A New Pantheon

            “We’re still figuring it out ourselves.”

            Jack Milton, who had been going under the name Jack Cart for a good while now, found himself walking down the hallway of his childhood home, back in Eliot, a suburb of Entraht, the capital of Narcia. Their house was nice, though perhaps not any nicer than the average Narcian home. There were three stories and the only eccentricity to the architecture was a small room that rose above the third floor with large windows that allowed for a relatively unimpeded view of the night sky. Of course, being so close to the capital meant there was a fair amount of light pollution, so only the brightest stars in each constellation were visible and the Path of Aeoes was so faint you could never be sure if you were not merely imagining it.

            The area got winters with some snow, but as he walked through the house, he could not reconcile the powdered street outside with the humid summer heat he felt indoors. Oddly, it was not this discrepancy that convinced him he was dreaming. It was instead the fact that Tessa was standing next to him.

            Jack had two sisters, both younger. Gwen was only two years his junior, and he had always thought of her as one of his best friends. She was artistic in a way he always admired and envied, and lived in Omlos, working in independent film. The youngest Milton kid was Sandy, who had gone straight from college to law school and had somehow beaten both of her older siblings to settling down with a spouse and was a year away from starting her own law firm. Sandy had always been far more competitive than her older siblings, which bred not exactly animosity, but a slightly greater distance than any of them would prefer. Jack and Gwen were a unit, of sorts, and while Jack had only the faintest memories of Gwen as a bump in his mother’s belly, the two of them had had four years together before Sandy came along to be this strange entity: a third Milton kid.

            They walked past Sandy’s room and Jack had a moment of dissonant emotion: he saw Sandy, not the ambitious young woman in her mid twenties with a wife and house and a future all kicked into high gear, but the little eight-year-old who used to draw pictures of spaceships and cute aliens.

            “Am I ever going to be able to show this to you?” he asked Tessa.

            “Do you want to?”

            “I think I do. Is that insane?”

            Tessa shrugged. “You should probably talk to me about it when you wake up.” There it was: that was just his own words coming from her mouth. He felt the frustration of having accomplished something only to realize it was merely in his imagination that he had done so.

            Play-acting as a couple with Tessa had been an odd experience. Staying in Kapla all this time, they had not really talked about it. He was no mind reader, but he suspected his feelings were reciprocated. On the other hand, there was a nagging thought at the back of his mind – Tessa’s role had been, initially, to recruit him. But with the House collapsing all around them, that mission had to be on hold.

            Hadn’t it?

            She had told him how she was recruited – the awful man who had married her mother, the strange gentleness of the man who had killed her stepfather. It was a surreal story, but sounded genuine. Gwen would have called it Jack’s “Knight Complex,” but the story had enhanced his protective instincts toward the agent called Dust. The nagging doubt was whether that had all been by design. Perhaps, Jack thought, it was the design of her superiors, though he could not help but worry that Tessa herself was interested in manipulating him.

            And yet…

            He had torn that faceless man apart. He still did not understand it, but he did feel as if there were something within him that had come online, waking up for the first time. And he had no clue as to what it was.

            He walked with dream-Tessa up the stairs into that observatory at the top of the house. But as they climbed far too many stairs, he realized that they were actually walking down – down, down, down into the Lower Block of Castlebrook Prison. Maybe that was why there was snow outside.

            It was winter when his team came to the ruins of the White Citadel and found the remnants of what seemed to be a battle. There were as many as twenty bodies, some torn apart as if by a huge beast, others sporting burns from some kind of arcane spell effect, but most sporting gunshot wounds from one hell of a powerful firearm.

            When they searched the area, they spotted a blonde woman carrying a sword, standing over the body of an extraordinarily pale man, his wound and the weapon both dripping with colorless grey blood. Jack was the first to spot her, and his hesitation gave her a chance to escape. There was something about the woman that awed him. The best he could ever do to describe it, even to himself, was that he felt as if he had been looking at some kind of religious scene – something that would one day be made into a stained glass window, that artists would strive to portray.

            She ran, and it took another week to finally track her down. When they did, she had been oddly cooperative. Never, even with several enforcement officers holding guns pointed at her, did Jack ever believe she was in any danger – at least not from them.

            She was arrested, awaiting formal charges, but they had a judge grant a special dispensation to have her held in the Lower Block, believing that she was likely a powerful enough arcanist that a mundane holding facility would be unable to contain her.

            And yet, even Castlebrook Prison opened for her like a wet paper bag. The reports said she simply opened her locked door – a door warded with about fifteen layers of magical protection – stepped right past the silver golem who guarded and cared for the prisoners, and walked up the stairs and out the door as if the building were not a prison at all.

            So it was perhaps inaccurate to see her down here, in the Lower Block. But he figured it was forgivable, as that had been the last time he saw her.

            “Commander Milton,” said the woman. “Long time no see.”

            “Jack’s better.”

            “Jack. Ok.” Even in the moment, Jack thought it strange how much their words lacked that typical dreamlike surrealism.

            Tessa walked across the room and sat on the bed. The prison cells in the Lower Block had to be granted some exemptions to the ethical guidelines for incarceration, primarily access to windows and sunlight, not to mention outdoor communal areas for exercise and socialization. Generally, the kinds of creatures they kept in the Lower Block did not miss such things. Still, while subterranean, the cell was rather well-appointed, with elegant landscape paintings in a far more respectable style than you’d expect in a motel. There was even a little fireplace that the more responsible prisoners were allowed to light. Milton recalled the history of the prison, which was that it had been built over a mansion owned by a man named Paul Airbright, whose horrific crimes lost his family this property. Airbright had been the prison’s first prisoner, which was perhaps a little odd in that it was a sort of house arrest.

