Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1)

by Michael Valdez

Chapter 13

  Monastery Rising

  When he didn’t hear anyone else coming, Dastou checked the contents of the big room he tricked Broken Nose and his female partner into “breaching.” It was mostly empty, with the far wall full of sturdy wooden shelving and the few remaining were covered in dust, likely rotted through. A few broom and mop sticks without heads were scattered about, as well. With nothing more interesting than old cleaning supplies in here, he walked out.

  Dastou strolled down the hall, and it didn’t take long before he arrived at a grid of evenly spaced hallways, with more of those sparse bedrooms were behind the first few open doors he peeked into. At a count of the number of hallways and guessing each had the same number of rooms, several dozen people could live here at any given time, though the Saint had yet to see why anyone would.

  He went back to tracking his way out and walked along the left side of the area as if he was in a maze, hoping not to waste time moving back and forth. The Saint didn’t go far before he noticed a door slightly out of place in the neat grid, the closest bedrooms on either side of it maybe three times farther apart than normal. The simple door had no lock, giving him unstated permission to walk in like he owned the place, and he did.

  Well... Wow.

  The room was a library – a big one compared to what the Cypher allowed for. There were six long tables in the middle, each with at least a half-dozen seats. Shelving, free-standing or against the walls, dominated the rest of the space, the paths between them wide enough for two people to pass without obstructing each other. Dastou took some time to look around, exploring carefully, feeling as if he was disturbing a tomb in need of great reverence. He’d have to contain a severe fit of the giggles if he found this library completely filled with books, but not a single one remained. The standard ravages of time and inattention replaced them, which was disheartening. Saints loved libraries in general, and were taught to explore the Null Bank within the depths of their own minds as if that’s what it was. This, whatever this place was, must have been a fountain of knowledge, of discussion, of growth when people were still here, however long ago that was.

  The Ajiulzi Depository attached to the Academy was full of volumes written by Saints, with access typically given to people only under incredible scrutiny, and not a single book was allowed to be removed from there unless you were a faculty member. While he walked this library’s aisles, reading the names of subject sections on copper plates drilled into the wood at each end, he realized they were organized the same way as his school’s nigh inaccessible archive, but with far less eclectic titles. The Saints, as varied as they were few, studied everything from metallurgy to conchology, from skin-care to painting. The sections in this library were stricter, separated entirely by subject rather than author-first like the depository. There seemed to be no room for levity here, none of the occasional ridiculousness Dastou’s kind put into their research topics, nothing about things like martial arts styles or money laundering. Practical skills and research on materials took up most the names of sections on the plaques here, this a library meant for people who had specific jobs to do, and the Saint desperately wanted to know more. Sadly, he couldn’t make the books reappear out of the past. Whatever society was here that was so wholly removed from history took their easiest to access information with them, and Dastou made himself move on after a disheartened final scan of the room.

  Upon leaving the library, Dastou made his way out of the living quarters grid and reached another three-way intersection. The hallways were wide and continued to be well-lit by more of those bluish-white diode bulb lanterns. He flipped a coin in his head and it landed on whatever would make him go left. Too bad for the imaginary coin that there was something shiny beyond an open door to the right. Shiny always wins.

  Before getting too far down the right-side corridor, however, he stopped early on to check a very wide, empty space that had no doors and was about four times larger than the closet he was held in. The walls were made of a combination of light stone and treated wood, not brick like the rest of this place. It also had no lights, only illuminated by lanterns in the hallway. As he examined the walls of the small room one by one, he reached a far corner where the wood creaked above him and a smattering of dust landed on a shoulder. He glanced up, noticed a handspan-wide crack in the wood, but couldn’t see into the oily darkness above. He pulled out his knife and tapped the ceiling of the room with its tip, which rang out a hollow, expanding echo that went farther and farther up. Ah, this was the lift. If he was as far underground as he guessed, that lift must have gone to the surface at one point.

