Sanity Line

by Zachary Adam

  Just there, at the edge of the fame, as if a frame had skipped, Vidcund watched the knife vanish. He copied the half hour before and after to cloud storage, made a note of the time to the second of the

  disappearance, and sent the whole thing off in an email to the technical department. He also took careful note of the features of the room’s sole occupant – a young girl about the age of 14, who had been nowhere near the relevant case at the time.

  He had the strangest feeling he had seen the young woman before. A truly damning feeling, since he usually prided himself on remembering people, and there shouldn’t have been that many teenage girls in his social circle to begin with.

  He’d let his driver worry on the truly pressing details, as he returned to his apartment. He still had a report to conclude. The triskelion did not belong to the symbolic lexicon of the Cult of The Eye, which made identifying it all the more relevant.

  Learning that piece of evidence made him accept that much more strongly the need for a task force. Two different groups, at minimum, were now in play, working against each other. That could be a very real problem.

  The civilians think a gang war fought with bullets is bad...

  --Gloria could not remember the last time her heart had pounded so hard. The doctors at her asylum had kept her so deeply immersed in psychoactives that she was practically living in a dissociative state. To finally have emotions and pulse again... it was a greater release than many of her experiences so far.

  Still, fear had a funny way of keeping you from enjoying yourself too much. She had run back into her room, as she had come to think of that space they stored corpses like hers until they tired of them. With nothing sharp close to hand, or even particularly heavy, there was little she could do but bite into her thumb to get the blood going.

  She pulled out another body, smearing her blood across its neck, before fleeing again.

  --Niles could not understand why the masked man ignored Gloria the second time they encountered each other in the corridor. He had simply strode past her, into the cold storage. He watched Creena flee through the back door. Just as he had never entered the building, the Masked Man never exited it, either. Once again, he stepped around a corner, and once again, seemed to do so into some impossible corridor not otherwise in evidence. Exit stage left...

  He was going to need something stronger than brandy, Niles began to worry. He watched an external camera show Creena’s flight route, not that it told him much, the trail being so cold already.

  As he had done every night now for three weeks, he packed his laptop back into his bag, settled his tab, and slumped into his car for a smoke.

  --References by Kline (1957) and Coultier (2010) mention this particular symbol in their own compendiums. Such documents are not widely distributed outside oftheir respective schools (The Iron Institute ofthe National Library and the Saffron Academy, respectively). The monographs refer to the symbol as the Yellow Sign, in reference to their use on the cover ofthe original editions ofa French play titled “Le Roi en Jaune”.

  The play is currently proscribed by most major nations at the insistence ofAgency Division, and several precursor organizations. Both the symbol and the work are known Cognitohazards. Agency conditioning Class A and higher is sufficient for exposure to the sign without the need for amnesiacs.

  Well, thought Vidcund, that much is a relief. He set the report aside for the time being, tapping the panel that would raise the hatch on his immersion tank. The autofile and the AR glasses were the last items he needed to remove from his person before settling in. As he inserted his earplugs, he reached for his phone and tapped out a short to-do for after his bath. He was pleased to note that an icon was flashing, indicating a security update being downloaded.

  +>Terminate Niles Clayton He pushed the matter out of mind, as he was so well trained to do, and sank greedily into those familiar, warm waters, seeking that enigmatic embrace of a thousand other parts of his body he didn’t even remember having had.

  --Being a police officer, especially once you had a few years worn into the soles of your shoes, you tended to catch your fair share of paranoia. For the most part, Niles had learned to deal with it well. You simply had to rule, in your mind, on what risks were really worth worrying about. It was the law of large numbers played with lives. Yes, it was possible he’d be assassinated in a drive-by shooting by some mob boss whose nephew he’d put away, but it was extremely unlikely.

  More to the point, it wasn’t worth worrying about because there was nothing he could do about it. Someone following him, on the other hand, he could do very much about, most days. He identified more than his fair share of stalkers, and in fairness, most of them were probably not actually following him. Having said that, he could usually shake the less persistent of the real ones, as well.

  He had been able to do nothing, thus far, absolutely nothing, about the nagging feeling of being followed, of the curious commonality of auburn-haired women with yellow dresses in November. It was one such occurrence, the sight of a tawdry thing on a street corner that fit that rather wide prescription, that had distracted him.

  None of the adrenaline in the world could have counteracted the sedative in his throat. No fear, it seemed, drove a sensible scream through the leather hand that covered his mouth. His head lolled back, and his eyes rolled to the back of his skull, and he thought he saw, against the streetlights, a dark sea of stars beneath the man’s hood.

  --The acknowledgement of impending death was a truly liberating sensation. What fear could you have, if you knew nothing could change that fate? You are going to die. There’s nothing you can do about it. But damned, thought Maria Frost, if you did nothing about it. Damned if the bastards weren’t going to take you kicking and screaming first.

  She had come back from the Labarynth a changed person. Gone were the days of her childhood, before her abduction and near-demise at the hands of the Cult of the Sleeping Eye. Gone was innocence, and youth – at least, the mental aspects of it.

