“Stop.”
She beams for a moment in her rarely-won victory, then adds, “You’re an ice cube in a hot tub.”
“Certainly feels that way some-days.”
With renewed excitement, Sabetha asks, “So who’s next?”
I pause, knowing Sabetha’s not gonna like my choice. “Lezar,” I half ask, half state.
She nods a couple times. “Going straight to the bottom?”
“I figure if there’s anyone we can trust who still lives in the tunnels, its Lezar.”
“You won’t have trouble finding him? Last I knew he had the best crafters in the region making his latest rat’s nest invisible.”
“We have all night.”
“You should have told me at home, I would have worn something more... durable.”
Sabetha and Lezar don’t hate each other, but they don’t get along. It’s a cordial rivalry regarding chyld and gazer pride. Both find the other to be the epitome of what is wrong with their respective species. Sabetha is self-centered, narcissistic and elitist. Lezar is dirty, paranoid, and without an understanding of the world above his sewers. I just have to make sure I do all the talking when we see him, and pray they can keep their bickering to a minimum. “You’ll be fine; we’ll just take the subway till one of his scouts picks us up.”
Sabetha throws the car into a power slide, skidding to a stop inches from the curb and nudges the shifter into park. “So we just ride the tunnels till something happens?”
We exit the car and I sigh. “That’s the plan.”
On the wide sidewalk nearby is a stairway leading underground with a wooden banner over the entrance. It reads Licorice Line. Other lines include Candy, Mint, and Caramel. Darkened rumor has it the subways received their designations from a chyld named Nicolai who was around when the subways were being built, but just about every darkened myth or Hyperion apocrypha can be traced back to rumors about Nicolai. I’m not sure if he deserves half of it, or if the urban legends just snowballed, but either way, I hope to never meet him.
As we descend the cement stairs, the sound of our boots echoing in the hollow tunnel below, our demeanor quickly alters. We’re heading into hostile territory – a filthy, dangerous place. Urine and pine-scented solvents do battle in the misty smog that gathers in the trenches. Lights in the white and brown tiled ceiling flicker on and off as trains echo in the distance. Water drips from pipes into rust-lined puddles and rats scurry in and out of drains between the tracks. As we were above, so we find ourselves below, alone. I think.
As if the dangers down here weren’t enough, I’m practically blind. Due to Lezar’s paranoia, he has hired crafters to manipulate the kharma in this area of tunnels and make it thick and confusing. To me, someone who senses and feels kharma, it’s like being caught in a sand storm. My supernatural senses are severely blunted. Down here I see and hear and smell what an ilk would and it puts me on a hair trigger. Knowing better than to come to the subway unarmed, I’ve brought our gun-filled duffle bag.
Sabetha and I lean against a wall that cuts the train platform in half lengthwise and posts the different lines for this section of Gothica. We try to move as little as possible, not wanting to disturb a single inch of air more than we have to. Several minutes pass, the chirps of insects and rats the only sound. Behind us, the hexes and lines of the subway map frame our statuesque poses. It’s six-hundred, fifty-four miles of city, north to south and the subways run for four hundred and eighty of it.
The tunnel lets out a gasp and a train trembles somewhere in the abyss. With a groan and rumble it comes to halt in front of us. The doors open but no one exits for there is no one to exit. The subway tunnels remind me of just how unreal a city Gothica is. I get used to the top side, but down here it’s impossible to ignore.
These flickering lights, for instance, haven’t been replaced by anyone for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The service department is either too busy to get to them all or, more likely, doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s a single person answering phones in some forgotten cubicle, writing work orders that go nowhere. Yet the lights somehow work. There is no one driving or scheduling the trains. They just come. There are no repairs needed – tracks never break. It is known as Cycle and it’s the mortar between the bricks of our reality.
The city above functions in much the same way. Sentiners know this. We can almost prove it, the same way a theoretical physicist can almost prove string theory. But no one else notices these things, and if they do, they never talk about it, and if they talk about it, they never live long. Cycle weeds out anyone who tries to follow the path of an electron in the grid. With that kind of person gone we’re left with a population that is very content to assume certain things just happen. Thanks to Cycle, they do.
We board the train and I put my foot through the duffle bag’s handle so that it can’t slide away. The train starts moving and we hold onto the rails overhead as the subway car shakes through the tunnels below the city. As the train rumbles around corners, the lights continue to flicker on and off. Sabetha and I look calm and stoic, like we’re in our element, but it’s an elaborate bluff. Traveling underground at night is a roll of the dice. We might keep riding and riding and never stop again. We might crash. We might come to a halt and lose all power, or the next stop might contain fifty tunnel dwellers waiting to swarm onboard and devour anything not bolted down.
At the next station, the train comes to a slow halt with the breaks making a horrific squeal. A hunched-over figure dressed in tattered clothes, boards one car up. Ilk, I think, but a guess at best. Through the window of the car’s separator doors we spot the person take a seat and bunch up his collar against the cold. The track bends, the car shifts and for a moment the figure is out of sight. The lights flicker, then the corner ends, the cars align, this time empty.