            Still, Milton reasoned that the cells, particularly here in the Lower Block, were probably part of the original mansion, which could explain the luxurious design.

            “I’m sorry I left,” said the woman. “Well, not sorry that I left. Sorry that I did so without answering your questions.”

            “Too bad you can’t answer them. This being a dream, and all.”           

            “Well, not really.”

            Jack cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean by that?”

            “Well, as I said before, we’re still figuring this all out for ourselves. A dream is just a kind of healthy hallucination, right? Like, your brain interpreting all these random impulses that happen while you sleep? It’s like, the stimulus is just random, but it lets your brain sort things out.”

            “So I’m imagining you so that I can sort out all this stuff about the House and the faceless man and this… thing that I’m becoming?”

            “No, I told you, it’s only partially a dream. You and I are talking.”

            “Right now?”           

            “I mean, I think. Either that or you’re my dream.”

            “I’m talking with you right now?”

            “Yeah.”

            Jack nearly woke up from surprise.

            “Stay calm. Stay loose. I bet it’s way harder to do this if you’re awake.”

            “What are you?” asked Jack, though he had meant to ask “who?” He felt his control drifting, this lucid dream threatening to sink back into an uncontrolled, drifting one.

            “We’re humans.”

            “From where?” he thought about the stories of the Redlanders coming to Sarona-Ki in massive ships from another world – the very ships that his sister Sandy would draw.

            “Boston. I mean, I grew up in L.A., but Sky here grew up just outside Boston.”

            The names meant nothing at first, but then he thought of something. “Is that near New York?”

            The woman smiled. “Yeah. Same country. Closer to Boston than L.A.”

            “So it’s real. New York. Central Park. Those are real places.”

            “Yes, they are real,” said a low, masculine voice. They were not in the Lower Block anymore. Now they were sitting on smooth rocks somewhere in a large desert – presumably the Sarona, though that hardly narrowed it down, given that the Sarona was the size of Asia, though as he thought of the comparison, he also puzzled over the question of just what Asia could be.

            He turned to face the owner of the voice. The man’s age was hard to place – the shape of his face was that of a young man, probably under thirty. But young as he might be, the man was weathered. He was thin – not sickly, but sinewy. He was dark, both in skin and hair, the latter of which had grown into long dreads that were tied back. If this man were less than thirty, it seemed as if he had seen enough for ten men in their 90s. The man’s eyes were a piercing, icy blue, slightly magnified by a pair of round-framed spectacles.

            It was odd, now, looking at the two of them, somehow youthful and yet also primordial. He was more convinced than ever that he was looking at the beginnings of a new pantheon.

            “Why are you contacting me?” asked Jack.

            “Is that what’s happening?” asked the woman. Sky was not looking at him, apparently scanning the horizon, a look of cold pragmatism on his face. “I thought maybe you had contacted us.”

            “I’d never heard of Sky before,” he responded.

            Sky let out a puff of air that might have been a chuckle.

            “I told you, we’re still figuring it out. I’m not sure I’ll even remember this when I wake up.” She then slapped Sky on the shoulder. “Hey, Sky, one of us should mention the dream to the other so that we’ll know it’s real when we wake up.”

            “Ok,” his voice was quiet, as if he had not expected he would need to speak and had thus not given his vocal chords enough air. “Except I’m not asleep right now.”

            “What?” said the woman.

            “I’m on watch right now. Tarra’s resting her head in your lap and Ec’s out hunting. It’s like four in the morning. The sky is getting that faint hint of blue before the sun actually rises. There’s a light rain, pretty cold, but we’re taking shelter under a really big fallen tree.”

            Jack stood back. Around them it was a sun-blasted desert, but he could now smell the faint scent of rain and trees. “Who?”

            “Friends of ours,” said Sky. “Yeah, June, this guy is pretty far away.  Somewhere in Arizradna is what I’m getting. But yeah, he’s real.”

            The woman turned back to him. “You got all that?”

            “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, June. You’ll get the hang of it.”

            “And this guy, you think he’s awakening?”

            Now Sky leaned in and looked closely at him. Jack felt his breath grow shallow. Nothing in this experience had dispelled the notion that this woman, or indeed this man, were gods. But as Sky’s piercing gaze fell upon him, he reflected that even the most benevolent gods were capable of terrible deeds.

            “Never seen one of us from Otherworld before. But, you know, first time for everything.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2018)

The Faithful Servant

            It had been too fucking long. Richard Airbright had lost patience and decided that it was now time for him to assess matters directly.

            The whole point of binding such a foul and spiteful creature to his service was that he could hang back and keep a low profile, focusing on the protection of his daughter.

            The RAS could hang for all he cared. Thall had sent his “femme fatale” to provoke Richard, and the latter believed he had been clever in sending his familiar in response. It had been reckless and foolish and it was time for him abort the mission.

            The townhouse was a cobweb of protective wards. He had even consented to instruct Isabelle in the basics of their workings so that she would know if something were amiss.

            Meanwhile, the killings had slowed, but not stopped. Most prominently, Sir Roderick Candel had been slain in something that looked like a botched job – forensics had had a difficult time piecing together the sequence of events from the mangled wreckage of the cab and the two corpses. Only after about a week of investigation did they seem to discover that half the driver’s head had been sheered off by what any halfway decent arcanist could easily identify as a frostfire bolt. There were no runes surrounding the body. Presumably the ritual that Candel would fuel would have been performed post-mortem and the old bastard had attempted self-defense (pity he had been on such a high road at the time.)

            There was an article about some foreign spy being discovered at the Rookery the same day – just another sign of how chaotic things had been lately (he had even seen something about a string of violent incidents in Arizradna, of all places.) He had spent enough time reading newspapers and so he began tweaking his summoning spell.

