“You haven’t killed me yet,” Clara reasoned, “the giant in your vision - he immediately changed and started killing, right? That means for whatever reason, you’re stronger than him. It doesn’t control you, you control it.” The voice inside me growled at the assertion, but I forced it down further, testing both Clara’s theory and my own strength. To my surprise it was quickly suppressed, and I felt more like myself again. Even the faint pain from the dim light of the repository hall hurt less, even if my skin remained disturbingly inhuman.
“Looks like it,” I confirmed with relief. “But why Wusul? I have a job to do as well, you know that. I have… obligations.” For some reason I didn’t want her to think less of me, so I quickly corrected the last part from ‘crippling debts’.
Clara gave me a wry look, “I know your sort. Unmarried, few real friends, too lazy to take up arms or work a farm, but too poor to slack off?” It was a wounding assessment, but I couldn’t really correct her and she continued, “A life bouncing from crime to crime until you messed up, badly, and had to pay the price to someone worse?”
I sighed and nodded. “You make it sound so bad. I became a delver didn’t I?”
Clara barked a laugh, “Completely of your own volition, I’m sure.”
I shrugged, “I made a choice. That choice just happened to be inspired by knives.” I knew she was trying to distract me, and herself, but I didn’t mind. It was better than dealing with the fact that I’d become a monster.
Clara forced a grin, I guessed she was probably also trying to distract both of us from what we’d just learned and the fact that I was standing in front of her looking like some kind of demon from the pits of the hells. I hadn’t seen my face yet, but from the look on Clara’s and her unwillingness to make eye contact, it was bad. “Sure,” she laughed anyway, “either way, I promise you’d be better off with Wusul. You know more about these ruins and devices than any of the scholars that briefed us coming down here.”
I considered it for a moment. I hadn’t thought about it. I was certainly one of the more experienced delvers in Qalea, through sheer luck more than anything else. If Wusul were getting in the game, they’d probably pay well, and probably be a lot less free with the large knives. “Sounds interesting,” I said, “but the people I work for… they’re not huge fans of their people cutting and running.”
“Who cares?” Clara answered immediately, “it’s not like delvers always come back, you could just disappear and never come out again. You came in a different route to my squad, right?” I nodded assent. “We leave my way, get you to our scholars, you live a life of luxury, I get a commendation; it’s a win-win.” She leaned forwards earnestly.
“You’re not concerned about the whole ‘murdering this entire city’ thing?” I asked, finding the elephant in the room and setting it on fire. Clara sighed.
“I could go out tomorrow with an axe and start swinging. Doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to live,” she eventually answered, but I could see the shame as her brain went down the same roads as mine had already.
“I’m sure the possibility of weaponising me never crossed your mind.” I said quietly. I wasn’t a fool, unleashing a force like the beast that killed these people on an enemy would be catastrophic. The darkness inside me perked up for a moment as I thought again of the slaughter and made a contented sound. It probably liked the thought of being a weapon. I, however, did not. “I’ll come with you, but you have to promise me you will never tell them about what’s happened to me.” Clara protested but I raised a hand to silence her. “Promise. Me. This is my price.”
She sighed, “Fine. Your knowledge is enough.”
“Promise me.” I was deadly serious, and knew Wusuli people almost always kept their promises. We used to laugh at them back home, but I was glad at it now.
“I promise.” Without warning she yanked out her knife and cut across her palm, flipping the blade and holding it out to me. It seems she felt I needed some extra reassurance, so I took it. After taking a breath I quickly attempted to run the blade across my hand. Nothing happened. I could feel the pressure of the blade, but there was no pain, no blood. The palm of my hand stared back at me in the darkness, unbroken. Clara stood expectantly, unable to see the detail as I stood out of the light. She frowned. “Well?”
“Er, slight problem,” I coughed, extending my hand and turning my palm so she could see it. “I can’t seem to cut it.”
Clara’s eyes widened, and she held out her hand for the knife. I passed it over and without warning she lunged for my hand, bringing the light close and slashing the blade across it. This time I grunted with pain, and black blood began to leak from my hand. She grabbed it with her bleeding hand and shook, sealing our deal before I snatched my hand back. The moment I came out of the light, the wound sealed before my eyes. Clara grinned, “Sorry, wanted to test that.” It seemed I wasn’t the only one with a scholarly bent. “Seems the light lets me cut you if it’s bright enough. That explains why that monster doesn't like it.” She gripped the blade determinedly with a savage grin on her face.