  It would have been news to find this ancient elevator heading deep down into this old structure from somewhere in Blackbrick, and his spies never told him of such a thing, which meant there was almost certainly no way out to the surface from here. If he tried to climb out anyway, to double-check, whatever ropes attached this timeworn thing to its pulley system was as bad an idea as any because he’d likely find them as rotted as those linens where Broken-Nose was napping. Either bad ropes or a blocked exit would greet him if he tried to climb out this way, maybe in addition to an unstable shaft. Bad idea upon bad idea, and yet again he walked out of a room disappointed by what he found within.

  Down the right corridor he went, past widely spaced doorways on his right that signaled the rooms were all massive, possibly work areas.

  He went along to his targeted Shiny Item open door and looked further down the hall before entering. The next entryway was a good thirty-five meters away, then the hallway ended in a ninety-degree turn to the left another forty meters past that. Dastou had trouble keeping track of distance when he was faking unconsciousness while being brought down here, but knew that there was more to getting out than going beyond that blind turn at the end of the corridor, including a set of stairs.

  “Not much to stop me from leaving no matter how long I take,” Dastou muttered. He’d also probably meet Nes and Trenna partway out if they found his blood splatter clue and followed him down.

  Next up, time to go see what was so deliciously glittery. Dastou shoved open the already ajar metal-reinforced door and walked inside the big room. Oil lamps hung from above, all of them lit, so there was plenty of light to see with. Big grates in the ceiling for ventilation meant having liquid fuel lamps here wasn’t a hazard. The shimmering item that caught his attention to begin with was a half-meter-squared metal plate that reflected some of the light in the room, hung up at eye level against a wall. That plate was very thick, completely flat, and had an elaborate pattern carved into it. The wall where it was foisted held another eleven similar plates, and thirty small white ceramic pattern stamps. A four-tiered glass-and-metal display cabinet in the corner held a few dozen more ceramic stamps. On the other side of the room were three stone ovens up against the wall, directly opposite the pattern-plates. The wall opposite the doorway, in front of the Saint, featured molds of all kinds and sizes, from simple shapes to highly complex designs, sitting on low shelves. The smell in this place reminded Dastou of unscented candles, and he figured this was a place for producing objects made of wax, the plates and stamps for use in repeating a design.

  He walked over to the display cabinet, and many of the stamps in it featured a crest that he recognized. Each city-state in the world had a specific crest, usually used on administrative paperwork, flags, and the like. Established families also had them, whether the lines were city-folk or isolationists, a point of pride in a world that did its best to crush pride. It seemed impossible to Dastou that he knew many of these designs. This place, at his best guess, was older than written history, at least six-hundred years, however at least two of the insignia were used in flags for places that were built only in the past century and whose crests were thought to be newly-forged at the time. The crests were always thought to be a simple aspect of mass-hypnotism, and seeing them here means they just might be, the patterns hidden in the depths of its control.

  Thinking on it, Ci
tizen Vaiss orchestrated an attempt on his life and then the escape and kidnapping to this underground treasure trove of secrets. Trenna’s group wouldn’t have known about this place or they’d have taken it for themselves, ransacked it, and sold things like the pattern stamps to black market dealers that specialized in art. This stuff would have made a killing, easily able to be re-sold to tribes and DavNo artisans. Did that mean Vaiss always knew about this literal hole in the ground, and used it to his advantage when he had a chance?

  The logic did not seem incredibly tight, and more information was needed, but there was a connection between that man and this place. Dastou realized he was going to have negotiate hard with Constable Renker and make sure he and his subordinates still had access to Blackbrick, because there would have to be numerous expeditions sent down here to find out more about this wonderful underfoot surprise.

  As Dastou was deciding which stamp crests to jam into an inside jacket pocket, he heard a pack of animals howling somewhere nearby and froze. The guttural, resonating calls lasted for a while and were off-kilter in a way that made them impossible to identify; it was somehow like a choir of three animals in one, their calls perfectly in unison. With the hallways made of stone and more or less barren echoes and reverberation made it difficult to calculate how far those animals were. After hearing all that, the Saint reckoned that tomb robbing could wait and started for the door. He was still near the middle of the room when it slammed shut with a blurring speed that would break bones if it had caught him as he reached it. The deep wooden thud of it hitting the jam stung his ears and echoed just like the animal sounds, but only in the room he was in. Then the animals cried out again, this time a set of eerie howls that broke the air in a back and forth pattern for long enough to figure out that there were five of those whatever-they-weres out there.