            Whispering Jim was bound to him: bound to obey, but also bound in the sense that they shared a connection – one that Richard knew would be difficult for even him to break. And so the fact that Jim had not come when called after Richard had tired of what he was beginning to feel would be a fruitless task gave the old warlock pause. Now, days later, Richard had begun toying with the nature of his spells, not yet willing to imagine the nightmare scenario: that Jim had somehow escaped his binding and gone on to sow murder and mayhem across Ravenfort, as was his wont.

            He had invested months in securing Jim as an asset. He imagined this Clara woman had been Thall’s in one night. Despite himself, he had almost enjoyed their verbal sparring session, at least until she saw Isabelle. He was amused at the time that Thall thought a pretty face would set him off balance, and yet that was exactly what she had done, though not with her looks. There was a part of Richard that looked forward to performing violent acts on the young woman for shaking his sense of paternal security. The thought disturbed him, though. She was, after all, not that much older than Isabelle. And violence toward women had always left an especially bitter taste in his mouth - call it sexist if you cared to. After seeing what Thall had done to Chloe after he transformed, the specific and pointed cruelty toward the person who had been kindest and warmest to him, Richard could not help but feel that in even the direst circumstances, a man should reserve some degree of practical mercy for his female enemies.

            He would kill her if he had to. But he would make it quick and easy. Indeed, whenever violence was called for, that was his general policy. But for Clara, he would not allow Whispering Jim to tear her apart like those people at the law office in Wolfsmouth.

            “Dad, do you need help?” Isabelle had come downstairs. She was getting another cup of chamomile, dressed in her pajamas.

            “No, thank you, dear,” he said. The less she was involved in demonic summoning the better. He also doubted that she could understand the complexity of the spells he was performing, given that he barely understood them, so customized and twisted they were.

            “Is it Jim? Is there something wrong?”

            “Nothing, dear. I just need to concentrate.”

            Isabelle watched him as his hands went through the motions. Richard’s beard began to itch. Isabelle took a step forward. “Dad?”

            “Isabelle, give me a moment, please!” he said, catching himself before he could raise his voice.

            “I only think… You’ve got some tangled arc-lines, between your left ring finger and your right thumb.”

            He looked down. Indeed, the configuration of his hands had been in error. He had lowered his right thumb in order to push the range of the spell outward, but that had interrupted a gesture that searched for altered demonic frequencies in the right hand. He corrected his gesture and not only did the magical energy feel more solid, his hands also felt less cramped.

            “Bell, when did you learn about that?”

            “Just watching you for the past few days.”

            Damn, he thought. The child has talent. Now, of course she did. She was an Airbright. But his nonmagical ambitions for her seemed to be gradually disappearing off in the distance.

            And then he felt a tug. It was not that much unlike fishing (or so he imagined, having never gone fishing himself,) and it seemed he had caught a big one. He continued to make the gestures, whispering an incantation to draw on latent energies nearby to boost the signal, as it were.

            THUMP.

            “What the hell was that?” Isabelle exclaimed. It had come from upstairs.

            Certainly not Jim. Whispering Jim was, after all, a being made of magical smoke, and did not tend to thump.

            Shit! thought Richard. In all of his experimentation to summon Jim had he inadvertently summoned some other demon? He was not prepared for a binding, and he was not eager to slug it out with some infernal monstrosity in his own living room.

            THUMP.

            This time it had come from the neighbor’s house. That did not bode well. Just what in the hell had he summoned? Richard began to think back through the, in retrospect, insane number of rituals he had performed in the last three days, desperately hoping that there was no careless mention of Sadafeth, who had given him nightmares when he was a small child (he had not repeated his father’s mistake of training children in demonology before they had stopped wetting the bed.)

            THUMP.

            This one was very close. In fact, it seemed to have come from the front walk.

            “Isabelle, did you lock the door when you came home from school?”

            He glanced back to catch a slow, guilty shrug from his daughter.

            Before he could perform a quick telekinetic snap on the door lock, the door was opening.

            And standing before them was Sweet Clara.

            Before he even knew what he was doing, balls of dark purple flame were forming in his hands. His mind began rattling off which wards would protect against this woman, a woman he had been so sure was a simple, mundane human being, but now…

            “Uh…” said Sweet Clara. “Sorry, this isn’t what it looks like.”

            Richard’s heart was pounding and he could feel his entire body grow hot (not from the nightfire in his hands, which consumed but did not generate heat.) “Tell me one good reason I should not burn you alive right this moment,” he said, immediately wishing that he had told Isabelle to avert her eyes.

            And then Sweet Clara opened her mouth, but it wasn’t her voice that came out. “Because it’s me, master,” said Whispering Jim. And then Sweet Clara (or was it Whispering Jim?) smiled widely and held out both hands as if she had just performed a magic trick. “You rang?”

Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2018

Down in the Hole

Down in the Hole

            The time that had passed was abstract. True to the style of the House, the torture was not physical, but a forced disorientation. The last span of darkness, he was sure, had lasted over forty-eight hours. But how long it was beyond that he had no way of knowing. He had been stripped of his clothes other than his underwear, which was rank with the smell of sweat and had gone from a clean white to a filthy tan. There was actually a little toilet – one of those portable devices a person can put on a yacht that isn’t attached to any plumbing, but sequesters away waste until it can be extracted and disposed of. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer that they provided him with, though it wasn’t enough that swallowing it would put him beyond their reach.

            The room had a concrete floor and a large glass window facing outward onto what seemed like a dark garage or bunker – a space wide enough to accommodate a pair of large trucks and was featureless save for a few light bulbs that were bare except for simple plastic cages. He could not see the end of that space to the left of his cell, but the cell’s right wall was shared with the back of the room. The glass wall between his cell and the open space seemed to be a couple inches thick, but was manufactured precisely so that it would not distort subjects on the other side.

