The Renegade Within

by Mark Johnson

  The gel hadn’t had enough time yet. She’d have to delay her pursuers, somehow. Just by a few minutes. But she couldn’t take on what sounded like… ten Seekers out there.

  What could she do?

  Her eye caught on the drawer containing the cage keys. She had an idea. It was worth a try.

  There was one empty cage left. The cadvers howled hungrily, clawing at her in futility as the cage door rattled shut. With her inside. A loud crack rang from the corridor as the door broke open. Probably using a battering ram. She pulled a glass tube from the satchel and set it on the cage’s floor. The clear liquid within sloshed as it rolled on the ground.

  A familiar voice echoed through the corridor. “What you accomplished today was masterful, Saarg.” It was Lijjen, his clipped voice calm as if seated behind his desk and once again blaming her for things that were not her fault.

  She closed her eyes, kept her mind still. She wouldn’t let him goad her. It wasn’t time to snap the glass tube at her feet. The gel needed more time to set.

  “Truly, I underestimated you. I can’t guess how you learned of the laboratory.”

  “The rest of my squad have no idea about this, Lijjen,” she called, allowing herself to sound hoarse, flustered. She didn’t need to try. The cadvers helped, their hissing and shrieking almost drowning her voice. “They know nothing. Don’t harm them.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Liar!

  “You barely escaped your death in the wastes, and your complement have been suitably distracted. I let you live, and you repay me like this?”

  The man really believed he was at the center of her world. Incredible.

  “I won’t harm you if you come in, Lijjen. I don’t have a fatal weapon.” Anything to buy time.

  There was whispering in the passageway. Lijjen stepped into view in his Keeper plate. Hard, with sharp edges. She kept her hands on her shockpole. His plate might absorb her concentrated shots if she tried it on him.

  “You’re upset,” he said. “I understand. But whatever you hoped to accomplish, there is no way out. I promise you will die quickly. If you think there is a better option, I’d like to hear it.”

  “We both know I’m dead, Lijjen. How I die doesn’t matter. Just tell me why.”

  Lijjen’s posture relaxed. Terese shifted and the glass tube bumped against her boot.

  “You came to us at an interesting time, Saarg. Recent, ah, discoveries brought to our attention have caused us to question the nature of our allegiances.”

  “You want to rebel against the Royals, using modified cadvers because you can’t make golem? What is wrong with you?”

  Lijjen shook his head like he was rolling his eyes behind his helmet. “Whoever sent you knows nothing. The hybrid cadvers are a first step, not the end-product. We have created something… wondrous.” He sounded so proud, so rational.

  “Like what?”

  “Something those within the Center have no answer for.”

  “You can’t control it, Lijjen. It’ll backfire!”

  There was a smile in his voice. “It works, Saarg. You’ve seen its handiwork.”

  The slaughter she and her two missionaries had found in the Wastes? Or… the Immersion Chamber?

  “The Royals will falter before us,” he continued. “Why should they have all the golem? If we Seekers were once a religious order and are now a military one, why should we not undergo another evolution? Given what we’ve learned these past years, we can become engineers!”

  Terese recoiled. Gods. That had been the same rationale given to Holder Moorcam; encouraging a Seeker change of identity. Armer Stone had been told the Seekers might one day become ‘doctors’, and Sumad Reach had been promised they could become ‘engineers.’ All promises built on lies.

  “Lijjen, you can’t fight evil with evil, no more than you can stay clean in a mudfight! It’s madness!”

  “It’s temporary, Saarg.”

  Had Lijjen been mindlocked like Jools, or not? There was no point asking. “Is it worth betraying the Founders, Lijjen?”

  He chuckled. “Nothing in the charter bans Seekers from experimenting on cadvers.”

  It was everything she expected from Lijjen. A defiance of the Charter’s spirit. His was a cynical repudiation of the obligation to protect the innocent. A man who’d knowingly done bad things, taking shelter in false righteousness. She’d known many like him: Cowards who lied about their intentions because their actions were despicable. As she’d done. It was how sociopaths like Lijjen rose to the top.

