“It can see us, though. It doesn’t seem to care that we’re here.”
“Then why don’t you go and pet it?”
I scowled. “I’m not going to pet it. I’m going to walk around it.”
“Let’s just kill it,” said Zira, frowning. “It’ll attack us anyway, might as well save ourselves the unnecessary injury and strike first.”
I was about to reply, but a voice invaded our minds:
—Testing.
It was Yahweh.
—Testing one, two, three.
I actually laughed, while Zira rolled his eyes in relief.
We can hear you, I telepathized.
—Oh, splendid. It only took me eighteen days to figure out what you did. Are you two okay?
Yeah, I guess. We could have used some help a while ago, but we’re good now, I said.
We are not good, corrected Zira. At no point on this mission have we ever been good.
—Have you found Leid?
No, I said. But I think we’re about to. She’s alive; we know that, at least. We’ve just reached the Committee of Esotericism Headquarters. Can you see our thread?
—We can. Aela is sorting it as we speak, but it’ll take a while. I’m glad you two are okay. I need to brief Adrial now. Talk to you soon, hopefully.
“Eighteen days,” said Zira, absorbing that fact.
“Seemed longer to me.” Then I looked back at the headquarter grounds. “I don’t want to kill that thing if we don’t have to.”
Zira let out an exasperated sigh. “This is honestly the worst time for you to change face.”
“But it’s so…” I hesitated with my hand out, searching for an appropriate description. “… Majestic?”
Zira stared at me, blinking twice. “Qaira, we’re wasting time.”
“We’ll waste even more time by killing it. Let’s just walk by and see what happens.”
He said nothing else, only stepped through the gate; a signal that I’d won.
*
The unicorn didn’t bother with us, just like I’d predicted. It’d only given us a dismissive glance while chewing on a pile of bones, each crunch the equivalent to the sound of breaking glass. That couldn’t have felt good.
We were greeted by a dark and vacant lobby past the rotating glass doors of the Esotericism HQ. Only several steps in, desolation stamped us with a foreboding heel. Two things happened then; the augur’s train vanished, and Leid’s signature reappeared in attica’s user list. It was oddly shaded out, but there.
Zira and I stood there for an instant, weighing the sudden turn of events. We didn’t speak, only shared an apprehensive look. Then, we left the corridor by way of a leftward corridor, where we’d seen the train lead just before fizzling out.
It wasn’t difficult to tell where Leid had gone—her path was marked by an array of ruined doors. She couldn’t have done any of this herself. Laith’s augur was more powerful than I’d thought.
Then we hit a roadblock—a sealed metal door with an insignia over the top and magnetic strip on the frame, the area beyond accessible by only a keycard. Guess we were going to have to break it down.
“Are you sure she went this way?” asked Zira, grimacing as I started shouldering the thing. The metal bent, but held.
“There’s a broken door at the entrance of this hall. She was here,” I said.
“Yes, but this door—,”
“She may have found a key.”
Zira considered that, flipping down his visor. After analyzing the radiation levels of the strip, he nodded. “It was used recently.”
I released a scythe, and the door was ripped open in just three swings. I opted to keep the scythe unsheathed; there was a chance I’d need it again, and didn’t want to waste one of the three remaining marbles we had left.
“I don’t want to carry this anymore,” declared Zira, holding up the mug of tea with which Laith had supplied us.
“Then drink it.”
“I’ll drink half; you drink the other.”
I snatched the cup from his hand. “Then give it to me first. I don’t want your backwash.”
“As if I want yours.”
We’d hoped the train would return after emptying the mug, but it didn’t. A few reasons floated around my mind, but I refused to entertain any of them.
Not far down the next hall, there was another broken door, this one leading to a staircase and elevator. We looked between both.
“Why did they even go this way?” asked Zira. “What were they doing?”
“I don’t know what the augur was doing, but Leid would have been looking for answers surrounding the rift. Lesser, or not.”
Zira sighed. “Stairs it is.”
