The Renegade Within

by Mark Johnson

  Sumad seemed to regard her more closely, with a patient smile to those who came for help.

  A truth occurred to her: One she’d not considered before, that seemed so obvious, here. Her career had never been unclear; the only unclear thing had been her. She needed no title, superior officer or mission description. No chapterhouse nor plate made her.

  Titles and ceremonies were nothing. Chapterhouses weren’t necessary. All that remained if you took away the created meaning that humans put into their lives, to give shape to chaos, was action. Being a Seeker meant nothing if the vileness below the chapterhouse existed. It was better to be no one than a corrupt degenerate. Better to leave no name than a bad one. Better to rebel against bad leaders than tolerate their decrees.

  And there was only one more thing to say to Him.

  “Lord Sumad, I renounce my Seeker vows. I wish only to destroy evil, wherever it may be. Witness this pledge, Lord. I am no Seeker, only Your servant. Guide my actions.”

  She was a woman who hunted cadvers and sought to eliminate chaos where she found it. Titles and decorations and rituals were nothing, compared to her deeds.

  She dried her tears and stood. Better to be a renegade than a collaborator.

  Terese Saarg would break Sumad Reach to pieces. Polis would provide.

  Her aches had melted and been forgotten by the time she left the chapel and took the stairs from the basement, ascending into the streaming daylight.

  19

  Terese woke instantly. A hand was over her mouth, although it was too dark to see whose. She broke into a cold sweat.

  They’d finally figured it out.

  A week since her raid, and they’d come for her. Perhaps she’d be fitted with some of the hideous devices from the unspeakable laboratory. That place, those things had given her nightmares. An involuntary whimper rose and died in her throat. Pella’s face came to mind. If only she could get an orphan’s grant and continue living with her grandparents, Terese could die at peace.

  The hand on her mouth would be Lijjen’s, or possibly Patzer’s. Either would relish this, would have fantasized how to make her death as painful as possible. There’d been no announcement of Makkdarm’s death or any change in procedure: Only an announcement he’d gone on leave. If not for her injury, she’d have wondered if she’d dreamed the entire thing.

  “You’ll not be hurt,” a man whispered. “Once I take my hand away, you can scream until you are blue in the face and I’ll have no choice but to run. But then you’ll never know why I came. Nod if you understand.”

  She nodded.

  The hand came off and she sat up, gulping air even though he hadn’t been suffocating her. She instinctively pulled her woolen nightwear down over the wound at her side.

  Her window grate was bent apart, letting in meagre light from the open shutters. She blinked. Her visitor was no Sumadan. She looked closer. The figure was light-skinned like her, muscular and around the age of an apprentice. If the hair were longer and the face bearded, then it could have been… her mouth dropped open.

  “Zalaran Morgenheth?” The renegade who’d knocked her unconscious at the failed taking and questioned her the morning after. Her last meeting with Morgenheth and his three comrades had gone badly. But, any foe of Patzer must, by definition, have redeeming qualities.

  “Yes.” His voice was carefully neutral, coldly polite.

  “The room will be bugged.”

  “It’s not. The one under your bed must have gone dead weeks ago.”

  She’d searched under the bed at least five times. How could…? Never mind.

  “Listen to me, Morgenheth, this chapterhouse—”

  “No, you listen to me. We need help with a—”

  “No! Shut up and listen.” She lowered her voice and pointed at him. “Forget Patzer! Active cadvers are being experimented on beneath this chapterhouse!”

  He made several shapes with his mouth before managing a word. “What?”

  She grabbed his forearms, pulling herself up to face him. “Ever since we arrived, they thought I was spying on them, because they’re hiding something much worse.”

  “You met… Patzer?”

  She had no time for this. “The man is a lunatic. He dragged me all over the Wastes looking for you, convinced I was hiding something. What did you do to make him hate you so much?”

  “I… We…”

  “He’s convinced you four are hiding at a monk hill somewhere. If you’re at one, get clear of it because he’ll find you.”

