by Harry Nix
We were in a junction of sorts. Smaller stone tunnels went off in six other directions. Some were blowing hot air, like from a furnace. Others were chilled. It mixed where we were and passed out the carved slot above us.
“I’m going left and down. Remember, if you don’t see me in a day but you find Death, set it off because I’ll be dead or captured,” Isabel said.
She vanished into the left tunnel before we could say a word to her.
I stood looking at the remaining tunnels, wondering which one to take when my gaze drifted across Ori.
Ori who could split himself into much smaller versions.
“When you split, do you know what the other you are doing?”
“It’s just me. It’s not other ink demons so yes, I know what I’m doing,” Ori squeaked.
I explained my idea but Ori merely scowled at me. Scarlet didn’t look too happy either.
“You realize that some mages use split ink demons to communicate over great distances, don’t you? That’s the other thing they do to us, apart from using our bodies to write their scrolls,” Ori said once I’d finished.
“I didn’t know,” I said. I thought it was an excellent idea. One Ori stays with me, the rest split and split and explore and relay back what they found.
“It’s kinda like asking a horse you’ve just freed from the cart to pull another cart,” Scarlet added.
“The difference is consent? You can choose to say no?” I said.
“You’re very different from other Summoners,” Ori finally said. Then he split and split again.
Soon I had an Ori no bigger than a finger standing in front of me. We sat down to join him as other Ori’s climbed into the tunnels and disappeared.
He closed his eyes and crossed his legs like a meditating Buddha. With his tiny size, his voice had risen several octaves and was like a mouse squeak.
“Kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, lots of kitchens, lots of cooking happening. Armory and men and women getting dressed. Bedroom, bedroom, water closet, oh!”
“What?”
“Lost one. A cat I think. It swatted into an opening. I think it was climbing in.”
“Keep going,” I urged. There wasn’t much of Ori left. We couldn’t afford to lose more of him.
“No pixie, no jail, more weapons, barrels, we’re looking for barrels? Lots of barrels!”
“How many?”
“At least fifty. They’re stretching off into the dark. There are guards loading them into carts. They have one of those elevators we went in.”
“If you keep going can you find your way back there? We need to locate the prison,” Finding Death straight up was a stroke of luck but we were here for Delicia.
“I can do it, oh, damn, lost another one. The cat is orange,” Ori said.
He started murmuring to himself as pieces of him explored the tunnel network. Rooms, kitchens, armories... it was like the mine had space for half a city atop it.
A gust of hot air blew out of one of the vents. It smelt like chemicals and for a moment my throat stung. They were brewing something toxic down there.
“The fact that Rax had this ventilation system carved into the cliff means he was the one brewing Death, right? He’s behind the spider kidnappings, too.”
I was still searching for definitive proof that he was evil.
Scarlet shrugged.
“He didn’t carve them. They were here hundreds of years before Rax was born. When they were being carved, there was a haze of white marble in the air, like chalk dust, turning me from red to pink—”
Scarlet stuttered to a halt.
“How long was I in that graveyard? How old am I?” she said, a tear streaking down her face.
“Do you remember anything else?” I asked, touching her shoulder. Perhaps it was like a dream and if she slipped back in soon enough, she would remember more.
“White dust, the marble, it was Summer I think. When it was night it was dark, true dark because—”
She gave a shuddering gulp.
“Because there were no stars,” she finished.
A blast of arctic air burst from one of the vents then, so strong and cold that it nearly knocked both of us over. Ori went flying, hitting the wall at high speed with a splat that had an unsettling crunch in it.
The moment the cold died away, we rushed over to him. There was a splot of ink on the wall, trickling down to the floor where he was gulping air, his little ink body broken.
“Down, down, left, straight, right, left, left, down, right, down...” He was gurgling now, little bubbles of ink on his lips.
I had nothing to heal him with.
“I found the pixie,” Ori gurgled once more before he died. His form held before liquefying into a puddle.
It would have been an Oscar-worthy death scene had not another Ori come barreling out of a vent, an orange cat hot on his tail.
The cat was ready to kill him until it saw us. It tried to reverse direction, went sliding out the vent, landed on its back and did a very ungainly roll and flip before scrabbling away into another vent.
Ori was beside my boot, panting.
“There’s... three of those sons of bitches. All... orange,” he gasped.
“You saw Delicia?” Scarlet asked once he’d caught his breath.
“I saw a pixie. Blonde, wearing rags, her wings magically bound. She’s in a cell six levels down,” Ori said. He’d walked over to the ink puddle of his dead body and stepped into it. As we watched, he absorbed the ink, growing slightly larger.
“I thought dead ink was no use to you?” I asked.
“Freshly dead I can use. Another minute and no,” Ori said. His voice had moved slightly down from mouse squeak registrar.
“We need to move. I think those orange cats could be working for Rax,” Ori said.
We let the tiny demon take the lead, following him into a vent. I hadn’t forgotten about Scarlet but there was no time to dwell. I squeezed her shoulder before we went in and she touched my hand in return. It was enough, for now.
