – that element that defined his sense of self – would be stretched to breaking point and simply shred apart to be absorbed by the seething energy around him, but it never happened. There was no collapse, no dissipation of thought or mind. Instead he seemed to be everywhere all at once, and everyone simultaneously. He was
– a scrawny boy crouching barefoot by a bin, scraping cold beans from a discarded can and sucking greedily at his fingers
– a Thaistess deep in concentration beside her temple's pond
– a master cobbler bawling out an apprentice who had stretched the leather too tightly and so ruined a pair of expensive shoes
– a young woman astride her husband, rocking her hips and groin backwards and forwards, uttering the occasional moan for effect while her thoughts focused on the beautiful pink dress she had bought earlier that day
– a bank worker dithering over whether or not to report a colleague whom he suspected of thieving, concerned in case the allegations should prove to be unfounded
– an arkademic worrying about her closest friend who had been missing since the earliest days of the Rust Warriors' attacks
– a mother boasting proudly to a neighbour of her son's success
– an elated office worker debating whether to celebrate an unexpected promotion by taking his wife out for an extravagant meal or making a beeline to the nearest whorehouse
– an old man ruefully reflecting on how swiftly his youth had slipped away
– a shopkeeper tempted to close up early after a particularly quiet day
– a healer banishing a child's stomach pain while an anxious mother looked on
– a bargeman bent over and vomiting into the Thair as his gut rejected the volume of ale he had steadily been pouring into it since lunchtime
– a young girl laughing as her hands touched the wall, signalling safety in a game of chase
– a guardsman standing nervously at his post, wondering when rather than if the Rust Warriors would attack again…
Every Row, every situation, he was there – young, old, male female, rich or poor – he was there. In some ways it was like the immersion tank but taken to the ultimate extreme. Tom knew that he was primarily sensing the talented – those who had a link to Thaiburley's heart, a conduit which allowed his consciousness to flow out through the core to touch the privileged few, even those who were oblivious to their talent. He knew too that the talented formed only a small minority of the population, but in a city of tens of millions they still numbere
d tens of thousands and, for that moment, he was there, with each and every one of them.
Somehow, his mind coped. It didn't shut down or collapse, perhaps because of his experience with the immersion tank. That had been nothing compared to this but it had, in a sense, been preparation. The tank had taught him how to let images and impressions wash over him without attempting to grasp and interpret each and every one. Afterwards, he would feel certain that it was only this preparation that enabled him to cling on to his sanity amidst the kaleidoscope of impressions that threatened to overwhelm him. Had the goddess known? Had she suspected that he might find himself here? He wouldn't have put it past her.
Eventually, after what seemed an eternity, Tom began to regain some coherence and resume a sense of self. He felt a huge sense of energy coursing through him, of vitality and strength, of power and destiny beyond human ken. This was the core, this was so far removed from anything Tom had ever experienced, and yet beneath all that was a hint of something familiar. He isolated that hint and recognised it: Thaiss. The core energy was somehow of her in a way he didn't understand. Did the goddess actually generate the energy? She was linked to it at a fundamental level which she'd never hinted at, had hidden from him. Was it core energy that sustained her, kept her alive?
Suddenly, all his previous assumptions about the goddess were ripped to shreds. No matter appearances, she and her brother weren't human, he knew that now, could feel it as a certainty. How could he not have seen it before? These two beings had led a civilisation from one world to another, built the mightiest city humankind had ever seen, and they somehow controlled and manipulated this elemental, beautiful yet brutal force known as core energy. How could he ever have dismissed them as merely human?
Perhaps they truly were gods.
He could sense something wrong, an anomaly within the core; not rotten as he'd expected, not overtly evil – not wrong in that sense, but unquestionably out of place. Thaiss's brother, it had to be. Tom reached for that presence, attempted to explore this taint of something foreign, but it fled, recoiling from his touch. He pursued it, not with malice or even that specific intent, but in joyous sport, riding the vigorous wave of energy that washed through the core, driving the anomaly before him. It contracted, withdrawing into the farthest fringes of the core, and then it left. He felt the moment the taint departed and knew that it had fled into the City Below. To some degree, in some sense, Thaiss's brother survived. Replenishing the core hadn't killed him as anticipated, the process had merely driven him to a new vessel, a new host.
Had Tom wanted to, had he possessed the will, he might have followed then, might have seen where the taint had fled to and perhaps even finished it off for good, but the moment the anomalous presence deserted the core he lost interest. Instead he revelled in the vibrancy, the purity of the cleansed core, allowing it to wash around him and through him.
There was work to be done. A new generation of Demons to prepare and install. The latest group had been fully integrated. Lessons would be learned, improvements made. Slowly, increment by small increment, they were drawing closer to perfection, each new generation of avatars an improvement on the last.
