by Scott Rhine
The Shadow of Kragen was first to demand her attention that night. His outline a mere silhouette, Tumberlin appeared and bowed respectfully to the crone. When she gave him permission, he manifested a complete self-image, now haggard and lean, with no eyes. “The pilot of the Kragen ship claims that the high northerly winds enabled us to sail at twice the expected rate through the most dangerous waters. We should arrive in Reneau in a few more days, weather permitting.” Eager to gain her favor, Tumberlin added, “This next item is confidential, but it may benefit you to know, great sorceress. We’ve news that a certain Sword of Miracles known as the Defender of the Realm may be heading your way.”
Zariah’s eyes snapped upward from her desk to bore through the spirit messenger. “Impossible.” The god-forged Defender was one of the few weapons that could actually harm the Dawn race, and it’d vanished cycles ago. The return of this sword to the hands of men would’ve reached her ears before now.
“Unlikely, but I wished to warn you in case you needed to make preparations. The Defender was used in the slaying of several wizards, including the mighty Lord Kragen. I’m sure you’re familiar with the power of my teacher and remaker. His sadistic concubine has searched for this blade with all of her considerable influence. The assassin fled to the protection of Bablios after we took control of the Executioner’s Guild. Your emperor’s Glass Daggers are already after the sword-bearer, and he shouldn’t survive long. We intercepted a letter written to the bearer’s lady love saying that he was off to war but would wed her upon his safe return.”
Zariah could see no lies in the life fires of the messenger. “Are you quite certain?”
Tumberlin seemed amused by the challenge. “Sorceress, I’ve seen this stocky woman he writes to. Her nose is so large and her finances so limited that his motive could be none other than blind love.”
Zariah masked her emotions and asked, “What’s his name, this bearer?”
“He is a smith by the name of Baran Togg.” When the crone gasped, Tumberlin narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why should that matter?”
“This must be someone’s idea of a jest; I don’t like it.” While Zariah mused, Tumberlin flickered, his version of nervous pacing. After a moment, she looked up. “You’re still here.”
The shade looked down at her feet. “Many pardons, sorceress. I thought only that in exchange for this information, you might share information of equal worth.”
“Patience,” she commanded. “That’s the lesson you need the most. Besides, the data you provide is shaky, the barest hint, really.”
The shade drew dangerously close to her, restrained only by residual fear. “Then give me a hint as to what I’ll learn from you once we arrive.”
“Bold,” she said. “But sometimes boldness should be rewarded. Very well. We’ll begin with the basics of elegant feeding. You’ll learn to leave no traces. I’ll teach you to take sustenance from the unconscious and sleeping. On that rare occasion that your victim awakens, I’ll instruct you how to give the donor pleasures to ease the transfer of energy, or to selectively edit memories to make them more pliable. Insanity can be induced for short periods, causing them to be locked up and left entirely to your mercies. At higher levels, when yourobedience is proven, we’ll discuss your interactions with the physical world. But I’ve wasted too much time on you already. You’re dismissed.” At her wave, the rapt Tumberlin vanished. She scribbled a note on her parchment to have the intelligence about the magic sword investigated.
The rest of those reporting to Zariah that night painted a grim picture of the state of the sleeper community in the Dreaming City. Because of the disruptions atop the Holy Mountain, her servants had their hands full with a discontented population. Productivity was down 20 percent. Chaotic power fluctuations in the aether had resulted in large numbers of guests becoming vegetative or experiencing sensory burnout. Insomnia and unplanned nightmares were also on the rise. Zariah doubled the guards on the innermost circles to maintain peace in the Temple until this storm blew over. But even the loyal Somnambulist guards were becoming restless. One of their ranks had seen something in his dreams or in the cards that shook him so deeply that he resigned to become a street-corner prophet.
“I’ll handle that one myself,” the high priestess promised. He needed to disappear, and she needed to feed.
****
The next morning the rain slackened to a light misting. The weather was severe enough to keep sentries inside, but gentle enough not to interfere with the Stone Monkeys and their mission of skullduggery. While the priestess was tossing the first body of the day into a lime pit, she was seized, gagged, and dragged away with no witnesses.
The Monkeys brought the bound handmaiden back to the shepherd’s shelter. Within moments of examining her, Jotham had determined that the secret of the handmaiden’s invisibility lay in the numerous bells sewn into the hem and sleeves of her garments. Soon, every man and boy in the crude shepherd shelter wore a crude necklace strung with the bells. “Remember,” Jotham stressed. “Our goal is to observe them unnoticed, not to cause mayhem.”
“Why can’t we kill the guards?” demanded Sven, eager to use his new powers to their maximum potential.
Calmly, Jotham said, “If we harm nothing, they may assume the handmaiden who disappeared was disgruntled and left of her own will. Our trick can be used whenever we wish. Violence accumulates negative potential and blood calls out for justice. I don’t expect you to honor me for this reason, but you will for two selfish reasons. First, if we leave evidence or sound the alarms, they’ll change the sensory cue, and we may never gain access again.”
