The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  Sylvaine whispered out what she heard to Ysabel and Gualter, who listened intently, drivel as the conversation was. She focused her ears to guards’ footsteps and gestured to move back. The men were getting closer.

  “Why don’t we have Neers on this?” The first voice.

  “Because he pushed it on you.” The second. “There’s one. Hey! Come down here.” Another gunshot. A scream.

  “Nice!”

  “Nah, was aiming for the legs.”

  Some more footsteps, and a series of curses. Sylvaine could also make out a faint groaning, pained.

  “He won’t make it long. Damn it.” The second voice. “Won’t be good for talking.”

  “Eh, it’ll scare them well enough, half the point.”

  “Calm for so long, now making trouble.”

  Sylvaine felt her hair bristle and could see a similar fear in her companions’ eyes as she spoke. What trouble had the guards found? Had Marcel messed up?

  The footsteps picked up, followed by cracking, grunting, and the sound of crashing structures. The men seemed to find it easier to smash their way through than working out the mutants’ own pathways.

  The three moved back in response, having to scramble as quietly as they could manage. Sylvaine noticed that they were retreating towards the medical structure.

  “It’s in their direct path,” Ysabel whispered.

  “I’ll move the sick,” Gualter said.

  “We haven’t the hours for that,” Ysabel said. “Not even the minutes.”

  “Did they find the one who tried to escape?” said the first voice, close now.

  “Doubt it made it out of the Underway,” said the second. “Maybe didn’t even try, just scrapped that dictaphone speaker and fled back. Either way, we’ll find out.”

  Dictaphone speaker. Sylvaine staggered, struggling to keep her hand from shaking. In the Underway… Roache’s voice… It was her.

  They could see the men now, fully uniformed, rifles in their arms, the bayonets shining. They moved forward, kicking down the plywood and metal that stood in their way

  “Sneak back, as silently as you can manage,” Ysabel said. Sylvaine turned to ask a question, but the woman was already off, running through the camp. She dashed forward in a clear line to the guards. Sylvaine moved to follow her, but Gualter grabbed her arm tight.

  “Let me go,” she hissed, “They’re going to—” She saw his face. He was crying silent tears.

  Ysabel ran, clanging against metal and smacking her feet loudly against the concrete. The distraction worked instantly, the guards shouted and ran toward the woman, who fell prone onto the ground. The men didn’t grab at her first, but instead kicked her, boot against stomach and back, as she moaned, and curled up into a ball. They battered her as they latched her arm onto the second man’s belt.

  Sylvaine looked away. She could stop this. She could pull out of the man’s grip, she could ambush the men, turning their weapons to slag. Gualter stared at her, tears dripping down his stone-still face. He didn’t have to speak. If she helped, more would come, guards in their twos and tens and hundreds. They would tear this place up, make examples, find the sick and take them away, cut the hands off of the revolution before it could even begin.

  She closed her eyes, shuddering with her own grief, trying to maintain her silence as she listened to the men drag Ysabel away.

  Chapter 36

  “I don’t enjoy this, you know,” Verus said. He gestured a circle at the desk on which he sat, then spun his pointer finger up and around at his whole office, expanding the motion until he was just flailing his wrist, before shaking his head and drinking.

  Under the man’s gaze Marcel had actually finished off two full glasses. He sipped now on his third. He wished he had kept up the habit, since it was getting difficult to think with a sharp focus.

  “But you keep doing it,” Marcel offered finally.

  “You do what you do,” Verus said, “because you have to do it. Like that chair you’re sitting on.”

  “Yeah?” Marcel repositioned himself on the stiff wooden thing.

  “Well, it’s made for you to sit on it. If it didn’t work, if you just fell off or it crumbled into splitters… then what’s the point? Would be a shit chair.”

  “It already is kind of a shit chair,” Marcel observed.

  “Don’t get smart with me, Talwar,” Verus pointed finger and bottle at Marcel. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Point is, we’re all shit unless we do what we were made to do.” Verus started to pace around his office, patting paper stacks together and softly kicking file cabinets. “I didn’t think I’d be doing this for seven damn years, but here we are. Didn’t think I’d be wasting my days managing damn lazy mutants and snobbing it with a bunch of stifflander fops.”

