The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  There was a rapid knocking at the door. A mutant woman rushed in, saluting Desct, who stood. The motions of both were imprecise and weary, the night had been a long one.

  “Eirena’s squad just knocked Celina’s gang out of the caravan depot,” the woman said.

  “Good.” Desct nodded. “How many captured?”

  “A dozen or so, some killed, most ran,” she said. “I’ll get the numbers. But Celina was one of those who fled, straight out the main gate, with a couple of ‘trucks. Last we saw she was heading south, no sign of turning around.”

  “Fucking…” Desct caught himself and breathed in. “Congratulate the soldiers and spread the message that Celina has been defeated. Focus Eirena’s and Calix’s forces and sweep down the eastern wall, I’ll be out momentarily.”

  The woman saluted and ran back out. Desct sipped some more. “So it’s headless now,” he said, “no easy peace treaty.”

  “And there is the issue of Roache,” Kayip stated.

  “Bit late to do anything about him,” Desct said. “As much as I’d love to have his head.”

  “It’s his fault,” Marcel said.

  Desct nodded. “Need to consolidate my forces here.”

  “He’s coming back, isn’t he?” Marcel asked Kayip.

  The monk scratched his chin. “I am unsure on the man’s next move.”

  “But he has raiders as allies. Many of them, that’s what you said.”

  Desct looked to Kayip, who nodded.

  “Then we’ll need to defend the walls, hold out,” Desct said. “If the man returns to reimprison us.”

  “No,” Marcel said. “We have to go after him, strike him down, if we want to protect Huile.”

  “I need to protect my people,” Desct said, “and dispatching them out into the Wastes is not a rational course of action. Even if Roache does comes back, it will be safer behind these walls than out there.”

  “But if he comes back,” Marcel said, “he might give his own story, try to twist the ear of Levair, or whoever else comes by, with his words. He’s too dangerous to be left alive.”

  “I don’t know Marcel,” Desct rubbed his forehead with two worn hands. “All I can do now is to try and mold this city back into a semblance of sanity and chasing a man across the Wastes does not fit into a strategy of restoring sane fucking order.”

  “I will go,” said Kayip, standing. “I respect your cause, Desct, and hopefully my actions will aid your peace. But it is for my own reasons I must find an end to him.”

  “We don’t have much to offer,” said Desct, who stood in turn, “but I’ll get what aid I can to you.”

  “It’s not over.” Sylvaine sat, eyes downcast.

  “Sylvaine?” Kayip asked, offering his arm.

  “It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

  The monk nodded. “Then it is decided.”

  “Marcel?” Desct asked, walking past the pair. Marcel rose from his chair.

  “Marcel,” Desct said. “I could use you. After all this comes to an end, we’ll need someone who can help talk peace. I’ll do my utmost, but considering all that’s happened, I don’t know how my word will be taken.”

  How strange Desct looked in his uniform. It didn’t remind Marcel of the hodgepodge mix of rags and recycled military fatigues they had once worn together as soldiers. This outfit was far too formal, with frilled epaulettes and awkward pretensions. When Marcel had seen Desct crouched in the storage tank beneath Blackwood Row, he had thought that he had found his friend again, back from the dead, the mutations and filth changing nothing. But Desct wasn’t the man he remembered, he had changed, had seen things Marcel never had, suffered cruelties Marcel could never truly understand. The man standing before him was no monster, Marcel could not fairly judge him for the horrors of the night, but he was also not the Desct he once knew.

  Finally Marcel shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve tried to talk my way out of this, from the very beginning. And it’s all gone to shit.”

  Desct put his hand out. “We are free, Marcel, despite the unfortunate blood spilled, we have still achieved something. Help me protect that.”

  Marcel stepped back, leaning on the wall, his gaze twitching back and forth in thought.

  “We can still save Huile,” Desct continued, “truly save it this time. Redeem its transgressions and our own, rebuild it from cobblestone up, to be the refuge of liberty we fought for. It’s a mess now, all with sense can see that, but we can clean this mess, make Huile everything that we were once promised. Free and independent, from the Principate, from Lazacorp, from the U-double-CR if it comes to that.”

  Marcel could stay. He could stay among the ruins of the city; watch the men and woman who once called him a hero hide from his revolution in fear. He could linger in anxiety for the coming judgment of far distant Confederacy officials, men who knew nothing of what happened here, of the atrocities and injustices. He could pass papers with a man who he no longer understood, connected now only by shared trauma and failure. He could sit and wait here, all while Lazarus Roache lived.