  Dastou wasn’t sure if maybe those animals were sent after him, but it wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t get out of this locked room. He refocused and first took note of half-hidden mechanisms in the walls next to the hinges – which he would have seen if he bothered to look behind him when he entered. That explained the speed and force of the door closing, and told him he was definitely going to have to work to escape.

  “You truly are easily distracted, Cosamian,” Citizen Vaiss said with his combination accent from beyond the door, delight plain in his words.

  “Comes with the territory of being too smart for your own good,” Dastou replied. “I noticed your Stitch work on those people. Impressive.”

  “It is compared to you. Your own skill at that is a pale shadow of the Cypher, a mediocre forgery at best.”

  Dastou rolled his eyes at Vaiss’ self-indulgent slight. “You realize being that dedicated to something most people hate is irritating, right? You know what, I’m willing to let that go if you would be so sweet as to tell me who you really are, how you can do such neat Stitch work, and what this place is.” The Saint didn’t expect real answers and wasn’t waiting for them. He instead fixed his mind on finding some other way out or a switch for the door mechanism. Though if there was it wouldn’t be in working order since Vaiss apparently expected him here. Hmm, in that case, scrap that, no simple button-press or lever-pull to get out. Think harder, he told himself.

  Dastou added to his false questions without missing a beat. “I’m perfectly willing to stand around while you yammer about how great you are or how awful you I am.”

  “I’m sure you are, but I fear you will not have time.”

  Dastou stared at a fat green ceramic pipe that ran along the ceiling, thinking about whether the water running through it – he could hear it rumble – could be depressurized enough for him to crawl through, or if it would keep flowing heavily. Unfortunately, without knowing for sure if he could break out into another room in this facility it would be too risky. Again: think harder. Before he veered his focus away from the pipe to come up with another way out, the water rumble increased, the pipe vibrated against the strong metal supports keeping it in place, and a hairline crack formed near the center. Water dribbled out.

  “Oh, dear,” Dastou lamented, the trickle of water reaching the ground as if the pipe was casually relieving itself.

  “No, that is not quite the reaction I wanted, Mr. Saint.”

  There was an audible but very muffled boom somewhere in the distance and the rumble of the rushing water increased. The pipe visibly buckled and the crack opened wider. Water was streaming out at the pace of a fully opened kitchen faucet. The bottom of the door featured a gap a couple of centimeters tall, the same height as the last knuckle of one of his fingers to the fingernail tip. A thin stream of the water hitting the floor slithered to his position, grazed his boot, continued to the door, and went below the gap, taking dust and dirt along with it. The water flowing into the room from the crack in the pipe was not enough to overwhelm that gap and fill the room.

  As if reading his mind, a metal gate dropped from the top of the doorway with the same blurry speed as the door had when shutting. It came down fast and hit the stone floor with a clang that echoed throughout the Wax Room and shook everything in the room. Pattern stamps and metal plates clinked and clanked, shifting in position ever so slightly and banging against the wall from the single explosive hit, and Dastou himself vibrated from the soles of his feet to his calves and then knees. The hollow ringing of the metal door against the floor lasted for several seconds. A thin fog of loosed dust sprinkled up and down into the air from every surface, and the gate left no way for the incoming water to leave.

  “Aw, damnit,” said the Saint before coughing a couple of times from the dust.

  “Better,” Vaiss said, satisfied.

  What was happening must be part of some kind of fire suppression system. Working with ovens, paper, and fabric like this wax operation must have done, they’d need an extremely efficient way to stop fire from spreading out of this enclosed space. Dastou could easily imagine a blaze raging its way into other work spaces or the living quarters if left unchecked. However, that did not explain why the ceramic pipe was starting to burst.