  “What? We’re nowhere near… There’s nothing like that where we are. No, really. There’s no hill at… where we are.”

  The boy was as confused as she’d been over Patzer’s hill obsession. Despite Patzer’s much-vaunted informants, somehow, the renegades had upended his expectations.

  As they had hers.

  “What did you four do to him?”

  “There was… a fire. Um, it’s a long story.” He looked back out the window, where the silhouette of a head hovered. Another renegade, it scarcely mattered which one. “The Darkness is controlling him. And others. Lost their minds, all of them, but we don’t know how.”

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “You told us which chapterhouse,” he said. “How we found your room and did this?” he gestured to the bent window grill. “We’ll tell you, if you’ll come to us. We…” he exhaled, “need your help. Please.”

  “Listen, Morgenheth, there are cadvers below our feet and I have to destroy them. A group of Seekers here are obsessed with golem, and somehow altering cadvers to be like golem. I don’t know, I haven’t figured it out. I threw the Seekers off your scent, and your case was handed to Patzer. I kept my end of the bargain, but I’m not safe. I killed a Keeper who was working on things worse than the Immersion Chamber, and they might still learn it was me.”

  “How did—”

  “I barely got out alive. I can’t do this by myself, Morgenheth. I need to take this chapterhouse down and I need your help.”

  “Can you get leave?” he asked.

  “No. I’d be followed. This,” she pointed at the window, “is all we have. And now everyone will see the window’s out, if they haven’t already. You could have just knocked at the window.”

  He shook his head. “No one will see from four floors down. We’re bending the light with artifacts. Anyone looking will see solid wall. Look, what do you want our help with, Saarg?”

  Artifacts? How could they afford to rent artifacts? “What have you four been doing the last seven months?”

  “We deciphered the scripture we found on the Immersion Chamber’s wall.”

  What did he mean? “I translated that within a day. How did it take you four a year?”

  “I said ‘deciphered’, Saarg. There’s a hidden meaning there.”

  “Wait, it was a riddle?” She’d not thought of the passage beyond being a hint where the renegades were headed.

  “It’s not gibberish like they say, Saarg. It’s instructions.”

  She realized she wasn’t even interested. “If you have artifacts, can you help me put an end to this entire place, Morgenheth?”

  “After all the damage you did, why do you suddenly care?” There was no tone or emotion in his question, his voice was near a whisper.

  She looked down. “I want to do what’s right. Sumad Reach has violated the Seeker’s Charter. There’s no more to say.” She met his eyes. “I became a Seeker to fight chaos, and it’s in this building. What can you do for me?”

  For a long time, he said nothing.

  She waited.

  Eventually, he bent down to a pack she hadn’t noticed and pulled out a flat blue stone the size of her palm. “We made some friends.” It sounded like it might have been a complex story. “They said you asked for this?” The question in his voice invited explanation.

  Terese took the stone from his hand. It weighed more than it should have and was warm, even on this cold night.

 
The means to destroy Sumad Reach. That was what she’d asked for in the chapel. “This is an artifact?”

  “No. You’re supposed to keep it on you, and I suppose the rest will become clear. When you’re finished here, come find us. Soon.”

  “Where are you?”

  “HopeWall.”

  She sighed. “Of course you are.”

  “You know it?”

  “Patzer’s obsessed with it. But… isn’t it women-only?”

  He frowned. “No. Haven’t you heard?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t tell me. Knowing things I don’t need to will get me killed.”

  He stepped back, pulling his pack around his shoulders. “Then I’ll see you at HopeWall. Soon.”

  On an impulse she whispered at his turned back. “Morgenheth! The deaths the four of you caused, back home. Did you truly do it?”

  His shoulders slumped. “Whatever you learned, none of it was deliberate.”

  “Wait. Back when you took me hostage. You said you’d like to let me walk away, but letting me go would be too dangerous.”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you planning on killing me?”