We now faced our second conundrum. If Leid had acquired a keycard, she could’ve accessed any of the subsequent floors. Initially, there was no way to know which level she’d chosen. Zira, for whatever reason, thought that we should split up. I told him to get fucked with that idea.
“We’ll climb to the top,” I offered. “We need to see if there are any obvious indications of where she’s gone.”
Thus we ascended the staircase, until both of us froze on the entrance to Floor 3 when a cry rang out from somewhere above us, echoing through the narrow partition of the stairwell. There was no denying whose voice it belonged to, and both of us immediately raced toward the sound.
I was the first to hit Floor 12, exploding through the already-open stairwell door. To my horror, what had once been an upper administration-esque department had turned into a drug-fueled hallucination only the worst acid trip could provide.
The walls were a patchwork of mottled skin, breathing wet, sick gasps; churning with something grotesque beneath. Every nook and cranny was infested with swaths of protruding black hairs, slithering on the floor or floating in thin air. The sound of grinding metal made me involuntarily clench my jaw.
And there was Leid, wandering aimlessly in the right-wing corridor. I was in clear view, but she didn’t even see me. She moved back and forth, wall to wall, her condition switching between violent sobs to belligerent screams of anger, none of which I could understand. She kept repeating that she was sorry—sobbed that she was sorry, screamed that she was sorry.
“Leid?” I shouted, and that snapped her out of it; at least I thought it had.
When she looked at me, I saw how infirm she was. The tightly-woven braid she’d worn on her departure from Exo’daius was tangled and disheveled, having nearly come loose. Her skin was gray, eyes sunken so far into her head that I could barely see the violet sheen of them. Beads of blood trickled from her nose. Her right hand was burned and rotted, hanging on her wrist by only sinew and tendon. Smoke, much like the headquarter building, wafted around her form.
“You’re not real,” she whispered, backing up. “Get away from me, you’re not real.” She sobbed again and cowered in a crouch, holding her head. “I’m sorry. Stop punishing me. I’m sorry!”
Zira had taken my side, horrified. He moved a step toward her, but I stopped him.
“No, I’ll do this.” I opened my un-scythed hand. “Marble.”
“She’s manifested everything,” breathed Zira, fulfilling my request. “She must have absorbed a shard.”
My hand regenerated. “Get another marble ready,” was all I said at first, then thought better of it. “Get two.”
Zira reluctantly stayed put, reaching into his coat. I moved gingerly up the hall, reaching into my own.
“Hey,” I said, keeping my voice as even as I could. She didn’t register me. “I’m real, okay? I swear I’m real.”
She looked up at me, skittering away, pressing herself up against the corner of the hall and the door. Leid regarded me like a monster, and that kind of hurt. I kept approaching, now only five feet away.
“Please,” she begged, water tears streaming from her tired eyes, “just leave me alone.”
I said nothing, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. All I could do was try to b
e gentle. I reached for her, and she swatted away my hand, sobbing harder.
I grabbed her, and she fought me, but her fists were like cotton balls. She was lesser; she was nothing. I bit back the guilt of what I’d have to do next, forcing her onto the floor and pinning her there. I pulled out the spare attuned headset that I’d had enough intuition to bring along.
Leid flailed and screamed as if I were killing her. I tried really hard not to cause her any injury, but was certain there’d be some bruising in the aftermath. Lessers were soft; Vel’Haru were not, even when we tried to be.
I clamped my hand over her head, holding it still, fitting the headset on. She reached for my arm and I had to use my knee to keep it down. There was a crack of bone, and I winced. Leid screamed in agony beneath me.
It took several tries, but then she went completely rigid and her eyes blew open. The Exodian alloy melded to her flesh, sank into it. Light formed across her left eye, at first a solid circle, then a hypnotic swirl.
Leid was back online in attica’s user list.
“Zira, the marbles,” I ordered quickly.
*
“It’s all there,” said Leid, seated cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the hall, trying to fix her chaotic hair.