  “And Roache,” Marcel turned his chair to follow Verus’s journey, “was his purpose to get in your way?”

  Verus stopped dead and turned, finger thrusting. “That’s the thing, that’s the thing. He knows what he’s supposed to do. I didn’t want to be partners with him any more than he with me, quite a bit less in fact, but I played my role. Now he… now he’s trying to take it all for himself. Trying to steal our enterprise away. No, not our enterprise, if it was only that petty…” The man slouched on the wall and muttered to himself.

  “I can remove the… Roache’s addition,” Marcel said, “But—”

  “You will remove it,” Verus commanded. “Don’t forget your job is to work for me.”

  “Sure, sure, Verus,” Marcel said, “but I’ll need help, a good number of mutants. I’m not an ætheric engineer. I need manpower and tools.”

  The man shrugged. “We can get you one of Roache’s engineers.”

  “You’re just going to tell him?” Marcel said, his stomach turning.

  Verus snorted. “I won’t just tell him, I’ll scream it at him, shove his nose in it, force him to help dismantle his own treachery. Make him fulfill his promises.”

  Marcel laughed, half put on, but half genuine. “And he’ll take it? Roache never does as he promised. Think about it, he’s already undercut you, he’s gotten in with City Hall. Do you think he’d do all that, and then fold once you call him out?”

  “You don’t even know what we’re planning here, Talwar, not really,” Verus said.

  “I know Roache,” Marcel said, an idea starting to form in the back of his mind. “Know what a worm he is. He has been building the trap all around you, Verus. I saw how he built one around me. He’s not giving in.”

  “I’ll force him,” Verus said, an uncharacteristic lack of force in his own tone.

  “When he has all of Huile behind him? And whose name is on the Lazacorp guards’ paychecks? I don’t know how long he’s been planning this betrayal, but it’s clearly not recent. He’s made his mind up long ago if I have any guess, been poisoning your reputation for years, consolidating his forces.”

  Verus eye flicked back and forth, as he stroked the side of his bottle.

  “He has you, or he thinks he has you,” Marcel said, smiling. “But you know. You know, and you have the jump on him.” Marcel scooted his chair towards the foreman. He wondered how far he was stretching his luck, if he could just stretch it a little further.

  “We’re partners…” Verus muttered, the words empty.

  “Partners takes two. He betrayed you,” Marcel said. “And he’ll betray you again.”

  * * *

  “…We must not allow ourselves to fall to ego. Our task here is only a pitiful service, the barest we wretches can give to the true Masters of humanity. But through our service, our pain, we raise humanity up from our own filth, and each eye made Unblind is another servant of the divine.” Namter paused, letting his words sit a moment. “Now we shall welcome into our ranks a new Brother,” he said, gesturing to a thin young man, who stepped through the door, chest bare, led in by Brother Travert.
“He comes from a raider gang of the Wastes, a life of hedonism and ego. This we will strip from him. Let him seek the truth beyond this world of filth. So may we all.”

  “So may we all,” came the combined voice of the Brotherhood.

  “Let him seek a purpose beyond the lies of civilization. So may we all.”

  “So may we all.”

  “Let him seeks righteous punishment, to feel the pain of millennia, to be torn down so he may serve his proper Masters. So may we all.”

  “So may we all.”

  The young man moved with a slight hesitation. His face was still swollen and red from his first markings: twin eyes on his cheeks, surrounded by Truewords that even Namter had not been gifted the knowledge to read. Namter noticed that the man was shaking. With fear? With anticipation? With some emotion he himself could not know? Then Brother Remius took his blade and spoke the sacred words. The other Brothers chanted along, led by Namter.

  The blade slashed, a movement faster than could be seen, and the young man screamed, as he had assuredly never screamed before. Skin flapping off blood-gushing flesh, his hand was thrust into the bowl by the attending Brothers. His screams now moved beyond the human, to pitches above the range of the mortal, splitting sounds that cut through the threads of reality. The Brothers held him, and Remius locked his hand in chains, so the man’s writhing would not wretch him from the grasp of the Oathblood.