Even Ekvar nodded his agreement to this logic. The bearded man asked, “Why would we want to take more than one trip into that hole? Can’t we shut it down in one visit?”
Jotham resisted a lecture on military history. “Attacking without intelligence is like cooking in the dark. You might be able throw something together, but I wouldn’t want to eat it. I like to plan my operations such that no one is harmed, myself included.”
“And the second reason?”
Jotham replied, “The temple here has amassed a great deal of wealth; they store it on the premises. I wish to do more than close this temple: I want to make it impossible for the leeches here to have any kind of power over these people again. I’d consider it a personal favor if you emptied their coffers of every last copper. It may take several trips, but I have every confidence in your abilities to right this horrible wrong and place their wealth in the hands of those more deservg. I’d gladly assist such worthy aims, but I won’t murder with the aid of dark magic. Such an act, as I have indicated, stains the soul forever.”
The Stone Monkeys saluted him in unison, agreeing to his terms.
****
The two Kiateran men who captured the handmaiden were allowed to remain at the sheep pen for a few hours, alternately resting and keeping watch on the prisoner. Jotham, Brent, and the others entered the fringes of the Dreaming City. When the Tenor set foot on the packed-clay path the city called a road, his first impression was of a drunkard laying in squalor. The cleansing forces of nature did battle with the excesses of humanity. The rain washed the reek of drug-laced wine, vomit, and urine from the wooden sidewalks into the gutters. However, low-lying areas flooded, and overfilled latrines flowed back out into the streets. Jotham felt certain the waste products would leak into the city drinking-water supply. Already the air was rank with the stench of disease.
Unconscious people lay in every archway and under every dry overhang, all in gray rags, most in the final, skeletal stages of self-induced starvation. Many of the women had sold their long hair for coin before it began to fall out in patches. When Jotham moved one man to help him breathe better, a roach crawled out of the wastrel’s mouth. At this sight, Brent added his own breakfast to the smells in the gutter. The other men, all recently freed from dungeons, had stronger stomachs.
Jotham was able to close his eyes and find his own center. W
hen he opened them again, he spied a small, bell-shaped flower that looked merely white to the other men. In the spectrum of the Compass Star, however, it was splashed with varied shades. The single point of beauty helped to anchor the half-Imperial priest and enabled him to bear the indecency around him. In gratitude, he bent down and rescued the blooming plant, wrapping it in a muddy cloth to keep it healthy until a better home could be located.
The first objective of the jingling, invisible scout team was to get an accurate map of the interior of the Temple of Sleep. They spread out for half an hour of reconnaissance and met back at the lime pits to confer.
When the Stone Monkeys met again, it was determined that frontal assault on the wooden amphitheater would be almost impossible. There was only one door in the front, guarded by six somnambulists outside. Only the stone quarter at the rear of the building offered any hope of entry. There were two doors in the stone section, one for servants and the other for clergy. These entrances were also guarded moderately well, but the rooftops above them were not. The bearded Monkey confided, “If you can get up that drain pipe, there’re several open windows to choose from. You can even see into the main temple. Aside from the forest of support columns, it’s wide open in there. People are laying in cots stacked two or three levels high. We estimate about 500 sleepers, twenty-five acolytes, six roving guards, and three handmaidens inside at any given time.”
“No walls inside?” asked another.
The bearded man shook his head. “They use six-cubit squares of framed rice paper between the columns to give an illusion of privacy between the rings, but you can see everything from above.”
“What about the stone section?”
“That’s where the priestesses live, plus the off-duty acolytes. It’s a maze in there. The rooms and halls are narrow and twisty. There doesn’t seem to be a real for plan to the place. They just subdivide existing rooms when they need space for something.”
“That works for us,” commented Jotham. “Once inside the stone section, you fellows can disguise yourselves as masons. No one will give you a second glance, even if they’re immune to the invisibility trick.”
“But they still have to get past the priestesses,” said Brent.
Bjorn warmed to the planning. “We know from watching yesterday that to get the maximum out of the available floor space, there are sleep shifts. At each shift change, the giant bell at the top of the dome tolls. Whenever the bell rings, all sleepers are awakened and escorted out. A brief period follows where we assume that the floors scoured, more incense lit, and the rooms are swept clear of stragglers. Once the theater has been cleaned, the next shift of sleepers gets ushered in. That transition period is when our enemies will be the most distracted. Since their blades were forged by our brethren in Kiateros, their swords cannot harm us.”
Doing some math, Jotham said, “With the two interior doors between the sanctuary and the parsonage, we have five main doors. Assuming six guards per door and the rovers, there are thirty-six waking swords and at least the same number of sleeping guards we might have to contend with. Even invisible, that many guards could still harm us if the alarm is sounded.”
“Our best bet is to burn the abomination down,” rumbled Sven. “With all that wood, and those tiny rooms, they’ll never be able to put it out.”
Jotham objected. “Most of the people inside would burn without waking or complaining. Those who did manage to move toward the exit would likely be trapped in the crush of human bodies blocking the only way out.”
Sven persisted. “Why should we care about the death toll? The monsters running the temple obviously don’t care. If you want to cut the weed down, you have to get all of it.”