I captured the protocols document while reading it over, loading it into the thread. The nightmarish atmosphere had receded once Leid was back online. She didn’t look one hundred percent, but we’d given her the only two marbles left. The violet lightning storm had returned to her irises, some color returning to her skin, and those signs were good enough for me. “Laith said her augur was with you,” I noted, after reading about the failsafe NIBLI. “Where is he now?”
“It’s not a he,” she murmured, casting a sad gaze downward. “It’s a wraith. They were taken.”
“Taken where?” asked Zira.
“I don’t know,” she said. “To power the liturgy, probably.”
“Yahweh can attune more headsets,” said Zira. “We need backup.”
“There’s no time,” objected Leid, getting to her feet, the attempt at fixing her hair only proving half-successful. “It could take them just as long as we did to find this place.”
“If the last coil is broken, the rift will keep expanding,” said Zira. “We can’t go this alone.”
“Coil,” repeated Leid, not understanding. “Explain.”
And so we did, though it was more a summary than a full exposition. The murky confusion in her eyes gave way to cognizance once we mentioned the primex sentry and its monastery.
“We saw the same artifacts outside this building,” she said. “The last coil must be here.”
“Laith said there are three pillars still alive,” I mentioned. “Does that hold, or has the wraith killed any more since?”
Leid shook her head, solemn. “Nibli was looking for them in here, but we never found any.”
“Three pillars, their totems, and who knows what else,” assessed Zira, crossing his arms. “I’m telling you, we need backup. Adrial, at the very least. How many times do I have to be right for someone to listen to me?”
“And how are they going to find us?” I snapped. “Assuming the kid replicated my work to the tee, there isn’t any way for us to track our own signatures. They could end up anywhere once they cross the rift. Are we going to risk putting them through all the bullshit we endured?”
Zira sighed and looked away. He knew I was right, but being reluctant to proceed alone was completely reasonable. If it were up to me, I’d say let’s just get the fuck out of here, but something told me Leid wouldn’t be on board with that.
“Okay, so the coil,” I said, glancing at the stairwell door. “Where do we start?”
There was a moment of silence before Leid mentioned, “Nibli said they lived in the basement.”
XXII
NIBLI
I AWOKE FEELING WEIGHTLESS AT FIRST, MY vision clouded by confusion and vertigo. The weightlessness was only temporary; soon my body transformed into a burlap sack, stuffed to the brim with stones.
Pressure mounted in my head. Heavy torrents of wind lashed at my leaden form. I tried to move, but found my arms confined behind me, wrapped around a lanced baluster. I managed to disturb a cairn laid at my feet. There were three of them, all glowing a murky green, their light rising like smoke in swarm with dozens of others; all scattered amid similar runic balusters tethered to dead wayfarers. But their bodies still had power, even in death. Their glow was less vibrant, but still there; sucked into the balusters that imprisoned them, fueling their runes.
It was doing the same to me, because my effluvium was gone. I couldn’t even sprout any spines; in fact I felt no hunger, or danger, or anything. The light my tithe generated was only visible from the furthest edges of my vision, but still it shined brighter than the rest.
Ahead of me was a massive statue, a dozen times the width and height of all the balusters combined. Halfway from the base began a crudely-sculpted torso of a man. Its design grew in detail the higher my eyes ascended. Spears marred his sides and chest, and he stood with his arms opened halfway, face turned upward to nihility. A single, menacing eye churned within the center of his otherwise serenely chiseled face, casting an iridescent halo around his head.
Suzerain.
The three surviving pillars were assembled around the base of his effigy, hands pressed together as they knelt, heads lowered in silent, integrated prayer. Their totems stood sentry in front of them, two-thirds glowering at me with their dead, repulsive eyes. I hadn’t a clue what any of this was, or for what purpose, but knew it was bad. Beyond the surging chaos, a rippling window floated. I saw the laboratory through a filmy lens.