  There was a spigot with a nice, wide opening on the pipe near the side of the room with the ovens, a single large turn wheel connected to it. He went to it and had to climb on top of a work bench to reach get a grip. With a hand on the single large wheel, Dastou pulled to turn it and found it shut tight. There was likely some kind of mechanical pressure sensor within the pipe that locked or unlocked the wheel, but why was it locked right now when it would be needed to release pressure or put out a fire? Dastou didn’t have to come up with an answer, because the man who’d have sabotaged the wheel’s pressure sensor spoke up.

  “I am, at this very moment,” Vaiss said smugly, “in front of the hidden switch that will turn off what you will have figured out is a fire suppression system. I want your access codes to the Caravan’s primary locks and computerized archives. Give them to me and I will turn off the system, and let you go once they are tested and proven real.”

  Thus far in this conversation, Vaiss had predicted either what Dastou would be thinking or what he would be trying to figure out no less than three times. There was not a chance in all the world that the manipulative bastard wouldn’t know the Saint’s answer, but he said it aloud anyway, if only to tease more out of Vaiss.

  “You’re not very good at this,” Dastou said as he hopped down from the bench and immediately jogged to a knee-high chest next to the display wall. “I give you those codes, you leave me to die. I don’t, you leave me to die. If I do nothing but stall, I’ll drown sooner or later in here. All options assure my death, and one of them gives you access to my headquarters along with leaving me dead. I may as well figure my own way out and not say anything else.” He pulled open the chest lid with some effort and avoided grunting aloud. The big trunk was the only such storage chest in the room, and as good a place as any to find something useful.

  “Are you so sure you’re willing to die here?” asked Citizen Vaiss. “Those ani
mals you heard are not here by coincidence. They are mine, and they are hunting your three allies.”

  Three? Saan-Hu must have come along, a mistake and entirely against protocol, yes, but she’s never been the sit-and-wait type. She wouldn’t send one of her subordinates on the research team, and she wouldn’t let Captain Hays and his superior rank stop her – honestly, he would know her well enough not to try. Dastou scrutinized the chest, which featured a variety of metal tools organized by size and function. None were rusty, which meant they were made of materials proofed against such a thing.

  “I will not let you go alone,” Vaiss continued, “I will allow them to leave as well. Give me access, Cosamian Dastou.”

  Despite Citizen Vaiss’ attempt at scaring Dastou into cooperation, he revealed that not only did Nes and Trenna survive, but Saan was with them, which boosted that group’s overall survivability. Vaiss did not appear to be a fool previously, the opposite in fact. Was he so eager to destroy what information the DSF has collected on the Social Cypher that he would unintentionally reveal that much? It said a lot about the depth of the man’s desire for the data, if nothing about why he wanted it.

  “I say you set them free first,” Dastou said as he took a metal bar as long as his forearm and thick as his thumb from the supply chest. Notches on the outside that matched small hooks on an empty barrel next to the chest revealed the metal bar to be a sturdy holding or carrying tool. “Once you can prove that my people are safe, I’ll cooperate.”

  “I suppose that I prove your people are safe by bringing them to you, have them state that they are well, that they are free. Is that correct?”

  Dastou took his metal bar and looked at the spigot’s stuck wheel. Opening it would flood the place faster for now, but if he didn’t, the water pressure might make the water pipe burst entirely, which would be far worse. He continued the conversation on his way to the tap. “That seems like the fairest way to do this if you want my access codes.”

  “And when your people are here,” Vaiss said, “how long before they attack me on your order?”

  The Saint climbed onto the workbench again, slipped the pipe into a spoke on the turn wheel, and applied some force to loosen it. During all this he spoke to Vaiss, keeping his voice evened out to keep his exertion hidden. “If I give them the order they’ll do it immediately. I mean, really, all I have to do is raise an eyebrow wrong or tilt my head in your direction and you are, as I said earlier, a Dead Man.” No point lying about that, the Saint thought.

  “I see,” Citizen Vaiss replied. “Those terms are, as you may guess, unacceptable to me. Let us not waste more time on scenarios we both know will not come to pass when I have another method to retrieve the codes.”