  She cut him off mid-speech. “But how did you get the technology you’ve used on the cadvers? Where did the knowledge come from?”

  He sounded irritated at the interruption. “A contact came across an archaeological dig further in.”

  Antiques. Patzer.

  “An unparalleled find, dating back to the Founding. Artifacts still working, humming with the power they were stowed with five thousand years ago. Can you imagine it?” He gestured excitedly. “We will do what no one has done before,” he declared. “We will overthrow the Royals!”

  Oh, for the love of Polis!

  “Lijjen, I know Patzer is being mind-controlled by the Darkness. What do you say to that?”

  Lijjen’s helmet had tilted as if he were considering the question, then looked around like he were searching for something. Like… he hadn’t heard her.

  “Lijjen? Patzer and the Darkness?”

  He folded his arms and rocked back on his heels.

  A figure in male Sumadan head plate rushed in. Lijjen snapped out of his trance. The head handed Lijjen a metallic tube. A bolt projector, she realized. With a pull of its trigger, compressed air would fling the metallic bolt waiting inside, and easily puncture her armor.

  “Any last words?” he said.

  Yes. Hopefully, she’d bought herself enough time. “Lijjen, do you know a guaranteed strategy to infiltrate a fortress vastly above your own strength?”

  “No.” He raised the projector and aimed through the sighting ring at her helmet. She closed her eyes as she crushed the glass tube underfoot.

  “Don’t plan on leaving alive.”

  21

  Lijjen snorted. “Not an unlikely—”

  Nearby cage locks exploded in a crack of purple light, bright even behind closed eyelids. More explosions flared as her crushed tube’s evaporating particles expanded to the other cages, blowing them open. She opened her eyes as the bolt clanged into the bars near her head. The first explosion had knocked Lijjen down. He’d be blinded for a few moments.

  The cadvers dragged, staggered and stepped from their cages. Cadvers didn’t scream when they found their targets, they made noises somewhere between howling and laughter.

  Help rushed from the corridor to the flailing Lijjen. Armed missionaries should have made easy meat of a dozen maimed cadvers, but the chaos-scented explosions Terese had prepared lured the cadvers away, down the stairs. The Seekers were forced to follow, leaving the injured Lijjen.

  In moments, the final explosion would blow open the chaos repositories she’d activated, down below.

  Lijjen was sprawled on the ground, his cracked helmet discarded, revealing his raw skin and blackened scalp. A cadver had torn at his leg.

  The look of hate he threw her reminded her of Keeper Makkdarm with the dagger in his throat.

  Terese unlocked her cage.

  Lijjen crawled backwards. “What was the point of that?” he snarled.

  “I’m sorry your missionaries will die, Lijjen,” she said, “but they chased cadvers into a hotbed of chaos.” It was her voice, speaking from somewhere far away. The calm had returned.

  He glared at her in dazed contempt.

  A boom sounded below. Cadvers shrieked. “That’s the sound of the chaos repositories opening their loads.”

  A paling of his dark face. “No,” Lijjen barked. “Fool! You’ve unleashed charged cadvers in a chapterhouse. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

&n
bsp; Neither did he. She explained as she worked her shockpole’s tip. “When you have a Polis that can’t quite see the chaos energy you’ve hidden,” she explained, “you have to give Him a little encouragement.” She pulled out the stone Morgenheth had given her, placing it on an enlarged ammunition socket in her altered pole. “I’ve opened the repositories, which are supplying the charge to the cadvers, who are drinking in the chaos.” She didn’t want to imagine what it looked like. Human screams echoed from below, harmonies of terror and pain. “I exposed one cloaking node, and it’s absorbing the chaos from the repositories. Now the node is infected, the chaos energy will spread to other nodes.” She held up her pole. “This pole I’ve altered, is set to fire at light strength and wide angle, and will travel down to Polis. It will tell Him that Sumad Reach is compromised by chaos, with an entire subterranean structure surrounded by chaos pulses, inside of which are a dozen deranged cadvers in a feeding frenzy, drinking in chaos energy from what He will only be able to perceive as some sort of chaos fountain. The longer the image I send him, the more panicked He will become.