Instead of elaborating, Jotham changed the subject. “Because the fire won’t kill what I’m really worried about,” he said, gesturing to the dead body inside the lime pit. “See the way the back of his neck is exposed? That spot is a life-force nexus. See the tan and reddish circular stains around it?”
“A whore’s makeup?” guessed one Stone Monkey.
“Something disguised as a woman,” corrected Jotham. “While I was waiting here, I discovered that his life energy had been completely drained, presumably through that spot on his neck. Something fed on this man and then threw the empty husk away. From the distance the body arced, the creature is stronger than me. My guess is that this shrine has a guardian, or some feral spirit is lingering here, taking advantage of the cracks in reality.”
Brent spoke shakily. “Is this another metaphor? Because you’re starting to scare me.”
“He’s not the only one. Tell me you’re exaggerating,” the bearded man added.
Jotham shook his head. “I wish I were. You men wouldn’t happen to have twenty or thirty cubits of sesterina wire on hand would you?”
Sven chuckled at this request. “Must be in my other prison outfit. What the blue blazes for?”
Jotham rubbed the side of his frizzy hair and mumbled, “With an aetheric resonator loop trap I may’ve been able to contain the rogueme feong enough for us to perform the ‘banishment of a thousand cuts.’ That’d take only two or three days of nonstop chanting. None of us would be able to sleep for obvious reasons, but it works eventually. That would’ve been too easy, I suppose. We’re going to have to do this exorcism the hard way.”
The bearded man turned to Brent and asked, “Does this teacher of yours ever have good, cheerful news? Like, today we’re going to the beach, I’ll provide the ox for the barbecue.”
“We don’t eat oxen,” Brent insisted, fondly remembering Red, the beast he had ridden while convalescing. To Jotham he said, “What’s the hard way?”
“Locate it. Cut off its primary mana tap, goad it into attacking, and use the spirit’s remaining reserve of energy against it. Hopefully, we can bind it deep into the earth for seventy years.”
“That doesn’t sound so hard,” said Brent. No one else agreed with him.
Jotham looked thoughtful, as if composing a shopping list. “I’ll need to hold something personal of the feeder’s for a while to learn more about its nature before I can attempt the binding. Don’t let the feeder touch you, or it can siphon off years from your life. Don’t even make eye contact if you can help it. Many of the older spirits have the ability to paralyze with a stare, like certain dangerous snakes seduce their prey.”
“What does it look like?” asked Bjorn.
“I don’t know yet,” admitted Jotham.
“How are we supposed to recognize this creature?” demanded Sven, eyes darting around nervously.
“Three ways,” explained the Tenor. “First, it will be one of thirteen women among all the people in this town who can see through our invisibility. Second, it will probably be able to smell a priest like me coming twenty paces away and howl in fury.”
“Better and better,” complained Sven. “Is this third one going to make me piss myself? Because if it will, I just don’t want to hear.”
“Not at all,” soothed Jotham. “Very simply, daemonic magic generates a disturbance in the flow of the cosmos. It manifests most commonly as a localized field of negative probability.”
“Eh?”
“Bad luck,” said the gray-haired priest. “Freak chances you’ve never seen before. Everyone arm yourselves with dice, coins, or something that relies on chance.”
“That, at least, we have,” admitted the leader of the Stone Monkeys.
“When you get closer to the hungry spirit, probabilities will shift to warn you. We’ll all attempt to approach from several angles. When you think you’re close to its lair, come back here and we will plan the next step. Once we know more about the feeder, I’m hoping to lower myself inside the Temple by ropes and close the Door to Eternity before anyone is the wiser. I don’t want to have to fight all those swordsmen.”
“I know what you mean,” laughed Sven.
“I don’t think you do. If push comes to shove, I might have to harm them. I sincerely dislike th
e thought of that much blood on my hands,” said Jotham.
Bjorn raised a questioning eyebrow at the boy. Brent answered, “He means it. He’s much better at miracles than I am.”
“Gentlemen, find me a lair. Bring back anything small that looks valuable,” ordered Jotham.
“Aye, aye,” clamored the others.
“Knocking heads and taking names, the Stone Monkeys are back in business,” boasted Sven.
Chapter 9 – Lighting the Fire
After repeated attempts with ‘volunteer’ prisoners, Hisbet determined that newly created deaf men were more sensitive to the effects of Nightfall than those born without hearing or those losing the sense to fever. These new investigators could work only in the mine-car loading and unloading area. If they were placed in the carts, bone conduction carried the sound and they expired before reaching the halfway station. The record distance was an ancient woodworker who reached a spot about seven paces shy of the plateau before letting go of the string. Once true night fell again, the intensity rose and absolutely no one could set foot beyond the loading zone.
The head of intelligence reported these facts to a fretting emperor, who played with a scale model of the rail system. Sandarac whispered, “We must stop this man.”
The Viper nodded. “The gods conspire against us. How shall we proceed?”
After playing with his model for a few moments, Sandarac noticed the tiny trees. “We burn him out. We burn the whole City down.”