  She had returned a broken mind, riddled with anxieties, paranoia, obsessions, compulsions, and delusions. The years that had passed had been consumed by three activities – avoiding medication, eating huge amounts of well-spiced food that never quite satisfied her peculiar hunger, and arcane studies – what her over-worked mother called her drawings – from which she had filled reams upon reams of information, written in a dead hand, stacked neatly in twine-bound bundles all throughout her room.

  With a final heave, she forced herself through the gap in her bedroom window, and collapsed less-than-gracefully on the floor. She recovered quickly, hurrying to hide under her covers.

  When her mother did not come to check on her after several minutes, she emerged again, and shrugged off her backpack. It hung open – she quickly closed it back up, to conceal the mask, spray paint, and other incriminating paraphernalia inside. She peeled out of her yellow sweater, crawled back into bed, and for the first time in years, rested easily.

  Why concern herself with Gloria, when her Ambassador had done his job?

  --The Labyrinth was a world apart from the sterile, brightly-lit halls of the various subterranean installations of Agency Division, but, like their erstwhile antagonists, the Cult of the Sleeping Eye had long understood that power was found in depths.

  This was a realm of hedonistic decadence, a quasi-organic hive of all the various things that go bump in the night. There were many beasts, both mundane and arcane, that the Cult put under their yoke, and most, if not all, could be found here.

  Still, the chamber of the obsidian throne was hallowed ground, the Labyrinth’s holy of holies. It was reserved only for the use of the highest practitioners of their art, who gathered here in secrecy even from those few cultists that had freely entered the Labyrinth.

  It was a truncated dodecahedron, in shape, composed of a sandy-coloured stone that none the less had the smoothness and pallid sheen of a deep-earth

  metamorphic. The various surfaces w
ere set about with scribings and spirals in the hieroglyphic writing peculiar the Cult, predating even its relatively modern

  incarnation’s foundation sometime in the late-16th century CE. A throne of hewn obsidian sat in the middle, among three irregularly-placed torches, what, when lit (as now) produced a sickly green flame that added neither true illumination nor warmth to the room.

  They were, in many ways, a mockery of true light, which even now played upon the face of Gloria Creena, as her skyclad form settled over the sharp edges and surfaces of the throne. She, and she alone, possessed such faith in the cult’s diety that she could sit in this position, and for that reason (as well as others), she was the leader of the cult, the Glorious Speaker, from whom the authority of the Sleeping Prisoner could be felt in reality.

  “You have done well, Erwin. You as well, Crowe.” “I just hope that artist’s death really did put the Phantom off your trail.” Crowe was a mountain of a man, presently involved in working nitrogen bubbles out of his various joints. The sound, like the tearing of poultry joint from joint, was soothing to Gloria.

  By contrast, Erwin Baha was a far smoother, leaner, and smaller man. He alone had not disrobed for the meeting, wearing instead a dark, burgundy robe, which seemed less a garment than something that had congealed around him as he had slipped out of some wall of the outer reaches of the Labyrinth’s pulsing arteries. “The artist would be a fitting sacrifice to the Phantom’s master, and one indeed far worthier of whatever he intended Gloria’s fate to be.”

  The flattery pleased Gloria, growing her smirk as she twisted a lock of her dark hair around a finger. “Who indeed. Who dares to author my fate, but the Glorious One himself?”

  There would be, of course, no answer. She shifted in her posture, now sitting in the chair properly, upright, and with a powerful disposition of limbs that owned the station. “You two will focus all your energies, all your followers, on finding me Maria Frost. It’s time to put this grand farce to an end. I need my Key.”

  “What of Agency Division?” “Leave them to me.”

  04 – Immersion

  If there was a cell in Niles Clatyon’s body that didn’t wish for death at this one particular moment, he couldn’t find it. Nothing was good about this situation. He hadn’t experienced such a severe hangover since his Academy days, and he knew for damn certain he couldn’t have drank nearly as much last night as he had back then. Ignoring for the moment that his liver probably would have given out, it was difficult to conceive of having spent that much money at a bar, with drink prices several dozen-fold greater than retail.

  No, something was wrong. He had a memory – a sea of stars, the bitter taste of leather, a sharp pain in his neck that seemed to have transformed into a dull ache across his entire body. What the hell was he sleeping on, stone?

  He snapped awake. It was dark, pitch dark, and is often the case of modern man without his devices, he had no sense of the time. He supposed it could still have been night, taking the darkness into account. The surface beneath him was coarse, cold, and gritty, solid as cement, which he suspected it may well have been.

  Though it was tempting to assume he had passed out in an alleyway somewhere, that did nothing to explain the abject lack of lighting. Instinctively, he rose to a low crouch and waited, remaining very still. He had a lighter in his pocket, but he knew from one-too-many bad war novels that that would do more to illuminate him than his surroundings. Just now, he had the sense he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and that meant it wasn’t the best idea in the world to just assume he was alone, or that the people who were around didn’t want to harm him. Not out of any malice, necessary – whoever had wanted to hurt him by putting him in this situation could easily have killed him themselves – but just out of

  indiscriminate violent behaviour, which the detective considered the backbone of the violently criminal mindset, accurately or not.