            His own cell was about seven or eight feet wide and maybe twelve feet deep. There was a door in the back wall that they would use to access him when it came time to inject him with psychotropic drugs. He could only theorize that this was accomplished while he was asleep or somehow sedated by an invisible gas, as he could not remember seeing anyone come in the door nor remember receiving injections, but his arm was covered with little spots where the needle had clearly gone in, and the mind-warping experience of the drugs spoke for themselves.

            He had come, in his less lucid periods, to doubt the existence of gravity. He had a very specific memory of sitting on the wall, with his back to the ceiling, bawling his eyes out over an obscure line of poetry that, in a dream-logic sort of way, he could not remember. There was a line from this poem – a poem of which, in his right mind, if such a thing existed, he had never heard – that chronicled irony and arrogance:

            “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

            He was consumed, in that moment, and thereafter as if experiencing aftershocks of an earthquake, with an unsettling note of horror: had the engraver, or the king he claimed to quote, known of his fate, and left those words not as a boast but as a warning?

            The House was dying. Or rather, the House was mutating, evolving into something mad and cruel and, the man who was variously called James Tarson and Chris Thatch and Four Eyes feared, self-destructive. The House was meant to emerge as a new god built of people, rational, immortal, and eternal. Yet here were those who would have it become some writhing mass of destruction, destined to burn out its host and thus perish along with it like a cancerous growth.

            When the lights came back on, it was usually Question Time. A tall, handsome black man, about fifty years old, would pull up a metal folding chair and sit down. He was dressed in a cheap, moth-eaten suit that seemed utterly wrong on him. This was a man who was clean-shaven without a hint of stubble and looked as if he had his hair cut on a weekly basis, with a perfect fade and flat-top that never seemed uneven. He was the only human face that Four Eyes had seen since he was captured, and he found him beautiful, and that just made the suit feel all the more wrong.

            Mr. Cheap, as he had come to think of him, popped open the document case that doubled as a clipboard. He seemed to review his notes for a solid twenty minutes before he spoke, and Four Eyes had gotten in the habit of waiting in silence rather than fruitlessly attempt to engage his captor.

            Making a little note, Mr. Cheap finally looked up. “Four Eyes, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Six Coins is dead.”

            Four Eyes took a moment to process this. Could be a lie, meant to make him feel less on solid ground, or it could be true. Four Eyes decided he would try not to let the information change his behavior.

             “When did he recruit you?”

            Four Eyes remained silent. He knew better than to offer up information without any incentive.

            “Fair enough,” said Mr. Cheap. “Orville Sacker, thirty-three years old. Born in Kelmar, Omlos Province to Mayla Proudley, born Sacker. Half-sister Jaina Proudley. You attended Aligheri University, graduated with honors age 21, worked at Reben Arts Endowment before dropping off the map at age 25. We assume that’s when you were recruited, but I’d appreciate it if you could confirm.”

            Four Eyes had to fight not to wince. Yes, Orville Sacker had become just one of many identities for him, and he had long ago accepted the possibility that threats could be made against his family in a situation like this, but it was never enjoyable to see such a hypothetical see realization.

            He hadn’t spoken to his mother or his sister in a long time. He had not faked his death, as some Agents were known to do when they entered the House. It had never really bothered him to think that they might be concerned with him. The House had not chosen them, and that meant that, ultimately, they were not all that important. The House had a way of detecting remarkable people and bringing them into the fold. He had a general sense that he would prefer these two women to live comfortable and happy lives – he did not feel any resentment toward them – but again, it did not concern him terribly.

            What did concern him was that he was having trouble imagining a scenario in which he walked out of this cell alive.  It was possible they had taken him out of fear that he might reveal something he knew about the House. A panicked thought shot through his mind that it was his own faction that had captured him. But if they wanted him dead, that would have happened a long time ago.

            “You haven’t killed me yet. So I have something you want.”

            “That’s an interesting theory.”

            Four Eyes smirked. “Right, so there’s nothing you want me to tell you? I’ve got to be costing you a thousand tolls a day at least, with all the drugs you’re putting in my system. So clearly I’m worth something to you.”

            “Not to us, no.”

            Ok… thought Four Eyes. Don’t let them know you’re confused.

            “To be honest, Mr. Sacker, my main purpose here is to keep you engaged and focused. I’m here to keep your mind from fraying on the edges. Do you know what prolonged isolation can do to a person’s mind? It can lead to intense depression, self-destructive behavior, and even hallucinations.”

            “The drugs seem to be taking care of the hallucinations just fine.”

            “Drugs?” Mr. Cheap made a note on his pad. “What drugs?”

            Four Eyes chuckled. “Ok, look, if you’re going to fuck with me, I’d appreciate it if you put in a little more effort, I mean, look at the tracks on…” and with that, he looked down at his arm. All the pinpricks were gone.

            “What makes you think I’m fucking with you, Mr. Sacker?”

            “That… uh…” Four Eyes backed away. The lights in the outer room were blinking off one by one. “Where am I?”

            “You don’t need to know, Mr. Sacker.”

            And with that, the whole outer room went dark, and Four Eyes could not see anything but his own reflection in the thick glass.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2017)

ISA Kids

         They had been playing the music a little softer in Laren’s these past few months. There was a time, not so long ago actually, though it felt like the distant past, when Laren’s had been noisy. In the first decades after it was founded, Laren’s had a reputation as the toughest bar in Port O’James. Law enforcement officers were almost as regular as the customers.

         This was around the time the Industrial Stimulus Act, called ISA, passed in Port Sang thirty years earlier. The government invested in modernization, automating a lot of the harbor’s services while promoting new industries and services. Port O’James was still a port town first and foremost, but there was a growing tech industry thanks to ISA’s tax incentives and education investment.

