The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  “Are you sure?” Kayip asked.

  “Trust me,” Marcel said. “I know—” He yawned. “What I’m doing and—” He yawned a second time, louder. “Sorry, it’s been a long night.”

  Kayip nodded. “It will soon be another.” He stood up. “Perhaps it is best we rest until then.”

  …the dust storms abated sometime around noon. A few of the townsfolk still lived. Many had been heavily infected by the Sin emanating from the sangleum, which by the hour tore itself from the earth. That which days before had been valued as gold, and fought over as bitterly, now gushed out like water, a deluge of Sin. Some of its victims wore mere marks of red skin, others were twisted beyond recognition, limps elongated, sores open and oozing a strange black substance, bones twisted out of their flesh, resembling in a strange manner the shape of pipework.

  A number of the Order suggested mercy killings; it was surely the will of the Demiurge that these pitiful figures be put down. Santi Vitan would hear none of it. These were still the children of the Demiurge, if they had been spared the “horror” so far, (and that was his simple word then, for the name Calamity had not yet come about), then it was the Demiurge’s will that they should be protected.

  The debate did not long continue. From the horizon, between the towering ruins of what had once been one of the most beautiful cities of all of Vastium, we could see movement. Shimmering forms coagulating themselves out from the oozing sangleum, molding flesh and steel into strange mockeries of the human body. Demons. Not one or two, not in numbers suited for exorcisms, but a host of them, an army.

  Many panicked at the sight, other spoke foul words despite their oaths. A few with more composure grabbed their Cracked-Discs, whispering out their prayers, but others staggered backwards, mouthing out nonsense.

  Santi Vitan gripped his sword and commanded order among the ranks. His demeanor was calm, but I could see the pain in his eyes. It came not from the sight of the foul manifestations of Inferno, those congealed masses of Sin. No, for he could see, and I as well, that the demons were not alone. Encircling them were men and women, not crying, not fleeing, but bowing, worshiping the foul avatars that had brought ruin upon us all…

  —“The Life of Vitan: First Santi of the Calamity, As Told By a Confidant” By Levat Aman. Veracity debated. Listed as “profane literature” by The Hierocratic Synod.

  Chapter 23

  A bulbous bag of crimson flesh in the rough shape of a man lay on the floor. Namter walked around the mutant, if it could even be still called that, as it moaned and oozed, vomiting. He checked the tag stitched onto its arm, the scrawled numbers displaying results of a blood test. His pen clicked, and three checks hit their marks on his clipboard.

  “Is all in order?” asked Brother Avitus, staring down at another mutant, once a woman, which moaned out a soft scream. Namter nodded.

  Two more mutants lay in the garage, apparently part of a gang of five food thieves. The fifth had not survived his injections. This bout of disobedience was not of great concern to Namter; the mutants were a shiftless lot, and their tendency to rebel against their proper place was to be expected. The loss of five more would do little damage to Lazacorp’s labor force, and their bodies would serve a purpose still.

  Namter signed the export form and handed it over to the second of the two Lazacorp guards, who stood beside their autotruck.

  “Send these over to Narida Heights,” he ordered. The men silently assented, and started to load the seeping mutants into the back of their truck, which resembled, to ease the minds of Huile nitwits, a small sangleum tanker.

  Brother Avitus walked over. “Narida Heights?” He spoke softly, having the sagacity not to display his misgivings to those outside the Brotherhood. “We are sending them still to that slickdust farm?”

  “It is Roache’s order,” Namter said simply, watching the guards work. They wrapped the mutants in chains, hoisted them up, and then inserted into them, with force, the orogastric tubes necessary to keep the bodies fed through their trip out into the Wastes.

  “But we are so close to Reification,” Avitus whispered. “To waste Tribute on feeding raider brutes’ slickdust habits, seems, well, I do not wish to be impertinent, Watcher.”

  “You may speak freely with me,” Namter assured him, “but it is not our place to question such things. The blessed time is soon approaching, but until then, the balance must be retained.”

