Dual Heritage: A FireWall Story

by Mark Johnson

  Tummil put his stylus and paper down on his lap. He occasionally bought the Daily Delve when he was in the mood for a laugh. “We did a profile on him and his friends. That’s out of character, for someone like him.”

  “Zale suddenly got obsessed with the ‘Frogman Prophecies’. I found him going through my myths and legends books, looking at stories on the Frogman.”

  The Frogman. The mysterious spirit that turned up every so often to attack an escaping criminal or hinder a Guard or Investigator mission. No one reputable had ever provided proof it existed. There was a saying in the service, Frogman got them, or there had been a Frogman—an inexplicable complication to a case under investigation.

  Efale leaned forward, interlinking her fingers and resting her chin on them. “He told me he’d seen a Frogman. That it leaped like it was flying and that it likes to hunt and kill. He didn’t say so, but he thought the Frogman killed his girlfriend.”

  “Her name was Ina,” Tummil said. “We’ve learned that much.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. A piece of her lost brother’s puzzle. “Ina,” she said softly.

  “Your mother’s necklace, Efale.”

  “Yes?”

  “Zale’s friend’s mother wore one just like it, when I interviewed her a few months back. I don’t suppose your families have met?”

  She shook her head. “Mother… still pretends our father never abandoned us for his secretary, never disappeared, never turned up dead months later. She speaks like Zale’s still in Armer, and everything will return to normal any minute. Meeting Zale’s friends’ families would break that.”

  “Ah, I see. Sorry, I was just wondering—”

  “When the auditors invaded our manor, she had to negotiate for each piece of jewelry. She said she bought that green pendant from an old Cenephan peddler, before she got pregnant with Zale. When you asked to meet us, she started wearing it again.”

  For a woman barely out of her teens, Efale Morgenheth had weary eyes. Like her siblings, she’d had an expensive upbringing and education, before the life she’d been promised had been torn away.

  “A Cenephan peddler? You mean he lived here like us, or he’d recently arrived?”

  “A traveler from land-to-land, hawking goods. You’re Cenephan?”

  “Sort of,” Tummil said. “I’m half-Cenephan. My grandmother never stopped being disappointed in my mother, her only daughter, for marrying my father. And my mother never stopped trying to make up for falling in love with my father, by forcing me into Cenephan sports and clubs.” He couldn’t stop himself shuddering.

  At the mention of a mother who’d fallen out of step with the times, Efale smiled for the first time. “Must have been a difficult mother to please.”

  Tummil smiled too. “Imagine her frustration when I proposed to my girlfriend; a woman with a Cenephan mother and Armen father, with traditional grandparents.”

  He was rewarded with laughter and chose that moment to stand.

  “Thanks for your time, Efale. Best wishes for you and your mother.”

  She recovered with an easy smile and stood with the practiced grace of a lady in her parlor. “Thank you, Sergeant. May your investigation bring what you seek.”

  As she hurriedly closed the apartment door on him, he noticed her brushing something away at the corner of her eyes.

  5

  Tummil stared at the sharp-eyed Seeker. The Seeker glared back.

  He extended his hand. “Sergeant Tummil, Seventh Precinct.”

  “Head Seeker Jaarmin, Armer Spire Chapterhouse,” replied the Seeker. He took Tummil’s hand and squeezed harder than necessary.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” Tummil said, not letting Head Jaarmin’s hand go. “I’ve only been waiting since sunrise. It’ll be nice to get some lunch.”

  Jaarmin raised an eyebrow. “And thanks for watching the site for us. Must be different from babysitting drunks and entrapping gamblers.”

  Tummil’s hand shook a little as he clenched Jaarmin’s. “It wasn’t as rewarding as locking up rapists and mobsters, no.”

  They released one another’s grip. Jaarmin wasn’t wearing his plate armor, meaning he and his complement of twenty weren’t on cadver combat detail. They’d be ‘seeking’ fluxes and pulses of chaos energy.