“We’re not going hunting.” I said firmly, clutching my now unmarked hand and pre-empting what I knew was coming. Clara nodded but I was sure that if we crossed paths with the beast, the chances of her not attempting to take her revenge were slim. “Come on,” I said, “I think I know where to find some good stuff.” I originally said it as a distraction from her going to immediately hunt the beast, but my newfound memories turned my lie into a certainty. The vault wasn’t far. I turned back into the main area of the repository and looked for a door which I knew stood on the far end of the room. It stood there, partially blocked by a bit of debris but mostly intact. Clara came along after me eagerly. I gestured to the rubble and went to attempt moving it, in the hopes that the room inside wasn’t completely buried. Whispers in my mind told me that this was the room I’d been looking for from the beginning, where they kept the latest and greatest prototypes. They’d probably have taken some with them in the evacuation, but I hoped something would be left.
On a count of three we lifted, or we went to lift the large stone that formed the bulk of the debris. In reality, though, I lifted it, easily hefting it straight out of Clara’s grasp. We stood there for a moment, me holding a large chunk of stone the size of myself easily in one hand and exchanged wide-eyed glances.
“Guess there’s an upside to the whole murderous monster thing,” Clara noted. I swallowed, nodded and set the rubble down to one side. We made rapid progress after that, me using my newfound strength to shift the larger pieces, Clara swiftly clearing the rest aside. By the end of it, she was breathing heavily and yet I was still unaffected. The dim light of the entryway still stabbed at me, but so long as Clara kept her more intense source away from me, I felt more energised than I felt the pain, like waking up from a really good nap with a mild hangover. I theorised that the energy I was absorbing from the light, while somewhat painful, was actually recharging me as fast as I was using up my own reserves. That explained why the weapons the inhabitants used had little effect, the beast and the thing inside me clearly fed off whatever arcane energy they used, while Clara’s knife was nothing more than cold hard steel. Their advanced weaponry became their downfall. I saw once more the small child-like figures falling before the beast, their lives cut short and stopped for a moment, reliving the horror once more. The darkness inside chuckled gleefully.
When Clara looked at me questioningly, I nodded to her hip where her long blade hung in its sheath. “If I ever…” I trailed off.
Clara looked down and met my eyes, then simply nodded. “I’ll do it. No hesitation.” I’m not sure if that was the most comforting thought I’d ever heard, but it settled my nerves anyway, and in another moment the doors were clear. Tall and wrought from stone like the other doors we’d encountered, that was where the similarities stopped. This was the strongest room in the repository, and you could tell it just by looking at what barred the way. Two strong doors st
ood before us, banded with that mottled metal we’d seen on the barrels of the mounted weapons that had done their best to vaporise us what felt like an eternity ago. Around the bands, intricate carvings of what could only be devices performing miraculous acts wound their way across the stone. In one, a small figure held an orb in front of a burning building, a ribbon of flame snaking its way towards him. I wasn’t sure if it represented him burning the building down or putting it out. Possibly both. In another, one of the taller beings held a pair of rods, and around him objects and other people rose into the air, hanging as if from an invisible thread.
Dipping into the memories I’d acquired, I gestured for Clara to step back and crouched down. Running my hands over the lower carvings, I found concealed knobs, and twisted them in a very specific order. With a grinding sound, the door begun to swing open towards us of its own accord. The corridor beyond was blessedly dark, even though I knew it should be brightly lit and I darted inside with a sigh of relief. Clara stood at the entryway, waiting for me to give her the go-ahead, and I took the moment to lean in the darkness. The light may have energised me to make getting in effortless, but nobody likes being constantly stabbed with pins or being slowly burned by the sun, and the light felt a bit like that at its weakest. After all too brief a rest, I called for Clara to follow, and set off down the tunnel.