  Morgenheth wheezed. “What? No! I was going to ask you to swear a vow on Polis Armer’s name. Your idea for us to not contact the newskeepers was better.”

  Terese rubbed at her forehead. She’d spent half a year believing she’d been on the brink of death in that broken old shelter. Then, for no reason she could understand, she asked a question. “People call you Zale—short for Zalaran. Is that right?”

  “Yes?”

  “I hope I can hear your story when I get to HopeWall, Zale.”

  “Only my friends call me that, Saarg.”

  He climbed out the window, then somehow turned half transparent. The window’s grill bars glowed red as he bent them back into shape and welded them together, though she couldn’t tell what instrument he used. He dropped out of sight, then faint footsteps sounded below, and the wind whistled.

  Terese held the stone to her cheek with both hands. It shivered and vibrated.

  Shafts of morning light found her cross-legged on the bed, staring out that same window. When the morning bell sounded, she rose and dressed, tucking the stone into an internal uniform pocket.

  She went to work.

  20

  The bell for night eight sounded distantly, within the chapel’s six walls. Outside, the winter sun would have dropped below the RimWall.

  This place of quiet was such a precious thing. Over the past three weeks, Terese had spent hours in contemplation here, the peace and quiet sustaining her, answering her questions, focusing her resolve, and allowing her to craft and recraft her plan. She’d come so frequently that passing beneath the chapel’s wooden arches had become like stepping through her own front door. And all that time, the stone had pacified her, vibrating constantly in her pocket. It was no typical weaving stone, for she’d never sensed vibrations within it. But increasingly, an unfamiliar, pulsing energy whispered to her when her mind was most still. Today would be her final day in Sumad Reach. Alone in the chapel, clad in her Armer plate, Terese rose and took long, untrembling steps to the God on the dais.

  “Thank You for Your help,” she said, kissing her fingertips and touching them to His chest. Sumad smiled back.

  Terese left the chapel, her brown leather satchel swaying, brushing against her pack and the shortened shockpole at her waist.

  People gave her second looks as they passed her on the stairs and in the passageways leading toward the administration center, clearly puzzled that she was clad in full plate. Some recognized her and looked away.

  She smiled sadly as she pulled on her helmet outside Holder Mathra’s chambers and hefted her modified shockpole. Thoughts of Pella overwhelmed her. She switched her lenses to thermal, opened the door and shot Holder Mathra’s chamberlain. The old man staggered and flopped before going rigid, his muscles locking and straightening his limbs.

  She pushed the stunned old man to the side, locked the door and leaned a chair beneath the handle. Two apprentices in the private kitchen were immobilized, as was Mathra’s wife. Once she’d subdued the residential side of Mathra’s apartments, she moved to the administrative side.

  Holder Mathra wasn’t in his office, as expected. The five assistants bent over their desks hadn’t realized anything was happening, and the few missionaries and one head present had merely stared in bafflement when she’d shot them. So far as she knew, hers was the first shockpole to ever shoot energy, instead of passing it through contact. The hidden passage behind the bookshelf in Mathra’s study opened easily.

  She and Head Fejak had used the service corridor entry, from the garage. After the surgery, before she’d found the paperwork, they’d found this second entrance. It seemed likely this entryway was for the more senior Seekers who’d have little reason to visit the garages to avoid notice.

  Once inside, she bolted the door and ran down the stairs to the laboratory. Thank the Gods, no one was working on the cadvers this evening, although the surgical table was decorated with new dark stains.

  Terese put the glowbulb on its coil, and the beasts hissed, roared and bared their gums at her. The monsters had made the air stale and rank, despite the struggling air purification mechanism in the corner. Jools’s mindlocked squad must have found more cadvers in the Wastes since Terese’s last visit. One cadver had no legs and rattled the bars from the floor. Another had no hands and yet another had no arms. On that last cadver, the gray skin hadn’t healed over the missing limbs in the same way it would have in a human. The stumps had brittle growths, pathetic misshapen vestiges, doomed never to regain their former condition, the cadver’s regrowth halted by Seeker experiments. She ignored the cadvers as best she could.