The vent was gloomy gray, lit only by knife-cuts of light from gutter size holes cut into it here and there. At first it was big enough to hustle along in an uncomfortable crouch but soon it grew smaller and we were on hands and knees. I found myself behind Scarlet, which was a good place to be in general terms.
The first few slits we passed we were careful, moving slowly but as we went, we sped up. Most of them were angled so anyone in the room couldn’t see directly and the people we came across were busy with their tasks. I use the term “people” loosely. We passed by an armory filled with Orcs, at least a dozen, getting geared up for war.
Sometimes the slits were on the floor of the tunnel and we had to carefully skirt over it. One we passed over was above what had to be an abandoned throne-room. The drop was easily a hundred feet to cold white marble. There were pools of light here and there from some sort of glowing fungus. Even from high above I could make out the skeletons, most dressed in full armor, laying out flat on their backs, like they’d gone to sleep.
It was good Ori had returned. There was no way I could have remembered his instructions. Left and right were fine but down was hard. Sometimes the vent took a right angle and we had to clamber, searching for fingerholds that were barely there. It would have been pitch dark except for Scarlet with a flame burning on the tip of a finger.
The long shuffle through the dark gave me time to think, when I wasn’t focused on the pain in my knees. Maybe Scarlet was older than she remembered, some iteration of a previous version back when Lucy started up, carrying along fragments of memory. She remembered Bron because she’d known him, however many years ago.
It also confirmed to me once again that Lucy had to be reading my mind. I was so into things like this. Lost memories, old mysteries, fragments of clues. When I play games I read the notes, listen to the recordings, dig into the lore of it all. Scarlet being possibly hundreds of years old was exactly the kind of A-grade game nonsense I was dow
n for.
Which mean hey, another trillion for the Lubochenkos. I mean, mind-reading!
I hadn’t thought of them for a while but now down here in the dark, uncomfortable thoughts were crowding in.
This system was beyond anything ever invented. A flawless digital reality rendered in exquisite detail. This was bigger than just a game, which alone would be billions upon billions.
This was the kind of invention like the printing press, the internet, antibiotics.
But bigger than all of them. If Lucy could make a medieval fantasy world and populate it with magic and characters and stories, then why not a modern world? Simulate a few billion humans, have them write books, make inventions, create computer programs, make movies and TV series.
It would be a firehose of pure creativity and invention. Books written by digital authors who had no idea their reality was on a server somewhere. Medicines created by researchers.
Even all that, which was trillions upon trillions, paled beside a digital reality people could live in. There was some form of time distortion going on here too. I was in for a week but I was sure it had been more than a week already. How far could Lucy push it? Could a week out there be months to years in here?
My mind swam with the possibilities which then came all crashing down because they had one giant question behind them: why the hell were the Lubochenkos running this in a warehouse in the dodgy part of town, using just me to test it?
They could abandon crime altogether with the money Lucy would make.
It was like building a faster-than-light-speed spaceship and then using it to go to the supermarket.
Did they not know what they had? It seemed impossible. Lubocheeto was a violent thug but Dr Lubo was clever.
I wonder how she got that scar across her face?
I crawled into Scarlet, my face hitting her right in the butt when she abruptly stopped.
“None of that now,” the Demoness murmured in a seductive tone that sent a lot of blood rushing south.
Her tail brushed across my neck before she pressed herself against the wall, letting me crawl to the vent carved into the wall.
For a moment I thought I was looking at an underground lake. It was dark but as my eyes adjusted I saw it wasn’t water but something much darker.
“That’s... blood?” I said, not really believing it.
We were maybe fifteen feet up the wall, looking out rather than down. There was a dim glow beneath us, one of those flaming torches but turned to a mere flicker.
Scarlet put her head out the hole and took a deep sniff before pulling back in.
“I think that’s demon blood. Demoness blood too,” she said.
My mind immediately went to the ability I and my staff had to absorb things. Hadn’t it said something about the first drop being free but I’d have to seek out other sources? Well, here was a lake of blood. I could at least dip my staff in it.
“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” I asked Ori.
Instead of answering he split in two and one of him went rushing off into the dark.
“I didn’t come this way last time. Must have gotten mixed up. I’ll find the pixie now,” he squeaked.
He did his Buddha thing, murmuring rooms under his breath and sometimes flinching. Apparently the three orange cats were still roaming the vent system and he was steadily losing parts of himself.
It hadn’t even crossed my mind to think about the how of a lake of Demon blood before I saw the light glinting off Scarlet’s Echo Knife. She was clenching it in her hand, her red skin beginning to warm with an inner glow. This far down in the mine it was cool so it wasn’t too bad but if she overheated, she’d cook us like an oven.
“Rax must have been collecting demon blood,” I said, touching her. She started, as though only then remembering I was there.
“I was wondering why I hardly saw any demons or demonesses in Bron. Rabbits in waistcoats, Orcs, Vampires and other shambling monstrosities but I think I saw maybe two demonesses only. Now I know,” she said, clenching her mouth around the words.
“I saw one on the bridge. She was dressed like a nun. She was rushing along like she was being chased but I didn’t see anything behind her. It was just before they locked the gates,” I said.