         This allowed Port O’James to escape from an economic slump, but it also created a gigantic rift between generations, with a lot of resentment toward the “ISA Kids” on the part of those who were a generation or half a generation older. Children descended from long lines of longshoremen and sailors now had access to world-class educations and white-collar careers.

         Laren’s became something of a battleground in the resultant culture war. But over time, the old regulars started to give way to new regulars, and the rough reputation transformed into a charm in its own right. The rambunctious fervor of the bar metamorphosed into an ironic imitation of itself.

         But the volume of sound, ironic or not, had died down in recent months. And so when Ana walked into her favorite bar, there was something dreamlike to it - an incongruity that, at least in her current state of consciousness (something she was pretty certain was genuine wakefulness,) refused to be contradicted.

         There was no denying that if people recognized her on the street, they tended to either stare or avert their gaze. She had never felt so self-conscious, but after weeks of this treatment, she thought she had gotten used to it.

         Walking in to see a quiet Laren’s, though, confirmed for her something that until this point she had only understood subconsciously. It was not just her. The city was on edge.

         And to be fair, it had felt on edge since the Ostrich sailed into port. But in the time that Ana had been gone, the town had gotten skittish.

         She thought about the faceless men, and how the soldiers at Far Watch had behaved strangely, unable to see them. She took some consolation that she had not seen any of the faceless men since Far Watch, and she preferred a town that was scared over one filled with people numb to near catatonia.

         Nick and George were at a table in the back – not their usual one, as there was a group of Arizi sailors taking that spot. For an instant, she considered turning around before her friends saw her, but her feet kept taking her forward.

         “There she is!” cried George. He got up from the booth and immediately went over to hug her. Ana bent down to accept the hug – George had achondroplasia, and so was over a foot shorter than she was. George wrapped his arms around her and held tight. Her eyes began to well up. George whispered into her ear “You’re back, Ana. And we’re never letting them take you away again.”

         Ana released a sobbing guffaw. “Thank you,” was all she could think to say. They had been friends since elementary school. When things got heated with her parents, Ana would stay at George’s house. One hug brought back almost two decades of friendship. It was a little overwhelming.

         Ana stood up again when Nick came to hug her. This was a quicker moment, one-armed due to a glass of beer in his hand. And there was the awkwardness inherent both in the fact that they had seen one another fairly recently at the station and the perpetual subtext of his hopeless infatuation with her. It had been her hope that, if there was any good to come of her shocking revelation as undead, that he might finally lose this attraction, but she suspected that he had not.

         That was not a problem she felt ready to confront – it was low on her priority list.

         “So,” began Nick. “How’s the process coming?”

         “Fully debriefed. Legally recognized as the same citizen I always was.”        

         “And at work?” asked George.

         “Taking a leave of absence. Harrick suggested it.”

         “To cover himself?” George has always been skeptical of law enforcement, and Ana’s choice to join the force had been met with something like shock – though the shock was couched in unconditional support, as it always had been with George. Ana had chosen the career partially because of her grandfather, Bjorn, who had always been her favorite. He had died early enough that she was able to idealize him and ignore the likelihood that he would have held to the same conservative views that had alienated her from her mother. On principle, she also decided that if she wanted a society with a more progressive and ethical law enforcement, people like her would have to join. Max Herrick had confirmed for her that she wasn’t the first person to have this idea.

         Ana shook her head. “He didn’t pressure me into it or anything. I… It’s still kind of a blur to me, you know?” She allowed a server to place a beer that one of her friends had apparently ordered for her in front of her. “I mean, objectively, I’m not back to normal. In a sense I’ve never been normal, you know?”

         “Sure, sure,” said George. It had sounded like he was going to follow this up with something, but instead he turned his attention to the bottom of his nearly-empty glass.

         Nick leaned forward. “After I got suspended, George took point on trying to get you back.”

         “I kept trying to get that Lisenrush fascist’s office, but-“

         “What?”

         “Lisenrush, I was trying to get in touch with her to complain. I was beginning to think they were ignoring me.”

         Ana’s own attitude toward Lisenrush had been fairly confrontational to begin with, but after their trek through the forest, she did not seem like an enemy.

         Yet Lisenrush had been the one to take her against her will to Far Watch. That had been dubiously legal. The Rangers had authority to deal with the undead – an authority that dated back centuries – but as far as Ana knew, the doctors had only put forth the idea as a hypothesis when she was taken.

         Still, she had bristled at George’s description of Lisenrush. She had been forced to put her trust in the Ranger-Captain. They had seen something that was almost unthinkable even after having witnessed it. She had expected she would get more questions from the Port Security Service, the North East Colony’s main intelligence agency, though they seemed satisfied with her statements. Perhaps they were in the process of corroborating her statements with those of Lisenrush.

         Maybe there was reason to dislike, even hate Lisenrush. But that all seemed irrelevant, given the threats they both knew existed.

         Coming back to Port O’James had felt so strange partially because it didn’t look like the world was ending here. Was it safe here?

         “It’s like something out of a nightmare,” Ana said to herself.

         Apparently it had been out loud, though, because George piped in. “Hey, Ana. We’re going to make things like they were. It’ll be ok.” George, the good friend he had always been, seemed to have adjusted to the revelation of her… physiological status with ease.

         But that wasn’t what she was thinking about. In a strange way, it almost felt like finding out she was undead was a kind of relief – a release of built-up pressure. It had been shocking at first, but she was beginning to acclimate to the notion.

         The nightmare was the faceless men. The outpost had transformed almost instantaneously. How could she be sure that the faceless men would not come back?

         Lisenrush could not feel her legs. They had her on an IV that seemed to be pumping in a lot of pain meds. Though, she supposed, not enough to prevent her from realizing she was on pain meds. And not enough to prevent her from feeling pain.