  A click could be heard over the lightly spewing water, and the walls ground on themselves in complaint, like a small earthquake had taken place. Immediately after the shake-up the water’s separate rumbling within the pipe grew yet again. Dastou never stopped apllying pressure with his metal, pulling down to the point where most of his weight was being utilized. The spigot’s wheel was very stuck in place, so he took the metal bar and jumped down off the table. He looked around the room, trying to figure out what to do, when he heard Vaiss’ voice again.

  The oddness of that voice had increased a hundred-fold, and the few words or phrases that reached Dastou drove his entire being into some strange frenzy despite not understanding any of it. He was dizzy, lightheaded, the room spun and curved and spun again. His stomach was tied itself into knots, taking his torso along for the ride, and he contorted everything including his face, muscles all over him taut to snapping. He fell to his knees, his fingers stuck in claw-shapes. Searing fireplace pokers were coming through his eyes from the inside out, and the Saint felt his jaw tighten, his neck tense more around all this pain. Somewhere deep inside during this torture he noticed that he didn’t bite off his tongue and was glad for that.

  Dastou fell on his side and had a hard time breathing. For some reason he spoke, the words not coming voluntarily. Whatever he said was blurted out with panicked speed and volume, all the while his entire body burning and freezing in different parts. When he finished talking most of the pain went away abruptly, and the act of being freed from it almost made him scream in wonderment. Dastou very nearly blacked out when he heard Citizen Vaiss’ “normal” voice again.

  “Thank you, Cosamian. I appreciate your assistance. When Keymeign and Gosch found this place I was forced to make them forget. You, however, will die here, the same as Havraz.”

  Dastou writhed on the floor, the world growing darkened red around the edges of his vision. He heard small splashes as his body shook violently. He took fast, shallow breaths, the best he could do. The Saint’s perception was torn apart, and he thought the floor his face touched was a wall, and pondered for a moment why he could float since his feet weren’t touching solid ground. Sheer will kept him conscious, fearing that if he blacked out he wouldn’t wake up. He pushed himself up, slowly and shaking, back to his knees, looked at the door, and wondered why it was made of steel. Wasn’t it made of wood with thin horizontal metal bars for reinforcement when he walked in?

  As he stared at the steel gate blocking his only way out, he started feeling better, thank the void. Some of the pain was still there, but Dastou was no longer convulsing violently. He was wet and filthy, and did not care at all. He wrapped his arms around himself as if he feared his guts would fall out otherwise.

  The water pipe behind Dastou suddenly ruptured, the violent, water-backed explosion making the spigot, wheel, and a chunk of the green ceramic hit the far wall. An oil lamp was ripped off its rope-chain by the debris and smashed against the wall at the same time as the spigot and ceramic. The intense crash was like a punch in the ear in the sealed room, enough to get the Saint to wake himself some more. Dastou’s breathing was still irregular, spastic, improving with every inhale and exhale. His mind raced now that his body was calmer, adrenaline and panic fueling his thoughts.

  Vaiss mentioned Keymeign and her husband, didn’t he? That he made them forget about this place. Those two Saints explored this area two-and-a-half centuries ago, there’s no chance they all met, right? And then there was Saint Ghisam Havraz, one of the last elders; he supposedly died at the age of fifty-two from complications relating to an aneurysm. Come to think of it, Havraz had left Blackbrick hours before his death. The possibility of Citizen Vaiss not only being centuries old, but having murdered a Saint fairly recently was almost too much to handle, and something about immediate danger clawed at Dastou’s brain, forcing him back to the present, to his current crisis.

  His mouth was too warm, and Dastou realized that he had bitten the side of his tongue, enough to make it bleed lightly – so much for thinking he avoided that, though at least it was a minor injury. He spat on the floor, watched the color red spreading quickly in all directions rather than staying still where it landed.

  The water. The pipe.

