by Mark Johnson
Terese led them to a large hill surveying the slumlands. “Toornan, you’re on lookout. We’ll stay up here all night.”
“Right.”
After activating the cadver deterrent mechanisms, Jools pulled a paperback book from her pack and read until light was gone.
Terese didn’t touch the trader’s note until it was dark and Jools had been snoring half an hour. She hid the small glow of her flashbulb inside her pack while she read the note, then wrote a new note. She approached Toornan and tapped his shoulder.
“Anything?”
“Other than coyotes and meerkats? Nothing. If there’s lions about, they’re avoiding us.”
“All right, wake me if there’s anything interesting.”
But instead of moving back to her blanket, she clamped a hand over his mouth for longer than she needed. His struggling petered out when they locked eyes and he saw her finger over her lips. After a moment, Toornan nodded his understanding. She brought out her glowbulb for him to read her note:
Toornan, don’t speak. Don’t whisper. Don’t open your mouth even to breathe. We’ve been bugged. You’re right about Keeper Lijjen; there’s no way he’d let me out of his sight, ever. I can feel the mechanisms he’s used. There’s one on each of us. I’ve felt them humming with vibrations. He wants to hear what we say because he’s convinced I’m (we’re?) hiding something.
We can’t let Jools in on this. Her opinion on anything becomes whatever the last person she spoke to thinks on the matter. She’s a loyal Seeker, but if she doesn’t see what’s wrong with putting innocent Cenephans out of business, she can’t be trusted.
I didn’t break the trading post’s currency counter. I broke a fan. I paid them a lot for information. Lijjen will think I’m breaking the currency counter when he plays this afternoon’s recording back on his mechanism.
We’re on a clean-up operation. I can recognize the pattern. Everything about this job feels wrong. Someone—maybe Sumadan Seekers—have done something rotten and we’re shutting it down. Getting us to do it is a convenient way of seeing if I know more than I’m saying to Lijjen.
The traders confirmed there’s a small mechanism trading industry across the border with the native Sumadans.
You heard me asking about mechanism traders? My actual question was if there are stories of Darkness events, like poltergeists or large cadver migrations. They said we should come this way, because there are ‘strange stories’ out here, and gangs pushing people out of the area.
I asked what they knew of Sumadan Seekers in the Territories. They said there are no obvious Seekers, but sometimes Sumadan groups that are clearly military come by in plain clothes, give currency and leave mechanisms that, later, Cenephan smugglers come and take with a code word. They’ve threatened the traders with death if even one mechanism goes missing. There’s a mechanism-smuggling ring out here. Which is odd, because mechanisms aren’t expensive or rare.
Toornan seized her stylus.
Gods! We have to get out of this mad Polis. Can’t we snatch the Apprentices and Assistants and just leave? How did you know about the bugs? I can’t feel anything. How did you get suspicious to begin with? Why do I feel like I know less about this expedition than anyone else in it? What in Armer’s name do we do now?
She was so relieved to find Toornan siding with her, she almost cried. Instead she took back the stylus.
These bugs are kept secret by Keepers and Holders. So small they fit on plate armor without us knowing. Each mechanism is probably hidden in a screw or stud holding the skinleaf plate together. They’re made by the Royals, but kept secret. That’s why they gave us the light plate. They knew we’d wear it willingly, not like our official heavy plate.
When I was a girl, my father was a Keeper. I learned to pick his study lock at home and read his notes. Because I was so curious about the Seekers. These mechanisms record everything, then an artifact back in Lijjen’s office, or wherever, filters out the voices from background noise. It’s primed to pick out vibrating throats, so even whispers aren’t safe. I can sense vibrations at lower levels than any other Seeker, but I don’t let on because I don’t want to be noticed. Ever since the Girdle ceremony, my Seeker sense is more sensitive than others.