         Maybe it would be worse without the meds.

         She had never let pain get to her. When she was a kid – ages ago – she used to get into fights. She was not the best student, or even the most gifted athlete. But she had an edge in fighting, because she did not let pain bother her. She could fight stronger kids and simply outlast them. It was a way that she could win.

         Her spine had shattered when it hit that tree. The draugr had looked so frail and thin, but that was the thing about the undead – their strength was not human, physical strength. It was all channeled through mysticism and magic, not earned through practice and grit.

         Through standard medicine, she would have been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Nothing below her abdomen would have had any function again. But all that was changing in this new, interconnected world.

         The Arizi used magic for everything, even though the doctor that the hospital brought in insisted that “magic” as it was understood by most people, wasn’t really magic in the strictest sense.

         She was not interested in philosophical debates. She could barely stay awake for two hours at a time. She suspected that was partially the boredom of being in a hospital bed.

         Sleep had been… not difficult, but it almost didn’t feel like sleep. There was a comfort, a pleasant sensation to sleep, when the mind’s logical thoughts were allowed to relax and drift on a timeless sea. Yet when she slept now it just felt like numbness.

         She looked up at the clock. It was three in the afternoon. She used the remote to turn on the television. She looked up – she just wanted to check the news – but she had the strangest sensation. She could hear the anchors talking about some sort of uncharacteristic violence in Arizradna (something that gave her a certain nationalistic smugness) but she could not see the television.

         She was staring right at the screen, but she could not tell what the picture showed. She squeezed her eyelids shut and opened them again. Was it her vision? The draugr had given her a painful head butt, and perhaps that had jostled her eyes or even her brain. But she turned her head and looked at one of the medical posters – something about proper handwashing procedures over the sink – and she could read it just fine from across the room.

         Yet when she looked back up at the television – or rather, where she was certain the television was – she did not see it.

         And strangely, she suddenly thought of Ana. Ana had seen things that weren’t there – faceless men, she said. Ana said something about seeing buildings sprouting up around Far Watch when it fell. Buildings full of these men with no faces.

         What did you see there, Lydia?

         She couldn’t say. She had not seen anything. Not that she had seen the old Far Watch in ruins or an empty patch of forest. She had simply not seen things in the places where she had looked.

         And now she was not seeing this television that was only a few feet from her eyes.

         Even at Far Watch she hadn’t felt this level of fear. She tried to think rationally why that was as her heart began to pound and she found herself desperately trying to get out of the bed as if her legs were not useless weight and her spine was not shattered into a million shards of bone.

         Ana saw them. She thought. Ana saw them. Maybe Ana can stop them.

         And then she could see the screen. There were pictures of what looked like a satellite telescope that had fallen onto a building. She could see the television with ease, its power button and volume controls, the cord reaching from the back to a plug nearby in the wall. It was perfectly ordinary.

         After all, the faceless man had moved out of the way.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2017)

Oubliette

            Gravity seemed to have become a weak thing, only a suggestion, rather than an incontrovertible law. His body was still and immaterial. Instead, he found himself focusing on a little spider web in the upper corner of the room. The spider walked carefully over her little construction project. A proud homeowner, that little bug. She took such fastidious care, creating her little spiral.

            “Do you understand the charges as I have described them?”

            He nodded. It was odd to think of this as a case of crime and law enforcement. He had never thought of himself a criminal. He was a soldier. Or no, that wasn’t it.

            He was an Agent of the House, nothing more.

            It was surprisingly civil. He supposed he had Nascine and Tartin to thank for that. They were thieves, a profession that still held with it some degree of gentility. Not every facet of the Rookery was so kind. In a way, he was lucky. Rather than being tossed into some dark room and left to starve and go mad, he was instead in a room lit with bright fluorescents with an enforcement officer taking him through the necessary bureaucracies.

            Of course now he had to consider what the House would do. An Agent inside the Rookery? That had surely been useful, but he wondered how useful it would be to have an Agent inside a national prison, not to mention one who already exposed as an Agent.

            The ramifications were vast. The House had been reduced to a conspiracy theory within the mind of the general public. The various intelligence services did a decent job of playing their cards close to the chest, but he suspected most of them had been in accord. While some clearly had an idea, he had to guess that among the “minor leagues” like Arkos Province’s Covert Intelligence Office and the North East Colony’s quaintly named Port Security Service, belief in the House might get you transferred to a basement office with nothing but file boxes and disused computer equipment to keep you company.

            And there he was, living proof that it was all real. His capture had been far too public, too ostentatious, and far too many people had been involved. Some might still not believe, but anyone who knew the game would have figured it out. He would go down in history as one of the House’s biggest failures. And the House wasn’t supposed to have a history.

            Things would probably end with a shiv to the back. He did not want to imagine the sensation, but he had to remind himself that such a thing was not only possible, but probable.

            His hair had gotten long – he hadn’t had a cut since Narcia – and so he swept it back from his forehead.

            “Sir?” said the officer. “Time to go.”

            Sir. That was odd. A strangely polite way to refer to an Agent of the House. Maybe it was just a standard sort of thing. A civilized country with a civilized system to make sure everyone felt right and properly civilized.

            In the absence of a given name (Four Eyes had learned years ago to really think of himself truly as Four Eyes and allow the name his parents had given him to recede back into his portfolio of aliases) they were using the false one that he had used in Narcia. James Tarson. It was better than John Doe, at least. He wouldn’t mind using this name for now. If he was terribly lucky and managed to escape, he might ditch the name and take up something else and retire to some island in the Sagrean Sea.