  “Is the Awakener aware we are, even at this hour, still sending caravans to Narida Heights?” Avitus asked.

  Namter answered with another nod. It was technically the truth, Verus was aware. He didn’t like it, but then again, Verus liked little Roache did these days. Namter glanced out the soot-covered window. Through the haze and buildings he could just barely make out, in the distance, the large featureless block, where their final Enterprise in Blackwood Row stood, nearing completion.

  “Do not worry, Brother, The Flayed Prince will soon have the blood he requires.”

  The autotruck revved. As the large garage door started to clunk upwards, a broad-chested man ducked in under from the street outside and stepped towards them.

  “Brother Namter,” Dutrix Crat said, conveniently forgetting his superior’s proper title. Namter bit his lip.

  “Brother Crat,” he said simply. Namter wouldn’t lower himself to some base trading of insults, though the man, like many of the other Brothers had, since Roache’s return, spoken to Namter with only heart-aching coldness. It had been irritating enough playing the middleman to Roache and Verus’s feud, but now it seemed that Verus was poisoning his reputation among the Unblind Brotherhood.

  “You are needed,” Crat said. He glanced over towards Avitus, who kept his gaze, and did not move from Namter’s side.

  “For…?” Namter began.

  Crat shrugged. “Roache’s command, I don’t know the reason.”

  “So you’re taking orders from him?” Namter said, an unusual state for one whose ear had always bent in Verus’s direction.

  A shake of Crat’s head. “Roache desires it, but the Awakener ordered it, perhaps to curtail the latter’s pitiful caterwauling.”

  “Ah,” Namter said simply. So the two men were face-to-face. Regardless of orders, that was a situation where he was needed.

  * * *

  “Rejected! Those arse-for-a-head, taur-taint-lickers rejected it!”

  Namter could hear Verus’s voice from a floor below. He let his shoulders fall and rubbed his forehead in a rare moment when eyes were not on him. Things had been going smoothly on most accounts since he resolved the tumult up in Icaria. That had been a mess that took some cleaning, dozens of people to bribe, several bodies to bury, and one imported El’Helmaudi rug that needed to be hand-cleaned three times over to get the damned bloodstains off.

  It was a small mercy that the ferral girl had run off without speaking to anyone, no doubt her words would have been discounted, but it was one less nuisance to deal with. More disconcerting had been the disappearance of the monk, but then, his previous attempt to make connections here in Huile had ended in the quick removal of his only possible ally. Within the walls of Blackwood Row they were quite safe from any mad attempts at assassination. Namter would have preferred the man dead, but perhaps it was more apt the monk live to see his repeated failures bear fruit.

  On the Wastes-side of things, raiders back in Stinktown still raised issues of slickdust pay, as always, and Clan Vapulus had been marauding the occasional caravan, but these were eternal bugbears, ones which would soon be made irrelevant. What mattered was that the Enterprise was on schedule, and, with any sense, the Reification should be completed without any real issue.

  Of course there was still one quite real, quite senseless, issue. One issue with two names, Roache and Verus. Namter gathered his strength and strode up towards the shouting.

  As expected Verus stood, legs planted, teeth gritted, in Lazarus Roache’s office. Lazarus, for his part, sat
behind his desk, a look of focused indifference upon his face. He altered the facade slightly when Namter entered.

  “Ah, good timing. Namter, please put a pot on, we have a guest,” Roache said.

  Verus didn’t even spare the butler a look, but instead sneered on.

  “You haven’t answered my question, Roache,” he snarled, finger pointed like a knife at Lazarus’s chest.

  “Come now, it’s impossible to start a civilized conversation without a cup of tea,” Roache replied, as Namter heated up the kettle in the tea nook.

  Lazarus Roache’s office in Blackwood Row was considerably larger than the one he used in Huile proper, and more ornately decorated. There was no need, up here, for even the small layer of false modesty the man put on display for the Huilian spittle-lips. For Namter, however, the expensive pre-Calamity paintings had long faded into an indistinct background, as had the statuettes looted from Vastium manors and the custom-made gold-leafed lamps.