  “Roache started this,” Marcel said “and it won’t end as long as he lives. He tricked us Desct, those years ago, tricked me since then. He’s twisted the mind of everyone he’s talked to, and could be at this moment planning his return. I can’t stay here idly, knowing that its merely a matter of time until that bastard comes to destroy it all again. No, while Roache is still alive we can’t trust any peace.”

  Desct’s hand finally fell. “Well, if that is your decision, then I can only wish you the best of luck.”

  Marcel smiled, or produced something akin to a smile. “Don’t worry, Desct. We’ll be back here soon enough.”

  Kayip grabbed Desct’s shoulder, and nodded. “We will bring you Roache’s head. I promise you that, if I can live long enough to find it.”

  Epilogue

  Namter fell.

  He fell and he fell. Shapes of shadows flew past, flashes of cities resplendent and in ruin, massive arms the length of the ocean, spheres of everturning celestial gearwork, some mired black, others glistening pure. Through this he fell and he fell and the pain was immense. He was himself, full and impure, and for this he suffered, his mind burning, his body bleeding.

  “An Awakener has fallen. An Awakener shall rise.”

  The voice came in from a world beyond. His world, Namter knew, as swirling visions flung past him, as he was thrown through the ceaseless maelstrom. Verus was gone. Yes, he was still enough of himself to remember that. The old Awakener had betrayed the cause, and though Namter could not understand why it had happened, it had happened nonetheless. That man (for without purpose he was only ever just a man) had perished in the chaos he created, burned in the pyre that he had made out of Blackwood Row. Whatever anguish Namter felt, the truth was that their Awakener had fallen.

  And now so was Namter.

  “A Brother seeks the Truth. A Brother is Blind. A Brother seeks Redemption. A Brother must Suffer.”

  Namter did not land so much as find himself suddenly standing. There was no crash, yet he felt such pain as if each bone in his body had been shattered into slivers, skewering out in all directions. He writhed without falling over, he suffered without injury.

  “He has Watched and long waited to Serve. Let him wander, let him See.”

  Around Namter loomed towers with no summits, dark and shattered. Hollowed husks infested with naked forms, men with leech-like features and limbs of metal crawling across a broken cityscape, fighting among themselves or sleeping in nests of bleeding rust.

  He cowered, covering his eyes, and yet that did nothing to block the sight. He felt his forehead, felt the marking there in cut skin and blood, the long oval with single iris. He knew that it was from this eye that he saw, and such vision could never be shut.

  “Let him See. Let him See what mankind has brought to the world, what they have dragged to ruin and rot.”
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br />   Namter stumbled out into the street. Great bulbous men, with masks of rusting metal and guts of suppurating maggots, walked among him, stumbling by with low groans. Mammoth machines hung above, floating in the crimson maelstrom, poxed with oozing sores. On their sides hung thick chains upon which he could make out the forms of men thrashing.

  “May his eyes be opened. If he cannot See, may he be blinded. If he cannot Hear, may he be deafened. If he cannot Feel, may he be Flayed. Let Pain mark his contrition. Let Truth smother him.”

  It was too much, he wanted to shout, it was too much! He choked on the words, remembering the Oathblood poured into his mouth. He was not breathing back in his world, but drowning.

  Creatures flew by, screeching. As they dove he saw that they were children, winged infants. Each was skinless, aside from the wings, which appeared to be covered in a frame of dried, stitch-worked skin. Their sunken eyes stared with a veiny white, and their fingers were long blades. They cackled and screamed, chasing him down into the winding urban maelstrom. They pursued him down infinite alleys that swung back on themselves and through giant factories where headless crones cut meat from men the size of the world. Figures writhed and wept on the streets, many-faced or no-faced, bodies long and wormlike. Colossal spider-shaped machines spewed black nothing that dissolved the very air around him, leaving floating holes of nothingness.

  He ran through the nightmare. He was not ready for this; he was not the Awakener, just a mere Brother, a mere Watcher. If this was the truth, it was beyond him.

  “Let him know the price of Hubris. Let him know the price of Ego. Let him know the Sick in the soul of man.”

  He ran onto a castle of oozing walls, titanic bleeding mechanisms twisting and turning the hallways in an endless mad maze. He stumbled through in seconds that took years, up turning floors of gearwork, past statues of squirming flesh, onto an overhanging balcony.

  I am not ready, he tried to shout, I am not ready.

  “If the Truegods allow it, let him know their Glory. Let him see how it was once. Let him See or let him Perish.”

  He collapsed forward, struggling to take the breaths that he knew were impossible. The pain was beyond the redemptive punishment, beyond even the destruction of the self, but an overwhelming torment from which death seemed no escape. His lungs burned, his veins burned, his heart seemed to pump in flames. His eyes boiled over, melting away, until suddenly…

  He could See.