The passageway sloped gently downwards and to the left, so subtly that to Clara’s eyes without my somewhat unique perspective it probably seemed like it was going straight. The passage continued for an indeterminate amount of time, and I waved Clara away from a few of the doors that we passed along the left hand wall that I knew held little more than administrative offices. While the work that was done here was top secret, it was worthless to us as no records would remain. As I had hoped, the structure itself remained relatively intact, the collapse not extending into the rest of this part of the complex. Finally we came to another set of huge doors, this time wrought of metal, which I eagerly pushed open. In my excitement, I put far too much force into it, and instead of swinging open smoothly the way I knew they should, the doors jerked and slammed back with a resounding boom. Clara jumped as the noise pierced the dark, and I apologised briefly, but she pushed past me, inspiring a wince as the now-familiar pain of close-range illumination stabbed through me. Once in the room, she held her light aloft. Although I knew what was coming, I still let out a gasp, and Clara swore softly.
What was before us was what remained of the pride of the people who once lived here. An oblong room the size of the hall we’d come from, this room was filled with finely wrought pedestals, atop which occasionally sat devices of all shapes and sizes, as well as some I’d never seen before. In their evacuation the inhabitants had taken the things that mattered to them the most, as many empty pedestals attested, but there were still a number of hugely valuable treasures to behold. We moved through the room, calling out to each other what we found. Once more my memories came in extremely useful, as although the minds that the umbral resonator had absorbed didn’t have all the answers, what they couldn’t remember was made irrelevant by my greater understanding of how to ascertain the purpose of relics much more reliably than my old method of ‘point-away-from-face-and-hope’.
“Dav, this one’s an orb about the size of my fist. Two bands, horizontal and vertical. Where they intersect there’s gems, apart from one on side where there seems to be a button…” Clara trailed off and I panicked.
“DON’T PUSH IT!” I roared, leaping away from the device I was inspecting and racing at an unbelievable speed to Clara’s side, snatching her hand back. I must’ve cleared over ten metres in under a second from a standstill, and for a moment she looked at me in shock. I made no apologies, however, and explained myself. “That,” I said, gesturing to the orb, “is an explosive. It explodes into a huge ball of flame about three seconds after you push the button.” Instead of looking scared, Clara looked dangerously intrigued.
“How big?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but it’d probably fill this room. Thing’s reusable as well, not destroyed in the blast. Please don’t blow us up,” I concluded. It seemed somewhat foolhardy leaving a weapon like that lying around, but I suppose they figured that anyone dumb enough to get into a secure storage vault and then press random buttons deserved what they got. I didn’t air that thought to Clara, however. I’m possessed, not stupid.
Clara laughed and picked up the orb. It was probably exactly what she came for, a tool of mass destruction that probably shouldn’t be in human hands. I gestured for her to wait and touched a notch on the pedestal in front of her. It opened up to reveal a case for the orb.
“Don’t want to be carrying that in your bag without something to stop it going off.” Clara nodded in gratitude and placed the explosive carefully into its protective container before stashing it away as per our deal.
-Boring. Death without hearing the screams is not as delicious.- My dark passenger grumbled from the confines of my soul, and I forced it back down. Every time it spoke I felt the rush of intense pleasure felt by the beast as it killed combined with the pain of its victims, and I did not want to think about that for too long.
By an unspoken agreement we stuck together from that point on, and I led her to another device that I’d passed and thought she’d be especially interested in. It looked like a cylinder, slightly curved, made entirely of metal and polished to a shine. Clara worked it out immediately.
“Is that… a hilt?”
I grinned and extended my arm out to one side, utilising the ‘point-away-from-face’ technique, a Dav original. With a grin I gave it a squeeze and with a thought a shimmering blade of energy shot out from the hilt away from me, about the length of my arm.
“It adapts to its wielder,” I slashed in the air between us, “it’s completely weightless,” I tossed it into the air, temporarily dismissing the blade, “it’s impossible to cut yourself with it,” I caught it again, bringing the blade back into existence and swinging it at my other hand, where it harmlessly bounced off, “and,” I concluded, “it can cut through iron like butter. I think.” That last part was untested as the people who created it were far beyond the use of iron, but it followed that if it could cut through stone and other materials the way my memories claimed, it’d not prove much of a challenge.
Clara looked at the hilt the way I’ve only ever seen a woman look at a lover or a particularly nice piece of jewellery, and I tossed it over to her.