            Chris Thatch was a burned bridge. He had stolen that name from a dead man, but now that the man had been discovered, it had been restored. Chris Thatch would be buried in a cemetery rather than Murleg’s Bog. “James Tarson” bore him no ill will. Perhaps putting a spirit to rest, if that is what one accomplishes with burial rites, could even be seen a small consolation in all of this.

            The truth of the matter is that as an Agent of the House, he had great respect for the Rookery and the institutions of Retrein, as well as Narcia. In his mind, the House did not count the people or governments of the world as adversaries. They were assets to be carefully managed. He had dropped the Retron accent, though the voice he spoke with now was not the one he remembered having before he had been given this assignment. It had lost its regionalism from the small, coastal town in northeastern Narcia where he had grown up, with its wharf and driftwood shacks all with peeling paint. Now his voice had flattened into a general Narcian dialect that had kind of melted into the Arizi one to become the least distinctive in the world.

            If this change to his voice was intentional, it could only be subconsciously so, but it did suit his purposes.

            And what are those?

            He brushed this thought aside.

            He would be questioned, but he doubted he would be tortured. The Retrons were regressive in myriad ways but even the shadiest parts of the Rookery had ceded their worst brutalities to the more attractive virtue of result. Six Coins had told him that the Other Side sometimes dabbled in it, though Sir Roderick Candel (they had long ago dispensed with the pretense of anonymity) was prone to exaggerate the deficiencies of his adversaries.

            But with a couple of honorable thieves like Tartin and Nascine taking charge of this case, Tarson took some consolation that his treatment would be practical and dispassionate. Certainly he would be questioned. They would offer him deals and Tarson knew that he would have to work hard not to betray the House. But until this sabotage, he had been an exemplary Agent. He was confident in his skills. He could very well be ejected from the House roster, such as it was, but he would not betray them. That would be foolish and invite a bullet to the back of the head, but oddly, Tarson felt that this was not his primary motivation. The truth of the matter was that he was proud of his work. The House was the thing. It was the single greatest endeavor in the history of the world. When the shock of his discovery had worn off, he was sure that he would mourn his fall from grace, but if called for, he would give his life for the House.

            Tarson was led to the car. His driver, a man in his late 30s, he guessed, was wearing a charcoal suit. The driver glanced at the man who would be riding shotgun, who seemed a bit younger. The glance looked nervous.

            Yes, you lucky guys get to transport the big bad House Agent.

            The submachine gun made a visible bulge in the second man’s jacket. It was some comfort to know that this gun was probably meant to protect Tarson, rather than kill him, at least as long as he didn’t try to run.

            The car was unmarked, though anyone looking closely would be able to guess that the black vehicle was enforcement. But then, most people didn’t.

            So much of his craft was based on the idea that people generally didn’t think much of what they saw. In another life, it seemed, he had simply put on a jumpsuit – not with any patches or labels or anything, just a dark blue jumpsuit, taken a ladder and gone up and removed the fuses from a traffic light in Entraht. No one stopped him. The drivers simply adjusted to the malfunctioning municipal equipment. He hadn’t even been sure that the House needed to slow traffic in that intersection. He suspected Six Coins had just wanted to demonstrate a principle, as this was very early in Four Eyes’ service.

            Had Tarson been looking at the newspaper on the stand next to where their car had stopped rather than the rather attractive, somewhat androgynous woman selling coffee from the stand, he would have seen the following headline:

            “RAS Councilman Dead in Traffic Accident” with Six Coins’ face half-visible above the fold.

            What he did notice, however, was that the identical black car in front of them turned right. The car that he was in turned left and then the identical black car behind them turned right.

            He watched the other cars disappear around a corner. Perhaps this was not so surprising. Transporting a House Agent, the Rookery surely would expect someone to be watching. Putting him in the middle car was sort of the obvious choice, but he had to go somewhere. He was unaware of who would be watching him – probably no one he had ever met – but he was certain someone was, or at least was trying to do so.

            He wondered if he would ever be in the loop again. Probably not. Not much use for a captured spy after all, at least not much use for his friends. The Rookery would treat him like he was worth his weight in gold. There was something vaguely delightful about that, though again that was perhaps just a consolation.

            His downfall had been engineered. He was certain now that the message: “there’s a hole dug up in Murleg’s Bog” had been sent not by an ally but by an enemy. They had discovered the location of Thatch’s body and relocated it in a place where…

            How could they have known that Tartin and Nascine would be there?

            The world was a strange place, with magic, gods, and demons walking the land. But ultimately, even the most powerful beings were just individuals, making their way in a universe that cared only that everyone follow physical laws – whether they be mundane or arcane. Tarson did not believe in fate, and he did not believe that some greater force had put Tartin and Nascine in that house to punish him for his sins.

            Thus he believed there to be two possibilities:

            The first was dumb luck. Coincidences happen, and on a long enough timeline, every possible scenario will eventually occur. But that was not satisfying. Tartin and Nascine had come there independently, so that made it even more unlikely.

            The second possibility was that their arrival, just like his own, had been choreographed by his enemy. Every trick, every miraculous feat of coordination between anonymous parties that the House was known for - the enemy would be capable of that as well.

            What troubled him was that if they had been able to pull this off against him, they were clearly winning.

            They were taking a tunnel south. The R4, it looked like. Tarson admonished himself for letting his attention drop. The tunnel was brightly lit with electric light, taking them south through the tall hills at the edge of Ravenfort.

            Tarson’s hands were cuffed to a faux-leather loop in the back of the car. The loop was attached by a chain to the frame of the car.

            Hope we don’t get into an accident, Tarson thought, bitterly.

            They emerged from the tunnel into a torrent of rain. They were traveling at highway speeds now, and the windshield wipers beat back and forth, their metronomic rhythm providing accompaniment to the rain.