  And there were others. He could make out their voices dimly, and they provided the narrative for his exploration of the only passageway leading from his spot, which he probed out with an outstretched hand as he followed it, blind as the proverbial bat.

  “It was probably the Librarians’ responsibility. If not THE Librarian, than at least one of the Librarians.” This speakern was calm, with a great confidence and somewhat familiar timbre.

  He was answered by someone younger and more impatient. Kraterburg accent, polished for the courts or press. “What makes you say that?”

  “The Librarians are known to be courting the curator of the museum. I mean, Professor Coultier is as close to being one of ours as you can get without actually coming inside, but they don’t know that. They want his brain just as badly as we do.” The first voice seemed annoyed at having to explain himself.

  “A mind like that is wasted on maintaining the status quo,” came a third voice, almost distractedly. It was a resilient voice, without a solid regional inflection.

  “Only from the perspective of agents of change.” This fourth and final voice had a robust sense of authority behind it, and Niles was not surprised it had brought the conversation to an end. He knew that voice, too.

  Clayton was at a corner now, around which must have been a light source, because he could now perceive by the dim glow of the light that reflected around it. The walls were not concrete, as he had guessed, but close-set, dry stonework. Remarkably good construction and unusual for interior walls.

  He pressed up against the edge of that corner and delicately peered around, so that only the periphery of his left profile could be viewed – just enough space to get his left eye pointed in the right direction.

  Ten metres down the next section of the corridor was an opening that lead into a larger chamber, not that it was grand – perhaps five or six metres wide, circular, and with at least one other opening that Niles could see. The chamber, such as it was, was filled with dozens of votive candles on every available surface, apart from avenues of the floor, each adding their weak light to the proceedings. A table-like structure, akin to a sarcophagus or an altar, was playing host to a man.

  The man, like so many that seemed to becoming annoyingly common in Nile’s life, was masked. He wore a long grey coat, somewhat tattered at the lower hem, with a deep hood. Under this was a dark jacket with a high mao collar, ribbed with white structure in a mockery of a ribcage. The left sleeve was either cut away, did not exist, or was worn under what appeared to be an elaborate armour-piece worthy of Hollywood stage design, giving a demoniac appearance to the entire left arm, from the claw-like fingers to the sharp looking ridges at the shoulder. The mask, which, taken with the hood, completely obscured the identity of this figure, was of a bone-like colour, extending down over the neck, superficially flat and featureless save for the deep dark wells where the eyes of the wearer ought to have been. The image was a skull-faced demon of death of any of a hundred cultures’ mythology. This must have been the much-rumoured Archangel, the nominally-evident leader of the Grey Angels, whose identity was the lustedfor prize of many of Clayton’s peers.

  It was the arm that gave it away - a deeper link. Four years ago, a grand jury had refused to indict one of Niles’s suspects – an accused multiple-count murderer named Eli Sharona. Niles had always found the Grand Jury result, and the prosecutor’s subsequent decision not to go to trial anyway, a gross miscarriage of justice, suspect in and of itself. He’d all but caught Sharona red-handed, and if Gloria Creena’s murders were worthy of lifelong incarceration, than so were the often equally-violent deaths Sharona had administered.

  Sharona had, when he was arrested to be charged, been wearing a full-length cybernetic prosthesis of his left arm, one of remarkable dexterity which was not unusual considering his then-studies in thoracic surgery. It was military-grade hardware, the kind of stuff that big medical-technology giants like Magnussun Arms and Slipher Medical Division liked to produce to show they had that club in their bag. What made this damning, however, was that Sharona was found to have
a case-mod for the arm at his apartment that was very much like, if not identical, to the armour this man was currently wearing.

  Niles retracted his head, and felt himself going into a cold sweat. He had his chance. He would argue self defence, believing as he did that Eli Sharona was an extremely dangerous individual, who was keeping him apparently captive. The forensics would agree, since the only way out of wherever he was seemed to be through the room Sharona and his friends occupied. He might be suspended, maybe even lose his job, but here was his chance to do what the system could not.

  Slowly, he reached under his left arm for the slung-under holster there, letting his fingers wrap around the custom polymer grips of his Colt Detective Special.

  The conversation around the corner suddenly broke off, and a new voice entered it – the clear and familiar northeuropean tones of his Grey Angels contact, Scion. “That would be a singularly bad idea, Niles. Why don’t you come on out and join us?”

  --Vidcund hated complications. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle them – he’d yet to meet the complication that changed the ultimate result of his attempts to tackle a particular task. It was that he was going to have to go through his schedule now and decide, out of all the other appointments he had booked today, what was trivial enough to cancel or postpone. This in itself was a nontrivial problem. Wearing many names meant managing each name’s overall reputation individually. Some were okay to be shown to be unreliable, but their uses were few and far enough between that he couldn’t always bump one of their appointments. It was hard enough to set those appointments in the first place, let alone reschedule them.

  As he sat down on Niles Clatyon’s rather nice (and rather unused) leather sectional to review his plans for the day on his phone, he was wondering if it was more important to push his meeting with his boss, or his meeting with his task force, since those were meant to be the two next things.