“How does it work?” she breathed, immediately breaking Dav’s First Law of Not Pointing Dangerous Devices at Your Face as she tried to find where the blade came from. I reached over, enduring the pain of the light for a moment, and tilted it away from her face.
“Point away from your own squishy bits and squeeze.” She did so, eagerly, but nothing happened, and she gave me a desperate look. I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Next,” I continued, “think about the form you want it to take.” Clara grinned with childlike glee as the blade of energy I’d summoned before appeared and begun to shorten to a dagger, then elongate to a long, thin sword. “You can get pretty fancy with it too with practice,” I gestured for her to hand it over, which she did reluctantly, and focused on a memory one of the minds had of experimenting with the blade. The blade formed and rapidly shifted shapes, first becoming a humble fork, then an axe, before morphing into a strange dual tipped weapon I’d never seen, but was familiar to my memories. Finally I flicked my wrist and the energy lashed out into the air, cracking and flexing like a whip.
“You’ve practiced with one of these before?” Clara asked, watching my showboating with barely restrained avarice. I quickly turned the weapon over before she tackled me for it.
“Not exactly…” I realised that I’d never actually told Clara about the extents of the new information pouring into my head, and quickly filled her in. “I don’t know everything they knew, and I don’t know how much of what they knew that I now know, but the easy stuff is up
here already,” I concluded, and tapped my head.
Clara sighed as she listened and failed to get the blade to take any particularly complex forms. “Now you really have to come back to Wusul,” she said, and I grimaced.
“I’m going to have to spend a lot of time talking to scholars aren’t I?” I whined. While I’ll admit I have an inclination towards scholarship, sitting in a library all day wasn’t really my idea of fun. Clara didn’t respond, however, as she was too busy slashing her new toy at the air, going through basic forms with it set to the size of her customary long knife.
I left her to it as I spotted another occupied pedestal not far away. Atop it rested a bundle, and my memories were not forthcoming as to what it was. I supposed this was a later addition that the scholars I’d absorbed didn’t know about. The bundle turned out to be a belt with a pouch, which startled me, none of the devices I’d ever heard of were anything other than stone, metal, or a strange rigid material that we’d never been able to replicate, commonly called eld. Don’t ask me why they call it that. I now knew the true name of it, but like so many other things to do with the language of the builders, my mouth was in no way equipped to enunciate it, so I won’t even try. The pouch, however, was fabric, finely woven to the point where I couldn’t make out individual threads. The belt itself appeared to be leather of a grade I’d never seen, smooth and cold to the touch. Tapping into my memories I carried out some basic diagnostics. Firstly, I applied pressure to each part of the belt, taking care to not apply enough to trigger anything, but enough that I’d be able to feel a reaction before it happened. I didn’t get anything, so I moved on with a series of minor tests, all of which revealed that the belt did absolutely nothing, as far as I could tell at least.
With some trepidation I opened the pouch, which was secured by a small metal fastener, I reached inside but felt only air. Oddly though, not the inside of the pouch. I moved my hand around, but still found no resistance, as if I were reaching into an empty space. Emboldened, I stuck my arm deep into the pouch, and watched as it swallowed it up to my shoulder. It was a surreal sight, the pouch on the outside being about the size of a regular belt pouch, but clearly not constrained by that on the inside. I pulled my arm out and pulled a coin from a pocket. I dropped it into the pouch and listened. There was a distant clink, as if the coin had landed at the bottom of a well. I reached in, but was unable to retrieve it. Whoever designed the pouch clearly didn’t think too far ahead. I put the bag up to my face and peered inside. With my enhanced vision, the darkness posed no issue as I found myself looking into a large stone chamber. At the bottom I could see my coin, but also a few strange cylindrical objects. With a laugh I realised that I knew what they were - writing implements. Clearly whoever built this device tested it the same way I did, by dropping something close to hand, but never found a way to get them out again. I tried upending the pouch, but the objects inside remained unaffected, stuck to the floor of the room. I shrugged and closed the pouch before looping the belt around my waist, putting my own, much poorer quality, belt into a pocket. If nothing else, I now had a much nicer bit of leather holding my trousers up.
Into the Dark Page 7