“Bridges can be very romantic,” Scarlet said. I wasn’t sure she was entirely hearing me.
“I found the prison again. The pixie is still here,” Ori said.
There was a flare of light then, so bright we all pulled back from the vent. It quickly faded but even so, all I could see was a glowing rectangle in front of me. We’d been in the dark so long it was as struggle to see out the vent properly.
Eventually our eyes adjusted and we looked out again.
The lake was not in fact a lake but more a pool. Like an Olympic swimming pool, but maybe three or four times as wide. Torches all around it had lit up, revealing a scene of pure horror, perhaps even worse than the spiders.
Spread around the walls were tombs of amber and inside each one was a demon or demoness. Most were alive, stuck so tight they couldn’t move. Their hands were by their sides and in each wrist was a metal spike, like an intravenous line, that protruded out from the amber, drip, drip, dripping blood into the pool.
Two whole walls were covered in them. There had to be two hundred easily. Some of them were dead and a few of the amber tombs held bones with bits of rotting flesh stuck to them. The liquid dripping off the spike wasn’t blood but ichor, black and revolting.
The wall beneath us had only torches on it and a walkway beside the pool. In the dark before I hadn’t noticed it was black marble. To the left and right there were statues made of shimmershine ore, warriors in poses with sharp weapons.
“Why... why would anyone do this?” I said, trying to take it all in. The glare of the torches was still far too bright but I could make out a large door at the far end of the room. There were benches and a chair down there, plus what had to be a pile of freshly laundered towels. Things were falling into place all too quickly. This was a pool. Someone or something bathed here.
In blood. Lots of blood.
Scarlet started talking, her voice flat and emotionless.
“Many things feed on blood. There are spells too, death magics that draw on blood and suffering for power. There are mages who travel with carts of prisoners, torturing them to use their pain as a source. Entire towns have been murdered just to charge a mage for battle. There was a King, Mikolas, and he...”
Scarlet stopped and then shook herself.
“What was I saying? King who?”
“Are you feeling okay?” Ori squeaked.
The doors at the far end opened and in walked Rax.
He was still the kindly merchant, salt-and-pepper in his hair. He was eating something, bread maybe and had a cup in the other hand. He used his foot to push the door closed, looking like a father coming out of the kitchen after making a snack.
Into a room with a goddamn pool of blood and hundreds of trapped demons.
“The pixie, her name is Delicia. She says that Rax has a golden ring, middle finger, left hand, that she is magically bound by. We need to take it from him,” Ori said, talking fast.
This snapped Scarlet out of whatever was happening to her.
“Tell her Scarlet is here. Tell her we’re coming,” she urged in a whisper.
Ori nodded and then tilted his head to the side.
“She says don’t pull a Socie,” he whispered back. Rax had made us all extremely cautious.
Scarlet smiled and then focused back on Rax who’d sat on one of the benches to finish his food. Her smile turned to a grimace.
“She says he’s not a human. He’s a new thing. A Clot but not quite. Worse than them.”
“What’s a Clot?” I whispered. We were far from Rax but if he was some evil thing, I didn’t want to risk him having amazing hearing too.
“Blood monsters that pretend to be other creatures. One can rip through a village when
fully fed. Until then they drain slowly, poisoning, turning families against each other. They’re clever too. Not innocent, like a leech doing what it was made to do. Clots enjoy their evil,” Scarlet said.
Rax had finished his food now and after swallowing the last of his drink, he began to strip off. Soon he was down to a pair of fine silk boxers, so white they were glowing. He didn’t look like a monster, a Clot or anything else. Just a man. There were a few scars on his body, but he was no warrior. Just a merchant. He even had a bit of a pot belly, as some older rich men do.
He walked to the edge of the pool and put his legs in, as though testing the if it was warm enough.
I wished dearly for a crossbow. Something insanely strong with a poisoned bolt. Something I could fire straight through his face as he sat there, like it was some random weekend down at the swimming pool.
“If he goes in to rest, that’s our chance to kill him. Maybe he closes his eyes,” I whispered.
I was so quiet I think Scarlet was struggling to hear me.
Rax, not so much.
He waved his hand lazily, like an orchestra conductor and some great force gripped my body, like an iron fist.
My arm snapped as he heaved me out of the slit, taking part of the wall with it and the pain was beaten only by my legs, which caught at an odd angle before the bone gave way, breaking both my ankles. I saw a brief flash of blood and marble before he slammed me into a statue.
There was a snap, a rage of pain, a flash of black and when I opened my eyes again he was sitting on the stone bench, watching me. His legs were red to the knee with smears of blood from the pool.
The pain was gone but I quickly saw why—the status on my screen: back broken, paralyzed.
There was list of injuries beneath that but I ignored them. I couldn’t move, couldn’t feel anything below my chest. Even breathing was a struggle as though half my lungs didn’t want to cooperate.
There was a slight tingle down at my left hand, the tip of my little finger sitting against the marble. I could feel it, some nerve still connected.
“You won’t die. I’ll keep you like this, trapped in your body until your mind breaks,” Rax said.
He leaned closer.
“I’ve done it before to your kind,” he added.