  “And the faster He will come to Swallow us.”

  Lijjen stiffened. Not even replying, he turned and staggered frantically out of view and up the corridor.

  That… that would do nicely as a final memory of Keeper Lijjen.

  She pulled apart the pole tip to allow for a wide angle and stood it on the floor, pulling the trigger, the little mechanism rattling as it set to destroying an ancient fortress. Only inhuman howls from below. The cadvers would have taken on an unbelievable amount of chaos by now.

  The chamber shook. Quietly at first, almost imperceptibly, then with smoothly-accelerating vigor. The Swallowing. Polis Sumad was on His way.

  She relaxed for the first time in months.

  She’d had a fear of drowning her whole life. Of dark ceilings of water falling on her from far above and of gagging and flailing in darkness. Would dying in a Swallowing be the same as drowning? Or would she be crushed first? How long would the lights last before the dark consumed all?

  Such questions would ordinarily have distressed her, but now, looking death in the eye, she was unafraid. She would die. Hopefully quickly.

  How ironic. She was at her most content, moments before her death. The high point of her career would be what killed her. The Seekers couldn’t let her live to tell the story, and she dared not release the trigger in case Sumad settled. And she wanted Him enraged; to lash out with a fury remembered for generations. To make Sumad Reach a shameful byword for disgraced chapterhouses.

  She wondered what the renegades had wanted of her out at HopeWall. The decent thing would have been to at least visit them, but that hadn’t been possible. The only way to solve this problem was by dying alongside it.

  She was ready.

  There were no more tricks in her satchel.

  With her free hand she pulled a small wooden frame from her satchel. A pencil drawing of Pella’s face. Messy, short brown hair and shy smile, small nose and green eyes. And those beautiful freckles.

  Terese tugged off her helmet to look on Pella with her own eyes and awaited the Gods.

  The world shuddered harder.

  The room’s glowbulb pulsed like a heartbeat at His approach. Masonry scraped against itself and slowly shattered. Shockpoles mounted on the walls clattered to the ground. Shelves tipped over. Her knees hurt from kneeling on the bouncing floor.

  And in a distant corner of her mind sounded a scraping rattle. A sound felt more than heard. The Roar. The sound of the God Himself, come to send her to His awaiting brethren. She hoped they’d show her mercy.

  It would be safe to let the trigger go now. The cadvers had stopped wailing at the thundering earth’s rising sound. She removed the stone from the pole. She wanted it with her, its pulse in her fist as the world went dark. It brightened. Perhaps it was excited to meet its master. The blue glow lit Pella’s face in undulating waves, almost alive.

  Armer watch over you, Pelina Saarg, Armer save you and keep you. Armer love you as I do.

  “Terese Saarg.”

  A voice in her head and a shape above her. An old Sumadan man appeared, made from the stone’s blue light. He was dressed in the sort of sophisticated robes the spirits at the monk hill had worn, and beaming a kind smile as he leaned on his cane.

  He knelt to join her, his hands wrapped around hers. Around the stone.

  She looked into his eyes and lost herself. Nothing mattered but this being. There was no sound nor sight.

  22

  “Will it… be fast?” Terese asked the spirit. She didn’t ask if it would be painful, for she knew the answer.

  Glass shattered, stone moaned. A piece of the roof crashed to the floor. There was warmth on her back, where her tattoo rested.

  A sound pushed into her head. The Roar, the herald of Polis’ arrival. Grinding. Metallic. Harsh. And louder than she’d ever heard it. Terrifying, exalting, enervating.

  The Sudaman spirit pushed her satchel’s strap into her hands. “Flee and live, Terese. Live and defend, Custodian.”

  What?

  But the man vanished into darkness as her stone dimmed.

  Flee? She could flee? Shaky, she clambered to her feet. What did he mean, ‘Custodian’? She thrust Pella’s picture back in her satchel and tucked the stone into her plate. She put the helmet back on her head. The room shook and the ground jolted, the Roar penetrating, tearing at her mind, madness waiting within the sound.