  What Namter found his gaze stopping at, even after these many years, were the older decorations: the framed contracts of early Lazacorp endeavors, the variety of cheap knickknacks from youthful years of frivolous travels, and the faded photograph of a young blond-haired child, sitting stiffly in the living room of a gray-toned manor. Namter remembered dusting these objects even as a boy, training under his father at the Roache estate. How odd they seemed here, junk from a left-behind life. Part of him wondered if these memorabilia spoke to some hidden sentimentality in his master, but he knew the far more likely truth. They stood as reminders of what Roache had surpassed, the refuse of a pathetic life scrounging for every frasc and aurem, when endless knuckle-wearing work couldn’t even keep the lights on. These were the treetops one looked down upon from the summit of a mountain, to see how far one had climbed, to laugh and mock on how miniscule they now looked.

  The brat in that photograph was long dead and completely unmourned.

  “Roache, stop wasting our time,” Verus said, as Namter started to pour. “We own this town, why in all troglyn-fucking madness was my application for a new engineer denied?”

  Lazarus Roache leaned back, taking a cup from his butler’s hand and sipping. “Come, Namter, why don’t you explain?”

  Namter would have liked to curse, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice in the matter. “Apologies, Awakener,” he said, “but the mutant engineers we took back from Icaria are making strong progress. An additional engineer, of unknown skill, would only delay the Reification.”

  “Unknown…” Verus said. “Is my word not enough? No, you’re making more taurshit excuses to keep me out. This is a partnership. You damn well know I don’t like that, but I keep up my end.”

  “Your end has been delaying the Enterprise for months,” Roache said, putting his cup down and folding his hands. “I do not need to remind you our contract is almost up. Seven years does fly by, and we cannot afford to be behind schedule.”

  “Schedule… contract…” Verus spat the words. “You speak of our holy task as if it were some business dealings.”

  “Don’t blame me for efficient thinking,” Roache leaned back, “unless you want to explain our failure to produce proper output.”

  “Proper output?” Verus smashed his palm into his good eye and shook his head. “It rots my brain, Roache, hearing you complain to me of delays. You’re the one shoving in that griffon-fucking module last minute. That wasn’t part of our plan.”

  “Namter, please elucidate to our guest as to why we needed to modify the water-infusion plant.”

  He knew what Lazarus was doing, clear enough. Lazarus didn’t care that Namter never truly understood the technical details. The tycoon knew full well that Namter never had a voice in the decision to remove Gall, that he had no real opinions on the matter. But Roache kept pushing him on as his mouthpiece, in order to present a united front.

  The role of the Watcher was to watch, to shepherd silently the one who held his true Master’s gift. It didn’t matter how much he actually liked Lazarus, nor did it matter that he more often sympathized with the Awakener. Duty was duty; individual will could only be tolerated in the service of divine will.

  Namter closed his eyes. “The Enterprise… though simple in one sense, is quite delicate in another. The slickdust infusion must be regulated perfectly, with a gradual but consistent buildup. All will fall to ash if the Huile residents say, observe that their tap water is suddenly crimson, or notice an odd taste. Were it only as easy as injecting the mutants here, to simply lock their chains tight and pump them until they are proper Tribute… but to prepare an entire city, without them noticing, demands immense precision. It is a difficult task, which has required significant breakthroughs in our æther-modulation and infusion technology. We can’t afford any further disruption or uncertainty.” He opened his eyes to find what he expected, complete contempt written on Verus’s face. Utter dismissal by the man who had trained him in sacred rituals, who had once revealed to him the truths of the world. Namter did his best to hide the hurt.

  “It would have been fine,” Verus said. “Gall had almost figured it out, would have, if you didn’t obstruct every damn thing. All was fine until you fucked me over a log.”

  “Oh, no need for such harsh words.” Lazarus gestured for Namter to pour him another glass. Verus had, unsurprisingly, not touched his first. As Roache sipped he pulled out a box of cookies from a drawer and dipped one in his crimson drink.