  Tummil stepped back and indicated the site behind him; Gaudrillar Temple’s graveyard. The shade cast by the temple’s tall dome had retreated some hours earlier, leaving Tummil and his troupe standing in direct sunlight.

  “I spoke to the priest,” Tummil said. “For hours. He told me there were five generators and seventeen powerheads.”

  The site itself was a confusion of human viscera, mechanical shards, and shattered tombstones. That morning, Tummil had driven slender red posts into the ground around the mix of gore, metal and stone, in a fifty-foot circle. He’d grown accustomed to the smell.

  “Head,” Tummil continued, “it’s safe to say the explosions were a surprise to the deceased because none of them got clear of their devices or were trying to get clear when they exploded.

  “What’s strange here is that the generators exploded all at once. That’s not happened before. It’s not impossible that the junkies got the bright idea to drill into their generators all at once to get more juice out of their machines.”

  Jaarmin regarded the site impassively and strode into the circle. His complement followed, their noses wrinkling at the stench of charred human remains. The Seekers closed their eyes.

  Tummil waited outside the circle.

  After ten minutes, the Seekers opened their eyes again, conferring quietly. Jaarmin led them out of the circle and planted himself before Tummil.

  “And?” Tummil asked.

  “Nothing, Sergeant. No chaos energies at all.” Jaarmin pointed beyond the graveyard. “The chaos detector didn’t register any chaos surges that you’d associate with cadvers, either. You might want to look for more typical explanations.”

  “All right. But why did all the suppression generators explode at once?”

  “No idea. How about you do your job and try finding out?”

  “Fine. I’ll do that, soon as you do your job and cleanse this place of suppression remnants. And take your time. It’s not like you’re in a hurry.”

  Jaarmin lunged forward, his nose an inch from Tummil’s, teeth flashing. “You want to know why we’re late, Inspector? We were decontaminating a private gallery where an antique collector was found, by his wife, turned inside out and hanging from the gallery’s chandelier, his entire collection trashed. We had to pick his remains off the chandelier, interview his widow and employees, and decontaminate a site that was clean of chaos energy, just to be sure.

  “We’ve had a very bad start to the day, and barely stopped to eat. When we’re done here, there’s a third site near the lake where a cadver was found, staked to the ground and withered dry as a bone. An undead is even deader. So you’ll excuse us, if we’re keeping you from locking up drunks.”

  Seekers. Always reminding everyone that they’re Seekers.

  “You’ll find it’s the Guard who do that. I’ll let you get started, Head.” Tummil turned to collect his troupe of five, waiting in the temple’s shade. Nearby, Seekers pulled metallic decontamination units from their wheeled electric wagons.

  He never tried starting fights with the Seekers; it was just that he couldn’t avoid them. And he was hardly unusual: The Seekers had been at odds with Armen legal enforcers for five thousand years.

  His corporal stood at his approach. “He looked happy to see you, Sergeant.”

  Tummil took in his troupe with a glance. “There was some strangeness last night. The Seekers are short on nerves, sleep and patience. Our problem in the graveyard was as bad as what happened elsewhere.”

  “What happened?” asked a recruit, shouldering her satchel and following Tummil out of the temple grounds.

  “Two cadver anomalies. They pulled apart an art dealer and drained another cadver. But these a
ddicts didn’t have any chaos energy nearby. It’s unexplained.”

  “Two cadver anomalies in one night? One is rare enough, but two?”

  “Not our department, Recruit. You’ll have to get used to knowing less than half the story and letting it go.”

  But he didn’t want to let it go. Two Darkness anomalies in one night was remarkable. Five suppression generators exploding was just as strange, even if the Seekers couldn’t detect chaos energy at the scene.

  6

  Tummil had needed a map to find the address; he’d never visited that part of the city. Unlike the Morgenheth women’s apartment, the house was free-standing, with a gate he had to unlatch to reach the front door.

  The door was answered by a well-groomed man approaching his later years, who introduced himself as Darin Lethrien, and absent-mindedly forgot to introduce his wife. They asked Tummil to sit in a parlor lined with color drawings of themselves, their children and grandchildren.