            They hadn’t told Tarson which prison he would be staying in, but he suspected it would be Hexley, a small, secure facility that specialized in keeping magically-capable prisoners. Aside from a handful of tricks, he didn’t really consider himself an arcanist, but Tarson supposed it would be the most secure facility.

            And they may have been thinking about keeping people out just as much as they were thinking of keeping him in.

            He had driven this road countless times, but there was something profoundly different about driving down a road versus riding in the back seat with ones hands cuffed to a faux-leather loop.

            It would be hours until they got there, but Tarson resolved not to fall asleep. He would sleep once he was in his cell, where there was relative safety.

            After an hour, the driver exited the highway, turning down Hemwick Road, which led into a dense forest and presumably to a place called Hemwick, which Tarson had never heard of.

            “Where are you going, Chambers?” asked the man riding shotgun.

            “We’re transferring the prisoner to another vehicle outside of Hemwick.”

            “I wasn’t briefed on a vehicle transfer.”

            “It was need-to-know. Consider this your briefing, Rykes.”

            Tarson’s heart began to pound. Chambers was selling it decently, perhaps enough to fool a glorified cop, But Tarson could see the subtle signs of nervousness, of deception. There was a slight quiver to the man’s eyebrow, and his hand was gripping the steering wheel just a little to tight. Something was about to go down.

            He could say something, but how likely was it that Rykes would believe him?

            And if you don’t tell him, you’re going to get murdered in the woods.

            “The driver is planning to kill us,” said Tarson.

            Almost instantly, Rykes turned back to him. “Shut the fuck up.”

            “Listen, Rykes, is it? I can tell when someone is lying. The reason you weren’t briefed on this is because it’s not part of the plan.”

            Now he turned around, and Tarson’s face exploded in pain as Ryke’s heavy fist connected with it.

            Oh fuck you man, I was trying to save your life, Tarson bitterly thought to himself. Though to be fair, Ryke’s survival was secondary to his own. Tarson decided it was time to come up with an idea, and soon.

            But they had only been on this road for minutes when they pulled onto an unpaved forest path. This was it. This was where they were going to do it.

            He thought about how he could use the cuffs. Maybe he could get them around a neck? If he could get the submachine gun, that would be ideal. He tried to decide if Chambers looked like the type to hesitate. He wouldn’t gloat – he was far too nervous to gloat and frankly, most people preferred to get over with this sort of thing as quickly as they could, but sometimes they would hesitate if they weren’t sure they were up to it. Tarson prayed that Chambers was the sort of person that pulled an adhesive bandage off slowly and gradually. If he was quick and efficient it would make escape practically impossible.

            They came to a stop.

            The road had come to an end in front of a tiny barn made of corrugated steel. There was another car there, a grey sedan. There were three men standing next to it. Two were in black masks to match the rest of their clothes, openly carrying submachine guns. The third was a very tall man who was mostly bald and bespectacled, wearing a grey suit and smoking what looked like a blackroot cigarette.

            “Ok, let me talk to him,” said Chambers.

            The driver got out of the car and walked up to the man smoking the cigarette. Tarson could only just hear what they were saying.

            “Ok, I have him.”

            “I can see that.”

            “Where’s Anne?”

            The man took a drag. “Outside Damana.”

            “Damana?”

            “Yes.”

            “That’s across the ocean.”

            “She is there.”

            “Ok, whatever. You’ll let her go now?”

            “We need to confirm it’s him.”

            Rykes had heard it too, and in an act of self-destructive anger, he was already pulling out his gun. Tarson cringed as he waited for the men in the black masks to open fire tearing the car and their bodies apart. “Chambers you piece of-“

            There was a thunderous bang and the sound of shattering glass as the passenger window imploded and Rykes’s blood sprayed across the front seat of the car. There was a fourth man, also in a black mask, standing there with a pistol.

            “Fuck!” yelled Chambers.

            The man who had shot Rykes shaded his eyes and looked in the rear window at Taron. “Confirmed, it’s him,” said the man.

            Tarson was so transfixed by Rykes’ blood gushing out of the exit wound in his head that he nearly had a heart attack when he heard the second shot. Now he looked up and saw Chambers’ lifeless body collapsing out of view.

            How’s that plan coming, Four Eyes? asked his own cruelly sarcastic voice in his head.

            The rear door on the driver’s side opened and a fifth man leaned over, brandishing a combat knife.

            Tarson pulled away, squirming, his mind howling with animal terror. The knife sliced through the faux-leather loop and he popped free. He wriggled over onto the front seat and thrust himself out through the still-open car door. He hit the muddy ground on his back and attempted to roll himself into a position where he could stand.

            Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Chambers’ dead eyes staring at him. A white-hot streak of panic shot through his consciousness. He got one knee under himself and pushed up.

            Only for everything to go dark.

            For a moment he thought he was dead, but then he found that a membrane of thick cloth was entering his mouth each time he breathed in. He felt strong arms wrap around him, but he fought back, elbowing someone in what he imagined was the gut.

            He tried to run, but then one of those strong arms pulled him down. He landed on his back, and the arms started to pull him by the wrists. His shoulders screamed in agony as he was dragged like an animal going to the slaughterhouse, his clothes totally soaked in mud and his breathing inhibited by the thick cloth of the bag they had put over his head.

            Wet mud gave way to dry, cold and rough cement, and the faint light that made it through the bag was now gone. His pants were caught on the surface of the floor, and soon they were down around his ankles. The cement gave way to something smooth, like linoleum.

            Then, the ground moved down. An elevator.

            And then the sound of rain outside disappeared. They dragged him along smoother concrete and then they dropped him.

            He heard their footsteps receding and then he could not hear them anymore.

            Around him, there was only darkness. And there was silence like he had never heard before.

            “Hello?” he said, a whisper he had intended as a shout.

            Nothing answered.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2017)