This operation doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason for Lijjen to distrust me and split up my command. They’ll be looking for us to attempt an escape, and that’ll provide them with an excuse to interrogate and imprison me. Besides, can you imagine getting Jools to leave? She’ll ask for permission first, and who knows what rot has seeped into the Apprentices and Assistants? They’ve got us.
She paused before writing the next paragraph. Her complement was in this fix because of her ambitions, her lies and mistakes. She’d been not only a part of the Immersion Chamber project, but a shift leader, and had been on duty the evening the renegades’ guard unit had been interred in the pods.
At least her complement had no idea. She bore Lijjen’s wrath alone.
Before her promotion, she’d been the best Missionary Seeker within Armer Stone. She knew what she was doing. Her footwork on routine excursions was flawless, though the reports that reached Lijjen said she’d made countless errors. Her paperwork was sent back, sometimes five times, with red pen scrawled over each page, telling her to get her reports in order, never indicating what to change.
She’d come of age in the cadets as the daughter of Sumad Spire Chapterhouse’s Keeper Saarg, which had brought her malice and cruelty. He was made a Holder when she was still an Apprentice. The bullying had been tolerable because she’d known she was better than her classmates. And her tutors. She would deal with whatever Keeper Lijjen threw at her, because every day was a day closer to returning to Pella. Nothing else mattered.
But oppressing the already-downtrodden refugees even further? Just evil. She could accept the insults, but she drew a line when her problems hurt someone else. By all the Gods, she would not enable Lijjen to hurt innocents. This time, she would do what was right, not what appeared right, and to hell with the consequences if she got caught. At least she wouldn’t have to pretend she was something she wasn’t.
She pressed her stylus back to the paper.
What we do is figure out what is going on in Sumad Reach and the Territories. We say nothing controversial, observe nothing unusual. We learn what pieces of the jigsaw are missing.
Instead of writing, Toornan embraced her. Such a simple gesture, such profound relief. And she hadn’t needed to lie. Just telling someone, anyone, the honest truth after months of nervous silence warmed her. He squeezed her hand and went back to his spot, watching the Wastes.
Terese slept.
“I mean, we have trees that move about and grow vegetables back in Armer,” Jools blathered the next morning, as they trekked further into Chastity Territory. “And they think that’s strange here. But you know what I think’s strange? Those random six-sided patches of land. The hexagons. Every plant on it grows three times as fast as everything outside. Three times! Even just random thorn bushes and brush.
“But,” she said, biting her lip, “I think I’d want a corner room if I could live anywhere back at Sumad Reach. Two sunlit walls can make a living room come alive.”
At the very edge of her perception, a dark shudder tingled in Terese’s mind. It strengthened with each step, despite Jools’s torrent of nonsense.
“I wouldn’t need so many glowbulbs or so much light paint, which means I could get some varnished wood. In fact, back home, we could learn some lessons from Sumad about when to use wood for decoration and when to use it to buttress–”
“There,” said Terese, reaching across Jools’s chest to halt her. “That collection of metal roofs and sides in between those two hills. They’re better assembled.”
Toornan raised an eyebrow. Terese nodded her confirmation behind Jools’ turned head.
The construction didn’t really look any better, though it was unusually large for the slumland. Nestled between two natu
ral hillocks like most shelters in the area, the fort-like structure had been arranged in a dilapidated circle with slim peepholes cut though the rusting metal sheets.
“It’s fortified,” Terese said, “and taller than anything else around here.”
“Circle ’round?” asked Jools.
“No, all together up to that entryway. There’s no hiding our approach, day or night.”
“Looks like there’s only one way in or out,” said Toornan, as they set off toward the enclosure. “And there’s wheel tracks at the gate. A lot of coming and going.”
“No sudden movements, hands where they can be seen,” said Terese. “Keep your poles ready.”
They opened the gate. A familiar, foul smell overran her senses. They found madness within.
Everything was broken. Benches, tables, barricades, boxes and clothing lay strewn around as if a tornado had descended on the slum fort.