  “Thank you,” Tummil said, receiving the cup of tea Mrs. Lethrien passed him. “It’s as you say, we don’t think your nephew, Repaan, was infected either. He and his three closest friends, all infected? It’s impossible.”

  Mr. Lethrien’s frame relaxed a little. He smoothed his mustache. “Never had a fair go of things, that boy. I’m not afraid to admit it, Sergeant, though I am ashamed. I failed my brother by not being able to bring his surviving child into my own house. Not for lack of trying, though.”

  “How so, sir?”

  “After my brother’s family’s death, young Repaan was… hysterical. Distraught. Delusional. The priests who counseled him were as confused by his reasoning as we were. Refused to come live with us out of fears he’d ‘do it again to his own family’. Said he’d convinced himself he’d killed his family, though he still didn’t know how they died.

  “The thought of coming to live with us gave him terrors. The advice was that he go to the orphanage, and we’d sponsor his education. The plan was that he’d come live with us once he turned eighteen, and from there go to university and get back on with life.

  “He was happy to discuss the plan with us, and seemed to be looking forward to moving in with us. Then, the day before he turned eighteen…” Mr. Lethrien bit his lip, and focussed on a portrait of a family of six, to the side. Two adults, three boys and one girl.

  Mrs. Lethrien cleared her throat. “The day before he turned eighteen, he disappeared. We only learned where he’d gone once the stories came out, a few months ago. He’d run straight to the other side of the city and joined the Brogen Quarter Guard.”

  She took a quick look at her husband. “We’ve kept Repaan’s wealth and his family possessions. He wasn’t the sort to obsess over possessions, but I must say he’s got enough to start very well if he ever recovers from survivor’s guilt. If he’s still…” She swallowed.

  “We’re convinced he’s alive, Mrs. Lethrien, and with his three best friends. Wherever they are. The reason I’m here is to ask if there’s anything that’s occurred to you in the last few months that you hadn’t told my colleagues when they visited you after we found the underground chamber?”

  Mr. Lethrien sucked in a breath. “You were there?”

  “I was.”

  The Lethriens stared, neither asking him to tell of it nor changing the subject.

  Tummil found himself looking out the window. “It was bad. I can’t imagine what your nephew woke up to. We’re certain he awoke after the damage had been done, and the body parts had been scattered all over. It stayed with me for quite a while. I didn’t think it was real, afterward. Thought I must’ve imagined it. Then the nightmares began.”

  He looked back at them.

  Mr. Lethrien took a deep breath. “In answer to your question, Sergeant, we’ve thought of nothing. If I could help you, I’d move heaven and hell and everything inbetween to do so. But I have nothing.”

  Tummil didn’t want to ask the question. It felt disrespectful, but the bodies of three hundred dead citizens urged him on.

  “Mrs. Lethrien, when I visited Mrs. Morgenheth the other week, and Mrs. Rortiin after the massacre, I noticed a green stone pendant around their necks. I’m assured that green stone pendants weren’t in fashion twenty years ago, but still, the two mothers I’ve met both have the same necklace. And they were never friends, and never met, and had very little in common.

  “It’s a silly thing, but I was just wondering…?”

  Mrs. Lethrien frowned, stood and left the room. She returned minutes later with an ornate metal box.

  She opened the lid.

  Tummil leaned over. The jewelry box was an assortment of rings, bracelets, hair clasps and necklaces. The adornments’ colors, sizes and patterns had fallen out of vogue. Even he knew that, for he’d not seen Reeta or his mother wearing anything like this selection.

  A glint of green glimmered at the box’s bottom.

  Tummil reached, gingerly fishing, trying not to disturb a dead woman’s possessions, left for her only child.

  He pulled out a long, smooth green stone. When he gazed at it, it seemed there was a… deepness to it. As though he could see further into the pendant than its other side.

  A shiver ran down his spine. After he blinked, the pendant was a simple green. No hidden dimensions within.