  Namter could only smile, bliss-filled on behalf of the young man. If he survived his first brush with the truth beyond all truth, then he would be a true Brother of the Unblind. Namter could remember his first experiences with the Brotherhood, eight year ago. Then, he had been nothing more than a servant for some sangleum tycoon without sangleum, the prodigal son without the riches needed for his lifestyle, or even for Namter’s paycheck. He had been sent out on rumors that an iterant, self-proclaimed waste-prophet held strange knowledge of sangleum wells, could dowse for them with methods unknown to any other.

  Such was the least of Verus’s skills, the smallest of his gifts. Greater still was the knowledge of the truth beyond this world, of the beings who had formed it, who, by right, should rule it. Namter had learned such in the first of his lessons, when Verus had personally beat him, taken stick to back, boot to stomach, and then, blade to throat, asking if Namter wished the prophet to cut his ego away, to carve out his very soul, slice down so there was nothing left. ‘Yes!’ Namter had shouted, ‘Yes!’

  The boy screamed and jutted back, his wrists clanging against his chain. Namter wondered what visions the boy saw, what bliss came riding with the agony. The rest of the Brotherhood stood watching, but Brother Valere crept from the doorway to Namter’s shoulder.

  “Watcher,” he whispered. “Roache has sent a courier. He says it’s important.”

  Namter nodded, hiding his consternation, and gestured to Brother Avitus to continue. If Roache had sent for him during the middle of his rites it must be vital. He stepped out of the room, and then ran down the hallway, up the stairs to where a Lazacorp guard stood, leaning against the open door to the street.

  “Yes?” Namter said. The guard glanced down at Namter’s hand, still bandaged and red. “Roache’s message?”

  The guard nodded and took a piece of paper from his pocket. He stared at it, mouth moving as he read, which seemed like a recently developed skill for the man.

  “Mr. Roache says, well he says it an emergency.” He squinted. “The, uh, for the water fil… the water plant, for the party, for the water-plant the cake topper is bad.”

  “What?” Namter said, grabbing the note. It was as inane as the man said, Roache’s complaint scribbled that the custom cake-topper, ordered to mount the three-tier cake that would serve as desert for Roache’s upcoming gala, was of insufficient quality, blotchy in color and ambiguous in form. It is imperative, the note stated, that the decorations fit the theme of our grand opening, and maintain the prestige of the Lazacorp brand. The current topper fulfills neither of these and is unacceptable. I assume you understand the gravity of the situation and will…”

  Namter crumpled the letter, holding his fist to his face a moment, as he filtered out his frustration. “There is a bakery on Montuere street, ‘The Admar Twins’ Finest.’ Take one-hundred-and-fifty frascs and demand that they send their designs to my desk before beginning. Go, now.”

  Namter waved away the guard, then leaned his back on the wall. Truegods… They were only days away from finally harvesting this town as Tribute, yet Roache still deemed it necessary to interrupt Namter’s duties in order to maintain the minute details of every aspect of their soon-to-be utterly irrelevant public image. No doubt the man was anxious about the end of his role. Once they were finished extracting Tribute from Huile, Lazarus would no longer be required to act the playboy, a job the man enjoyed far too much by Namter’s reckoning. Such a life had always been the Roache’s dream, and he wished to squeeze every last minute of it.

  Soon it would be over; Namter just needed patience. Soon his duty would be complete, and the world would be placed on its proper path. All these irrelevant nuisances, these passing humiliations, the endless games his master played, all would fade to memory. The time of Reification was near at hand.

  Calming himself well enough, he turned to find Brother Valere walking up the stairs.

  “Watcher,” he whispered, “our new Brother did not succeed in his initiation. The Brothers are taking it as an ill omen.”

  Namter closed his eyes and let out a sigh.

  “Well, remove the corpse. I’ll address them.”