The Seekers drew their shockpoles in one fluid motion, the rush of vibrations unable to settle Terese’s stomach. Just feet away, beneath a ripped mattress spilling old cotton, lay a human arm. Pale skin, like a Cenephan’s. Flies swarmed around the limb. There wasn’t space for the rest of the body beneath the mattress. There were other limbs, heads and viscera spread about the fort.
From habit, Terese blocked her rising horror to dispassionately analyze the site. But she couldn’t stop the shudder running over her body. Worryingly, her clenched gut wouldn’t relax, spreading faint nausea into the base of her throat: a tell-tale sign of nearby chaos infection. They’d seen something very much like this, months earlier, underground in Armer. Her forehead grew damp.
She made quick hand signals. Stay together. Circle the area. I’ll lead. The broken and splintered wood shards could have been anything before they’d been wrecked—chairs, tables, mattress supports... Shreds of a cotton tarpaulin that must have once stretched over the fort, now lay in pieces on the ground.
There was little to explore. Possibly there’d been divisions and walls in this place, but none remained standing. Everything was open to view.
“Clear,” said Terese. “Whoever did this is gone.” She made certain not to say ‘whatever’. Nothing human had killed the innocents within the Immersion Chamber, and this couldn’t be the work of humans either. But neither was it the work of cadvers.
“Terese, I can feel chaos,” said Jools.
Terese nodded. Her nausea was rising, making her stomach twitch. She quietly thanked the Gods she’d not eaten in hours. There was too much chaos flexing the air, turning her skin to gooseflesh. She couldn’t stay long before retching or fainting. She couldn’t let slip how advanced her Seeker sense was.
“It’s there,” Terese said, waving her shockpole at a cloth sack atop a stretch of torn tarpaulin.
Think of fresh meadows. And cool, soft air with the scent of streams.
Toornan grabbed at the sack, upending it and spilling dozens of bent metal fragments onto the ground in a clanking rush.
A wave of chaos energy from the pile dizzied Terese, reeling her backward and sending her sprawling.
“Terese?” Jools was at her side, tugging her shoulder.
There were downsides to having such developed Seeker senses.
“I’m fine, Jools,” she said, squeezing Jools’s forearm. “That rush of chaos surprised me, is all.”
“What is this?” said Toornan, staggering back from the metallic pile. He didn’t seem to expect an answer. “They’re fragments, all torn up. Bah.” He rubbed at his eyes, as if the sight of the pieces had hurt them.
Terese let Jools help her up. Her stomach twitched violently, her body telling her to get out, not understanding why she wasn’t running by now.
“Looks like this is where the smuggled mechanisms were headed,” Terese said. “They were cut up with chaos energy, to make something else. These are the remains.”
Mechanisms were usually forged in metal for durability, using specially smelted material that retained complex vibration weaves.
“Is this a dark workshop?” asked Jools.
“There’s no construction tools around,” she said. “It can’t be.” She wasn’t performing for Lijjen; she couldn’t be certain. Severed bodies all over, rotting. Gods, the smell!
“Is it like the underground chamber?” said Jools.
“Maybe,” Terese said. “But there wasn’t any chaos energy down there. There wasn’t any energy. Here, we’re swimming in it. It’s everywhere. Clinging to all the broken metal, fading like heat after sunset. But much slower.”
She sucked air through her teeth. “We’re leaving. Now. Cadvers will scent the chaos and come with sunset. Maybe lots of them. We need to be gone.”
Later that day they rested in the shade of a mostly-fallen shelter.
What was that place? Toornan wrote as Jools napped.
Terese considered his question. Dark mechanisms existed and, so the theory went, there must be dark workshops to make them. Somewhere. Certainly, dark shrines existed; Terese had destroyed a few herself. But the Seekers had never found conclusive evidence that dark mechanisms were created within dark shrines, which had led to the theory of ‘dark workshops.’
The leftover bodies were too well-fed to be powerheads, she wrote. We’ve looked for dark workshops for millennia and not found one. If dark mechanisms were made there, something took the tools with it. And recently.