All I could do was watch as the roaring winds intensified and the cracks in Suzerain’s effigy branched up through his torso and arms; red light bleeding from them, splitting the darkness like a thousand shivs. And then I couldn’t even do that, too tired to keep my head up any longer. It slung from my shoulders; particles of my face peppered the floor like ash.
A disturbance in the winds—a brief calm; so brief it almost didn’t register—stirred the total rout. The sound of exploding rock came next, which I attributed to Suzerain’s imminent release, but an echoed scream made me realize that wasn’t so.
I strained to lift my head, the circle of pillars around the effigy now broken.
One of them lay dead, her head still rolling away from the body.
Unpleasant scraping sounds erupted around me, though I couldn’t see the source. The only things my eyes could catch were the fleeting blurs of shadowy outlines.
Another scream.
A totem crashed dead at my feet, having fallen from somewhere above. Both its arms were missing, and I never found out where they’d gone.
Two figures rolled into view, entangled in a violent scuffle. One of them seemed to be carrying a curved, black sword, shoving it again and again into the totem’s gut. I watched all this unfold like shadows across a wall; the totem was quickly disseminated, piece-by-piece.
Tremors wobbled my arms as someone beat against the baluster that imprisoned me. Soon I was free, yet still too weak to move, and my liberator knelt in front of me.
Leid.
Except, not Leid.
The woman before me was an exact replicate, but she didn’t feel the same. When I looked into her face there was nothing there; neither a hint of warmth nor vehemence. Nonetheless she offered me a tiny smile, absent of candor.
“I bet you’re hungry,” she said, and despite everything crashing and ruining around us, I could hear her perfectly. It was as if her voice reverberated from inside my head.
I was far too astonished to say anything, and she disappeared soon after. A pillar—perhaps the last still (somewhat) standing—was thrown before me on hands and knees. I recognized her from the laboratory; the oldest of the six. She was shaking and crying, imbued with fear and loss so exquisite that my effluvia poured out of me like an exploding dam, and I lunged on top
of her as she screamed and begged for her false god to save her.
The spines erecting from my body silenced her forever. One speared the girl through the head via her open mouth. I shivered, drinking my fill, until my head lolled and I felt brand new.
Hands pulled at my arms, dragging me to my feet. I could barely use them, drunk from euphoria. The aftermath of Suzerain’s failed ritual lay before me. Broken cairns, crumbled balusters and their respective bodies, and crystallized pillars all scattered in varying degrees of mutilation across the torpid field.
And there was Leid, standing at the base of Suzerain’s effigy, looking up at the glowing, cracking monster with her arm outstretched, palm upward, a growing ball of blue electricity only adding to the seismic storm of wind and pressure.
“She’s going to pulse!” screamed the man holding me. “Zira, get back!”
Wow, I thought, right before I was tossed through the swirling window.
*
“You require more tea than my coffer can make,” scolded Laith.
The sorceress had been waiting for us at the facility’s gated entrance, which was fading slowly at our backs. The two men comprised of Leid’s rescue party wore injuries grave enough to lay most on their deathbeds. Apparently, that wasn’t the case for them. The black-haired scholar with eyes like embers helped me to walk, even though he himself was missing both hands—as well as half his face. I tried not to look at him while he provided a supportive shoulder, as it would be rude to cringe.
I recognized the second scholar; it was impossible not to, as Leid had manifested his stone likeness so exactly. The wings he’d worn were presented for only an instant before bizarrely disappearing into his body, via the shoulder blades.
Once the facility vanished completely (for good this time, I hoped), Laith raised shard pillars from the ground. Soon after, the blue flames of a hearth were resurrected at the center of her chosen circle. The sorceress had brought a pot and ladle on her person, which I found peculiar.
The single construct left of the facility’s recession—the steps and frame of the main entrance—lit up as soon as Laith fastened the pot above the bonfire. The empty space between the door frame was filled by a cloudy, swirling abyss.
Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9) Page 17