  Dastou blinked a few times and snapped out of his uselessness only to realize what he had just been a victim of: a vocalized Stitch. Instead of writing down symbols like Saints did or those tattoos, Vaiss was capable of speaking in order to hypnotize someone instantly. In fact, it caused a Kaialus seizure, the physical attack a Saint suffers when they draw too much information from the Null Bank, inundating their brains with an over-abundance data. Dastou never had a full-blown one himself, barely coming close. Some years ago he saw his mentor, Lonoj Ornadais, in that state. The old man couldn’t talk about it afterwards because the brain damage caused a week-long coma that ended in his death. Fortunately, the crippling nature of a Kaialus seizure had been documented enough that Dastou was sure that’s what he experienced.

  Another important problem was what he actually said during the fit. It must have been the Caravan’s access codes, but why did Vaiss bother to ask for them in the pantry if he could take them at will? Was there a chance Dastou could have resisted the Stitch and Vaiss reveal his power with no
gains?

  Forget it. Too many questions needed answers, and the water wasn’t going to stop flowing out of the broken pipe. Luckily he was only catatonic for a minute before he put himself back together. Dastou stood up, finally appreciating how cool this water was; if he didn’t drown, hypothermia might get to him anyway.

  A static hiss, low and stifled, made him almost panic, his nerves still shot. After listening to it, he remembered that his throat-mic package was in one of his jacket pockets, near his waste. He was being called. Once again very happy that the ragged bunch under Vaiss’ control was in such a hurry to get him down here that they didn’t, he dug into the pocket with a shaking hand, put the small receiver in his ear, and held the vibration patch near his jugular with two fingers. With the other hand he held the transceiver and moved the frequency knob with thumb and forefinger until the static was gone.

  “Answer me, you goddamn weirdo!”

  Dastou sighed. “Hello, Nes. How are you? I’m currently on my way to drowning.”

  “You’re going to drown!? Is that a joke?” asked Nes.

  “No. Where are you?”

  “In the sewing room of the monastery.”

  “Ah, right,” Dastou murmured, “that’s what this type of place is called.”

  He mentally marked a low spot on the wall to help him calculate the water gushing from the pipe.

  “What’s inside the room you’re at?” asked Nes.

  Barely audible in the background, Saan said, “Trenna turn around, I need the map.”

  “Supplies for making wax items,” Dastou told Nes. “Crest seals and candles, things like that.”

  “Dastou.” Saan again, this time from her own mic. “You’re in the room across the hall from us, very close in fact. Can you come to us?”

  “I’m sealed in. Vaiss closed a metal gate that’s part of some fire suppression system.”

  “A gate?” Saan wondered. “That is what one of those loud clangs was, I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry, did you say ‘Vaiss?’ Is that a person?” wondered Nes.

  “Yeah. Someone calling himself Citizen Vaiss was behind the ambush and the embassy attack.”

  The mark on the wall Dastou studied became submerged. A quick calculation and he figured he had a little over ten minutes to escape this room before he would have to give himself the nickname Dead Man. The Saint looked around the room some more, grasping for a way out.

  “Oh!” Nes exclaimed at Dastou’s last statement. “That’s the Citizen we heard of. Yeah, he convinced Trenna’s people to work for him.” He sounded like he was moving around.

  “Not convinced, hypnotized,” Dastou explained. “They are under a very powerful form of Stitch. That’ll have to be discussed later since I barely understand it myself. What are you all doing, can you get to me?” said Dastou.

  “Us? We’re about to be eaten,” Nes said.

  “Right, those animals I heard. Vaiss mentioned something along the lines of having sent them after you.”

  “For fuck’s sake, these things aren’t just randomly here, they’ve been ordered to come after us? This day gets better by the second.”

  “No, I cannot,” Saan said in the background again, her mic turned off, “it physically hurts to think it at all.” She turned the mic back on and spoke. “I’m sorry, sir, you will have to excuse us. We’re suddenly strapped for time. Saan out.”

  Dastou noticed Saan’s use of contractions, the clearest indicator of her distress.

  “Yeah, yeah. Nes out.”

  “Good luck, Mr. Dastou!” That was Trenna Geil, yelling to be heard out of the background. Dastou snorted in amusement and got back to trying to avoid a new nickname.