  * * *

  Verus held the bottle between his legs as he sat, somewhat slouched, eye focused forward.

  “I can…” Marcel began, as Verus thrust his finger up and continued to think. He had been like this for the past ten minutes. His gaze moved slowly around the room, and then finally landed on Marcel. Verus stared at him with something in his eye, not quite suspicion, not quite anger, some sort of puzzlement, mixed between frustration and bemusement. Or perhaps Marcel was merely reading that into the man, his countenance was a strange one. Then, slowly, a smile started to crawl over Verus’s face.

  “It’s a gift,” he said.

  Marcel nodded along, not sure his meaning.

  “A gift. My own gift, subtler and sublime. You see? The contract is broken, with no fault on me.” He stood up suddenly. “I always knew the man was scum. I’ve been waiting long for the moment I could leave him behind, but duty, Marcel, duty demanded I stay. Now I get to wipe the scum clean away. It’s a gift, a gift for my service.”

  Marcel stood as well. “Let me dismantle his machinery. Let me sneak in what I need and I can have it done before the fifth, have it ready by his opening day.”

  “You will, Marcel,” Verus nodded, “while I throttle the man. I will wrap my fist around his neck, and force him to watch as his treachery falls to pieces.” There was a feverish glint of glee in his eye. “After all these years it will be the last thing he sees.”

  Verus stepped over and grabbed Marcel’s bruised shoulder with such force that Marcel’s vision turned to black for a second, and he swore. The foreman just grinned.

  “In another time you’d have been a brother, Talwar,” he said. “Maybe there will still be such a time, but now.” His smile was the widest Marcel had ever seen on the man’s face, stretching his wrinkled, dust-worn skin. “Now, we squash a Roache.”

  For the Eyes of Colonel Goss,

  Maintain your forces in Holtag, reinforcements are not necessary. Victory has been achieved in Huile, the UCCR assault has crashed and been routed. Though defensive actions have never been my ideal, our foe was easily baited and destroyed. Send word back to Kaimark that our campaign shall continue onwards, any retreat now will only bring conspicuous shame upon the Imperator. No doubt those cravat-collectors have prayed that the star of Agrippus would burn out here at the edge of Bastillia. Let them sit in their cowardice and spite, our victories have m
erely begun.

  Continue surveillance on Colonel Lechslov. The more I gather in this rats’ nest, the more convinced I am that he has played a role in the coup here. I find it preposterous that provincials would rise up on their own accord, without some promise of military aid, overt or covert. This town is a prize I have no interest in, and I do not think its sangleum fields, gravid as they are, are worth the blood we have spilled in order to protect them.

  On that note, send orders to the East Vidish Extraction Co. I have too long suffered the presence of this perfidious Mr. Roache. He is convinced that his hand in the whole coup imbroglio assures his own continued control of the refineries here. That is a misconception I had great pleasure in correcting. I informed the man that we shall transfer control to imperial oversight within a fortnight. Do work to make my words truthful.

  This Roache is nothing more that a sycophant with pretensions, and if a certain prisoner’s testimony is correct, completely unworthy of trust. He even attempted to earn my favor by recommending the use of sangleum gas as a weapon against our enemy. A cowardly and shameful tactic, more befitting Resurgence terrorists than the honorable soldiery of the Imperator. The blond brute even runs his excuse for a refinery with mutant slave labor. It is barbaric. We will soon euthanize the pitiful mutants who remain and turn this slum of waste-scavenged machinery into something worthy of the Principate.

  Glory to the Imperator,

  General Agrippus

  —Final order sent by General Belona Agrippus.

  Chapter 37

  The location of the meeting had been switched, under Desct’s insistence, to the subbasement of a subbasement of an abandoned show apartment. As they waited for the final stragglers to arrive, Desct explained to Sylvaine that the apartment above had once been the focus of a tour for him and other Resurgence noteworthies. At the time it was hailed as proof of Lazacorp’s commitment to his mutant workers’ safety and comfort. The structure had never been filled, dozens of empty rooms left for storage, the sewage and water lines never even connected.