Toornan read her message. He didn’t look away from it for some time.
There’d been a lot of chaos energy back there. Terese knew of only one thing capable of containing that much chaos energy: the chaos batteries. In the Immersion Chamber, she’d helped siphon residual chaos energy from the subjects, into large batteries. She’d thought she was taking part in a medical experiment that would reshape the world by eliminating cadverism. The batteries had disappeared along with the Sumadan ‘researchers’, after the massacre.
Was this evidence of the missing chaos batteries? She couldn’t allow anyone to know. Not even Toornan.
“What’s that?” he said.
Jools jerked awake.
Terese crumpled the paper and stood. The shimmering Wastes showed little, and she almost asked him what he meant when the rolling object came into view, its rhythm steady and fast.
“A tracker,” Toornan said. Terese patted her pack, where their tracer—paired to the tracker—was stowed.
There weren’t many artifacts left since the War. The Royals let their Seekers use a few and, occasionally, recalled the five-thousand-year-old artifacts for maintenance. This tracker was unlikely to be that old, though its core program unit would be.
Toornan stepped forward and waved with both arms. The spherical artifact slowed as it registered him, then slid to a halt, its revolving sides skidding on the dry ground. The tattoo on Terese’s back heated as it scanned her, then its curious internal hum cut out. After a few seconds, a hatch clicked open atop the tracker’s immobile, bronzed chassis, revealing a storage unit with an envelope inside.
The word Saarg was written in black ink. Terese recognized Lijjen’s handwriting. Beneath the envelope was a flat, rectangular metal box that looked just like her father’s recording artifact. As she lifted the envelope, the artifact hummed, awaking the recording devices inlaid upon the light armor beneath their clothes. Toornan and Jools likely hadn’t felt the vibrations streaming between their clothing and the recording artifact.
Lijjen had sent the tracker to collect recordings of all they’d said over the past week. Why rush? What was he playing at? She opened the envelope. There was no greeting or salutation.
Wherever you are, change course for MarverWall. Your Missionaries are to return to Sumad Reach forthwith. Your excursion will last thirty days from the day after you reach MarverWall. Be attentive.
There was no signature, and the stylus nib had cut deeply upon the paper.
She pushed the tracker’s hatch closed. Its mechanics whined into life and it sped away northward. She hoped Lijjen choked on ev
erything he didn’t learn from their conversations.
They were still being recorded, however.
“Before you ask,” said Terese, “I have no idea.”
“It’s just some random Wall, about thirty miles away,” replied Jools, pointing at a map. “Look, we can go some of the way with you and part in the morning? I don’t like you being alone out here.”
Toornan’s eyes flicked toward Terese. She had no choice but to do as Lijjen commanded, and he’d implied whatever awaited at this ‘MarverWall’, she wouldn’t command it. Which was highly unusual. Heads were the highest field operation rank. Keepers were the rank above head, and very seldom did Keepers go into the field.
Lijjen wouldn’t have been angry if he’d planned on meeting her. No, he’d been fuming because he’d been forced to write that letter allowing his plaything out of his control a whole month. And that wasn’t necessarily a good thing for her.
“Sorry Jools. I don’t want you two getting in trouble on my account.” She squinted at the map. “Looks like there are some Walls a little out of the way. I can pay for a night in one and get to… MarverWall midday tomorrow. Leave me the map?”
Terese had wanted to confer with Toornan. To drag him away from Jools and write everything on her mind. But claiming too many secret moments with him would lead to bad assumptions, and the boy could end up sharing whatever further inconveniences Lijjen had planned for her. Besides, he was over five years younger and reminded her of a little brother: Likely to do something impulsively well-intentioned if left unwatched.
Toornan’s face whitened and his hand trembled as she shook it in farewell. He studied her face, as if committing it to memory. Her Missionaries hiked north, following the tracker’s trail.
Terese Saarg was alone in the wastelands.
Heat shimmers rose over the gentle brown-and-orange hills.