  Flee and live.

  It was impossible to survive a Swallowing. But could she escape one?

  She stumbled back up the corridor. Another jolt sent her to the floor. The room shuddered. Chunks of clay fell from the ceiling. The corridor tilted, turning the building on its side. She pushed forward, straining and stumbling. Another jolt toppled the world again. When she rose, the room lay sideways. She pushed out of the corridor behind the hidden bookcase.

  Holder Mathra’s quarters were bent out of shape, filled with fallen wooden shards, glass-filled cabinet doors and millennia of Seeker tradition. Her escape, the door from Mathra’s quarters, was up an impossibly steep incline.

  Sumad, how do you expect me to get out of here?

  Another shake tipped the room and she fell backwards. She landed on the broken glass of a fallen picture frame. The tear from her first raid scorched her side, and she cried out, her voice drowned in the Roar. There was no way to reach the door. Even if she made it, how could she get beyond a Swallowing?

  A large brick fell toward her head. She punched it. The brick flew away, shattering against the wall. She blinked. The pain should have been excruciating, but there was nothing. Her arm wasn’t numb—she’d knocked it aside like a bug.

  The stone burned against her hip. What had the Sumadan spirit done?

  Another seismic shake, rendering the Holder’s apartments even more unrecognizable. This time she didn’t buckle when the stone vibrated, hot, almost scorching. Feeling an unfamiliar strength in her legs, she jumped for the door, twisting to seize the frame at the top of a fifteen-foot leap.

  She buried plate-gloved hands in the wooden timbers, leaping upwards toward the surface like a cat up a tree. Stone blocks loosened and masonry crumbled every time she touched a surface. She jumped and ricocheted up the corridor without pause, bounding from bulb fastenings, bannisters and any irregular surface in reach. The bulbs had failed, plunging the sinking chapterhouse into darkness, yet she saw everything.

  A small, glow. Above her, in the darkness.

  Her back tingled, her nerves afire, her body burning with power.

  The Roar was all. It sang. Deep melodies of thumping cadences beating in time like a leviathan’s heartbeat, taking everything to the ocean floor. It pushed her onwards, upwards, streaks of light streaming in her wake.

  She flew up stone halls, past dining rooms and offices. Falling masonry and furniture sped toward her, but she was faster. Barely seeing the debris, she dodged and ducked as she ascend
ed. Her kicks landed on the heavier falling objects and gave her more speed.

  Nothing she’d ever heard had suggested this was possible.

  She was light and energy given body and purpose. Soaring from the darkness to the light above, through a distant window.

  Calling her.

  The light was a glowbulb, shining above the chapterhouse battlements. The corridor flew past.

  A final leap took her to a barred window. The black, starless sky above her, shaking buildings falling apart. Not caring that it wasn’t possible, she pulled the bars from the window, squeezed through the space, and gasped the cool night air.

  But she was below ground level, sinking within an enormous, dark pit, atop the disintegrating chapterhouse. What had been ground level was now twenty feet above her head.

  The Swallowing’s hole continued sinking into the Roar, the distance to ground level increasing by the second.

  Another jolt shook her to all fours, looking down into the window she’d escaped moments earlier.

  Wait! What was that, rising up through the darkness below? The Swallowing itself. The bodies that performed the destruction. She had no description or useful metaphor for what she saw. Armer bless, what was that?

  She turned, running from the sight below, for the building’s rim. At the edge, she took a final push into the air for the ruined courtyard overhead. The height she reached came from no strength of hers, with an acuity of aim not her own.

  Time slowed.

  She soared from the pit, rising above the ground, fleeing the Swallowing. Her flailing limbs moved through the air like jelly and the pit’s edge passed beneath her as in a dream. She was above a courtyard, tumbling toward the solid ground. She fell on impact and tumbled, rolling over until she collided against a fountain, the impact emptying her lungs. She lay in a trembling heap. Nearby, a thick palm tree wavered and collapsed. She gasped, sucking in more dust than air, and coughed. A cool winter breeze blew through her damaged plate and helmet.

  The Roar was quieter outside the Swallowing.