  Her modified shockpole took only moments to melt the door that she and Fejak had used. She ran down the stairs to the lower level. Screaming continued behind her. She put on the bulb. On this floor, a severed cadver head followed her with its eyes but made no noise, though its mouth flapped. The head was stuck on a metal rod, and controlled an arm not originally its own, in a separate cage, which flailed wildly. A pair of lungs, green, rotted and malformed, inflated and deflated next to a brain that had been removed from its housing and left to float in a tank of green liquid.

  There were other things. Worse things.

  How could anyone, let alone a Seeker, justify this? There was no passage prohibiting anything like this in the Seeker codes, because why would there be? How could the Founders have predicted this?

  The final level down housed a workshop. While it was easier to look at, it was harder to think about. Several items on a shelf were from the Armer Immersion Chamber. Squat, rectangular towers of shiny black metal. Repositories, or batteries, storing the chaos siphoned from the immersion pods she’d supervised in Armer.

  The same exact repositories; she remembered the serial numbers.

  And beside them, rows of mechanisms running on chaos energy. Dark mechanisms.

  She exhaled through her teeth. Whatever these cylinders and orbs were for, they were powered by chaos energy. Chaos energy that was supposed to have been harmlessly dispersed outside Polis Armer. This was the chaos workshop she’d been searching for.

  And Seekers had built it.

  Eleven minutes had passed since she’d entered Mathra’s chambers. The men and women she’d paralyzed would be moving their fingers by now. Within ten minutes, they’d be crawling to unbolt the Holder’s apartments.

  To work!

  Ironically, Terese’s training within the Immersion Chamber would be Sumad Reach’s undoing, since it was there that she’d learned what was necessary to destroy this place. She opened the chaos repositories’ maintenance hatches and retrieved thick cords from her backpack. It was a simple matter of attaching the cords to the repositories and cutting off the blunt-nosed plugs at their end. Chaos energy would pour from the repository unstopped. It wouldn’t dissipate like smoke in a breeze
. Instead, it would clump together, waiting to be used. Eventually, it would scatter, but not within the next few days. Which was fine, because she probably needed only another quarter of an hour.

  Calm hands. Keep it together.

  Her hands flew at their task. Why hadn’t she and the rest of the Immersion Project team been mindlocked like Jools’s team? She could only guess, but it probably had something to do with the fact that the Sumadan ‘scientists’ hadn’t had regular ease of access to the dozens of Seekers working on the project.

  But, Gods, what if they’d had more time in Armer? Could they have secured enough to mindlock hundreds of people like Jools? And a better question: Was Lijjen in full command of his own choices? What if Patzer wasn’t insane like she’d supposed, but instead so tightly controlled, he couldn’t make rational decisions?

  Terese went to work on the nodes cloaking the underground laboratory from Polis’s sight. With the pole set to a new frequency, she disintegrated the clay surrounding the cloak node, exposing its round yellow light, expanding and contracting like a heartbeat. That node, one of a network surrounding the basement, somehow obscured chaos energy from Polis. She pushed the cord in the hole and attached it to the blinking node.

  Then, she plopped large globs of a gel she’d bought from an apothecary every few steps as she ascended, dropping one of the chaos-powered mechanisms into each.

  The cadvers were still howling when she re-entered the upstairs room. Red foam leaked from the mouth of a bigger, older grinning cadver, at least ten years since infection. The largest cadver she’d ever taken had looked just short of fifty years. A spare shockpole hanging on the wall subdued the cadvers into twitching heaps, as using her own modified shock pole might have killed them, which she did not want yet.

  Shouts and yells rose from just outside the corridor while she was still smearing the solution on the cadvers’ cage locks.

  Gods, she’d thought she had more time!

  It would be a small group of select Missionaries coming for her, since not every Seeker knew of this place. She sighed. Only the most ambitious, people like her, would have been told.