  Namter stood at the same balcony, high above the city, but it was not the same balcony, not the same city. His skin, which had just been tearing at in agony, was now soothed. His body was covered in some fabric that was smooth to the touch and showed no signs of stitching. It was clearly never an animal’s skin, nor some relative of rubber. The cloth felt almost metallic, yet moved like silk, and glimmered in the light.

  The air, which had before been putrid, was now purer than a lake-breezed wind. Each breath felt like life itself. He walked with a lightness over to the edge of the balcony and stared down at a view from the height greater than of the tallest mountain.

  Below him was a city, but not the cities of his youth, not the fetid, faux glories of man, not filled with structures of the ego, of places of simple toil and idle comforts. Nor did it resemble the wasteland towns, all ruins and shacks, nor the monotone blocks of Principate cities, or the decadently dressed relics of the Resurgence.

  It gleamed white and blue, slender towers of incomprehensible artistry, spires that connected earth to sky. Between them roads, long and serpentine, moving like glistening rivers, crowded but in perfect order. Rolling gardens decorated the landscape, each the size of a forest, organized in perfect symmetry. Inside them stood statues of such majesty and prodigious size that even from this distance they demanded awe.

  This was a true City. All others were mere corrupted mockeries.

  Men, ants from this height, walked in uncountable crowds. Flocks of winged figures flew beside æroships, tracing lyrics of clouds in the sky as the wondrous machines sung arias from their engines.

  Great beings, of beauty beyond measure, walked among the lesser men. They were perfect in features, gleaming, their titanic mass seeming less to walk than to float on the ground, their clothes more marvelous than Namter’s own unexplained garments. He found himself weeping at their sight. Whatever lingering doubt he may have had, hiding in the back of his mind, was now banished completely, flung to dust.

  Namter moaned and gripped the rails, wanting nothing more than to stay in this paradise, even if only to glimpse this one image for all eternity.

  “Let him see what we lost, what we threw away with our Betrayal.”

  The world instantly burst apart into flames, the great city tearing itself apart in a sudden inferno. Namter screamed, clutching at it, willing in to return.

  Instead from the inferno, he saw Him. Floating in the void, both beautiful and hideous, flesh torn away to reveal divine blood, which dripped from His Body like rain. Great ribbons of skin floated out from the back of a figure the size of a distant continent.

  Namter fell to his knees before his Master, tears draining from him as he stared up at the glory that was The Flayed Prince.

  “I am sorry!” he screamed. “I have failed! I have failed.” The great Tribute in Huile had burned to ash. His Awakener had betrayed the cause, and Namter could not salvage it, could only run from the fire.

  “Let him feel the Agony of a thousand life-times.”

  He screamed. He screamed not from pain, not from punishment, but regret. A life of regret, millennia of regret, not the personal but the existential, the eternal more and more and more, unending desperation to return, to serve.

  The form of the Flayed Prince grew and grew until Namter was near upon it. The sky was a glorious crimson, and the radiant blood fell down upon him, coating his skin, digging into him like acid, down through the flesh and into his bone. He did not shudder, he did not pull away, he stood and embraced the oncoming torrent

  “Let him find redemption in Obedience. Let him find purpose in Service.”

  “I serve,” Namter shouted. “I serve. I serve!”

  “Let a new Awakener Arise. Let him bring his Task to a final end.”

  Namter drowned in the Crimson, the Oathblood flowing into his lungs, and into his veins. He convulsed and writhed, burned away and regrew. Then suddenly, his eye opened. Not the eyes he was cursed with in birth, not the eyes withered by age, not the eyes blinded from childhood by the filth of humankind, but a new one, carved with Truewords and burned in with Oathblood.

  And with this Eye he saw everything.

  There was nothing left. From fields of green and mighty cityscapes now sat only dust. I stood there awhile amidst the desolation, the black-charred trees and the husks of brick and metal that hours before had been my home. I did not weep, I did not scream, I could only stare out at the incomprehensible emptiness before me.

  Then, from above, I heard a chirping. A small bird flew down, whether gray of feather or drenched by the dust-thick wind I cannot say. It hopped along the rim a shattered autocar, as it might have tree-branches the day before, chirping. It found there an arm sticking out, clothes torn, flesh burnt. Slowly, then quickly, the bird started to peck at the flesh, nibbling bites, filling its belly fat on carrion.

  I knew then that I hadn’t witnessed the end. I was standing before a new beginning.

  —“Words of a Wastes Hermit” Author unknown.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Tiny Fox Press LLC

  5020 Kingsley Road

  North Port, FL 34287

  www.tinyfoxpress.com

 

 

 
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