At that instant, he felt something pulling at him, taking him away. No! This was where he wanted to be, this was where he belonged. But his protests were ineffectual. He was aware of something holding him back, tugging at him. The core seemed to be receding, or he was drawing clear of it. Not uniformly but by ragged degree. The energy still clung to him, like viscous toffee clinging to a slice of apple that had just been pulled through its heart, reluctant to let go.
Suddenly the world contracted. In one great surge, like water draining into a plughole, everything flowed back into Tom, leaving his mind reeling under the assault of more impressions than most people would experience in a lifetime. As awareness began to seep outward again, he realised he was sitting down. He felt human again; disorientated, but human. Kat was immediately behind him, reaching forward, almost sprawling, with one hand clasping his wrist, and the shoulder of that arm ached as if it had recently been wrenched.
"What… what happened?" he mumbled, remembering how to speak.
"Wow." Kat let go of his wrist and rolled into a sitting position, looking a little dazed. "I mean, just wow! I think I caught a glimpse of what you just saw. It was…" and she shook her head.
"But what happened?" he persisted.
"I grabbed you," she said. "You started to… I don't know, stretch, as if you were being dragged into that mass of energy, so I grabbed hold of your arm and pulled you back. That was when the world went weird, or at least my head did."
"I pulled you both out," Jayce said quietly.
"What?"
"You were both being pulled in there," Jayce explained.
Of course, Tom thought. Kat was talented too, so the core would want to absorb both of them if it had the chance. Jayce, though, wasn't. It had no claim on him, so he had been their anchor.
"I grabbed Kat, then grabbed you, and pulled you both out," Jayce continued.
"Thank you," Tom said, which was far from adequate, but it was all he could offer just then.
Kat frowned. Tom had regained his feet but hadn't otherwise moved. He just stood there, the now-dormant core cylinder lying discarded at his feet, as he stared at the curtain of energy which formed the room's back wall. The pulsing, flowing thing was pretty amazing, no question about that, but Kat had no intention of getting any closer to it. Yet Tom seemed completely lost in the flickering patterns and for a second she was afraid he might dive back in. If he did, she might just let him go this time.
Kat stood up, wary in case Tom made to move nearer the core. As she straightened, something fluttered from her pocket – a folded sheet of paper. For a moment she stared at it, not able to place what it was. Then she remembered. The apothaker's sketch. It had survived all this and stayed with her throughout. She bent down and picked it up, a little crumpled but still all there. She carefully smoothed the sheet out and opened it. To stare at her own image. Bet I don't look this good right now, she thought. Cute but with attitude. Exactly the look she aimed for but had a feeling she never quite achieved.
"Can I see that?"
Kat hadn't realised Jayce was behind her. She clutched the picture defensively to her chest, reluctant to show it to anyone. But he had just saved her life, so she relented and thrust it towards him.
He took the sheet and stared at it for a second, before saying, "Where did you get this?"
"A friend gave it to me."
"Was she the artist? I mean, do you know the woman who drew this?"
"Hey, I never said it was a woman."
"You didn't need to," he said. "This told me." He pointed to a small stylised "A" in the corner of the image, so artfully integrated that it could easily have passed as part of the design.
Kat snatched the picture back, folded the parchment and pocketed it once more. Only then did she reply. "Yeah, like I said, she's a friend of mine."
For long seconds the young guard didn't say anything. Kat found his expression difficult to fathom, until a single tear leaked from the corner of his eye to trickle down his cheek.
SIXTEEN
"It isn't over, not yet."
"What?"
Tom realised this wasn't exactly what either of the others wanted to hear, but it was the truth and he had to say it before they relaxed, before the urgency disappeared. "The presence that was corrupting the core, Thaiss's brother, it didn't die, it merely fled into the City Below. I've got to go after it and finish things."
"Why?" Kat asked. "You came here to restore the city's core, and that's what you've done. Job over."
Why indeed. Not for his own gain, not for some personal advantage, but for the sake of Thaiburley: the city that was his home, the city he loved, the city he belonged to heart and soul. For the good of everyone, not just himself. There, he'd admitted it. He was doing this, all of it, because somebody had to and he was the one in the right pl
ace at the right time; the only person who could. Simple as that. If it made him a hero in some people's eyes and a fool in others', that was their problem, not his.
He shook his head. "I have to see this through, that's all."
"Where are you gonna look? The City Below is a pretty big place, in case you've forgotten."
"I know, but the taint didn't just go anywhere, it went into a host, I could sense that much; someone or something that had been prepared in advance. I just have to figure out who or what."
"Insint," Kat said, as if struck by sudden realisation.
"What?"
"The expedition into the Stain, it wasn't just the Soul Thief we were hunting. I made a deal with the Prime Master. He helped us track down the Soul Thief and in return we agreed to help him take down something he called 'Insint', a leftover from the war apparently, some sort of creature or mechanism that's still around and working against the city."