  Mr. Lethrien leaned toward Tummil and whispered. “If this is some sort of elaborate fraud, perpetrated in order to take hold of a simple green stone, Sergeant, I’m tempted to give it to you. Simply out of awe at the foresight and planning employed. All for an ungraven stone.”

  “I—I wasn’t going to ask for it, sir.”

  But now it was in his hands, he wanted it.

  This mystery had too many moving parts. Terese Saarg, the Sumadans, the survivors, the impossible underground chamber, the Royals, and something only the Gods knew what was killing people. But here was something he could hold. Something that he could touch and point at.

  He still hadn’t taken his eyes from it. “Could I borrow it, Mr. and Mrs. Lethrien? It might help me find answers.”

  “What answers?” she asked.

  “Answers to questions that started over twenty years ago.” He lowered the pendant and gripped it. “I won’t lie. This isn’t departmental. It’s a personal loan, from you to me. On the understanding that I try to uncover what happened to three hundred dead people. And, if we’re lucky, some clue to what happened to your nephew thirteen years ago when his family died, and then again, a few months ago, at the massacre.”

  Mr. Lethrien stood. “I couldn’t do my duty as a brother and uncle, as the Gods would have had me do if the world made sense, so I shall ask you to act my place, Sergeant.” He took Tummil’s hands in his own, closing Tummil’s palm around the necklace. Bestowing a gift his deceased sister-in-law could not. “Find the answers, and you’ll have earned that pendant.”

  7

  Tummil passed quietly into the sacred Cenephan-themed grove. It had been too long since he’d visited.

  Living in Armer automatically made one a worshipper of Armer, but a popular sentiment during the exodus from Ceneph had changed things. The Royals and city council had allowed the Cenephan refugees flexibility to redesign a few sacred groves.

  He found a vacant stone bench before a statue of Armer the Forgiving, between Armer the Kind and Armer the Defender. Armer’s aspects were divided from one another by shallow pools—a reminder of the land of Ceneph’s canals and levees, long since fallen into the sea.

  He knelt, hands resting on the statue’s plinth. “My God Armer, protect me from evil. Bless my sight and words, oh Armer. Remember me to Your brother Ceneph, may His passing be swift. And… I’ve been coming to the groves, as You know. I just haven’t come to the Cenephan ones, because, well, it doesn’t make a difference where I pray, but I’m almost thirty and I still behave like my mother will know if I’ve been coming to the right shrines or not.”

  Prayer had never come easily to him. Every time he stepped into a shrine, he wond
ered how much he was being watched, and all the words he’d been planning on using just vanished from his mind like fog in sunlight.

  “Ah, a son of Ceneph, remembering the old ways, even after over one hundred and fifty years,” came a Cenephan accent, nearby. “Drifting back and forth, like driftwood in the tide. Always returning from whence you came, for reassurance and stability.”

  Tummil looked sideways at an old man who’d appeared without him noticing. From the robes of office and the lack of a preaching scarf, Tummil assumed the old man was a retired priest. However, his long, white hair was unusual for a Cenephan priest.

  “Not all the ways, Father. I’ve forgotten much,” he confessed.

  “Better to be honest, son. A man of action and positive intent is better than a directionless void of ambition. You’re here. And you’re troubled. And you wish to do good deeds, but know not how.”

  Tummil had never met a priest who improvised lyrics like poems. “I… how… Is this your grove, Father?”

  “No, son. I wander between shrines, searching for lost children whose lineages grow dim and forgetful. A declining candle in the dark. Children such as yourself, whose dual heritage has created confusion. Like yourself, Ceneph has fallen into confusion.”

  “Well done, Father. Not many can pick me out at first glance.” The priest must have seen many half-Cenephans in his lifetime.

  “It is your genetic code, child. It shines and resonates in time with this Armen shrine and the energies passing through it, but also with the Cenephan charm around your neck. You are a child beloved of two gods, and you give your love to both. In turn, you are able to receive Their blessings. Many seek to choose one over the other, whereas you embrace the uncertainty as your identity.

  “And in your uncertain state, you seek kinship with that which is also uncertain. Hence, your arrival at a grove in what must be work hours.”