  “Fancy a snack?” Roache asked, lifting up the box. “Brought them from Icaria. Funny things, molded in the shape of little gears. I’m sure they’re just for tourists, but surprisingly delicious.”

  Verus stared. “Are you mocking me Roache?”

  “Come now,” Lazarus said. “I’m an ambitious man, I have no reason to waste my time with such trivial tasks.”

  Verus responded over crossed arms. “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I don’t wish to speak out of line,” Namter cut in, “but I think it is proper to remind you both that we are all on the same side here. We work for the same task, the same Master. It is wise to argue so bitterly over details of execution?”

  Verus turned his piercing squint in Namter’s direction. “Did the ‘details of execution’ require the murder of my own engineer?”

  “Now, now,” Roache said.

  “I never liked that dog of yours, that mog-lizard, shit-licking Talwar,” Verus said, thrusting out his arms. “Unnecessary show, if you ask me, but at least the idiots he got arrested were people we actually wanted gone. What twisted thought wormed its way into your head for you to send him against me?”

  “It was the simplest way to resolve things,” Roache said. “That engineer wasn’t even competent enough to keeps his notes from being stolen. Inferno knows where those ended up. Could have that mad monk gallivanting the Wastes with a copy of them. No, best to finish up things here quickly, and if that meant going behind your stubborn back Verus, I won’t apologize.”

  Verus gave one last glance to Namter, and it spoke clearly of the man’s suspicions, all founded in shameful fact. Of course Namter had been the one to forge Gileon’s letters, did he have a choice? It was necessary. As were the varieties of letters he had had to forge in the past, often for the eyes of the same fool, a task that Verus had made no criticism of at the time.

  “We are almost finished,” Namter said. “It doesn’t matter what we think of each other, we have done our duty.”

  Verus spat on the three-times cleaned El’Helmaudi rug beneath them and pushed it in with his boot.

  “You two would still be some Wastes-wandering morons without a pot to piss in if it weren’t for me,” Verus said. “Some wrinkled old heir to a company you couldn’t keep above water and his hired brownnoser. I entertained the idea that one of you had potential,” he glanced briefly at Namter, “but I’ll admit, I never thought of either of you as much more than a pair of grasping idiots who had access to drills and auto-diggers.” The words cut deepe
r into Namter’s heart than perhaps Verus realized. “I made you what you are, and now you think you’re somehow better than me? More competent? Makes me laugh.” Though he certainly did not.

  The Awakener turned to leave, pulling the door open with a slam. “Fine then, do it your way. You, Watcher, keep your watch, Roache, just get the fucking plant running.” He walked out into the hallway, muttering. “Remember that it’s not me that you need to impress.”

  Chapter 24

  Sylvaine felt the large metal panel through her glove. She breathed in, letting the darkness that surrounded her dissipate away, and filtered out from her mind the distractions of the distant drips, the scraprat squeaks, the gurgling pipes, and the nervous breaths of Marcel and Kayip. The smell of the place could not be so easily ignored, even through the scarf she had wrapped over her nose, but it was not so overwhelming as to prevent her from feeling out the form of the metal with a subtle touch of æthericity.

  “Yeah,” she said, “definitely hollow. Some machinery behind it as well, though can’t make out much more than that.”

  “You think this is City Hall?” Marcel asked, staring at a Huile map they had brought, trying to do the math.

  Kayip swung his cone of handtorch light down the corridor in the opposite direction. “Yes. Yes, I do remember. I ran down this way, cut through a weak part of the wall. They must have patched it up.”

  “You had to escape City Hall?” Marcel looked up from his map.

  Kayip nodded, staring downwards. “This has not been my first attempt to reveal Roache’s crimes.” Sylvaine wondered if Marcel noticed how guilt-weary Kayip looked, deep lines pressing in on his forehead, or if the monk’s face was too hidden by the dark.

  “And they didn’t believe you?” Marcel asked.