The lights go out completely and the mirror-like quality of the train windows becomes transparent, revealing the tunnels beyond. To my left, in the absence of any illumination, I can see a person clinging to the side of the train, its face pressed against the window looking in at us, then the lights come back and it’s gone, replaced with our reflections. It’s a startling image burned with a teal flame onto my eyeballs like the flash of a camera. As I blink, the image shakes and drifts across my view. A lookout. Maybe. Maybe not.
My ear drums detect a sudden change in air pressure and then I feel a suction of wind. From behind us, a door has opened. Sabetha and I whip around to look. I know she saw the face outside too, but we hold back our initial violent inclination and look to identify the source.
A man with a coarse, sparse beard is standing on the metal link that holds the two cars together. He makes no effort to contest the swaying motion of the train, making him look like a part of the dirty, graffitied interior. He’s wearing layers upon layers of mismatched clothing, his gloves are cut off at the fingertips and his jeans, while full of holes, do not show skin through the fraying, but rather, more fabric.
“What do you want?” he asks in rumbling voice.
“I am –” I begin, but he cuts me off.
“We know who you are.”
“We want to see Lezar. It’s important.” I say.
He nods his head for us to follow. I reach down and pull the duffle bag up to my side while Sabetha takes the lead and follows the gazer. We travel between cars, each expanse unnerving me. The wind rushes by and the blackness around us seems to have no bounds. At the end of the train, on the last stoop, our guide sits on the safety chain like a child on a swing and leans out sideways. The wind blasts his hair back and he squints to look up the tunnel, careful, but not too careful, to keep his head from going much further out beyond the profile of the train.
He peers that way for a few seconds and then leans back in and stands upright. He pulls out a road flare from his front left pocket and strikes the end against the igniter. A green glow follows a spray of sparks and he tosses it onto the rushing ground behind. It’s an artifact, an item imbu
ed with kharma by the craft and it briefly grants me a portion of my senses, dispelling the kharmatic haze around us.
In the expanding distance of the curving tunnel I can see a few figures scurry by the flare’s light where it landed. But then it disappears in the bow of the corner and with it, my supernatural senses. I try to hold onto their silhouettes but just as they go out of view, the darkness is replaced by headlights. A pickup truck with no top is riding on the tracks. Sparks come from under the chassis where the vehicle saps energy from the third rail.
The truck gains on the train and when it gets within a few feet, the headlights turn off, leaving only the yellow parking lights to guide us. The scout gives a sly grin and then without looking, takes a step off the back of the train onto the hood of the truck. He scrambles into a seat.
A little upset at the rudeness of our greeting, I toss the hundred and seven pound duffle bag into the cab as I yell “catch,” then hop onto the hood. I twist my torso back to face Sabetha and offer her a hand, palm up. She takes it and steps with perfect grace from the speeding train onto the hood, never swaying or fighting to find her balance. We drift back from the train until it disappears and the truck slows to a stop. The scout who picked us up gets out and we jump down with him onto the mud covered ground. My poor Phobes.
The truck departs down another track into an access tunnel, leaving us alone with the scout who stands nearby. A new flare illuminates his torso, casting green shadows over his face and allowing me a chance to sense things around us. He waves an arm for us to follow and we duck into a different side tunnel. I can feel the moisture and dankness of this newly carved burrow.
Our guide comes to a grate at the end of the passage and taps on it a few times with the flare. A rusty bolt is slid to the side and the mesh gate swings open with a creek, allowing us entry. We come out into a dimly lit cavern and with the flare’s help I can make out the other end. Three gazers stand before us. Two are in a hybrid middle form which is only achievable by those who embrace their inner beast. These kinds of gazers make both the best and worst warriors as they don’t have to wait for the right phase of the moon to gain a physical edge, but by the same token, forever lose whatever discretion they may have possessed in the first place. Instead of Jekyll and Hyde syndrome they tend to just be Hyde. These two are different however. They’re not the drooling, lumbering beasts with wolf heads on a human body, dragging their knuckles like you see in lone pups.
That’s because these are some of Lezar’s warriors and that makes them cunning predators even with their yellow eyes, protruding fangs, deformed noses, and abundance of body hair. The third among the sentries displays none of these features. He is human looking, though still an imposing mass, and I immediately recognize him as Bullworth.
“They’re here to see Lezar,” our guide informs the sentries before handing one the flare.
“Not near your bite-phase, or are you just slacking off?” I say to Bullworth. He quickly chuckles, keeping the others in the room from pulling my legs off. It’s a grave insult none the less. The bite-phase is the phase of the moon when the gazer was bitten, and for whatever reason, that is the time when forever hence he or she can turn into a millitus, the last thing in Gothica you want to tussle with. It’s a sensitive subject for them and the only way I could have been more offensive was if I phrased it as a menstrual-cycle metaphor. Bullworth extends his big brown hand and I take it firmly, perhaps especially firmly. I’ll be sure to behave from here on out.
“How are you, Delano?”
“Worried enough that should my luck not change, I may be hiring your services from Lezar again.” Bullworth, like Sabetha, is noteworthy for walking the tight-rope between what he would be and what everything else in the world would have him be. His life is a struggle, and he is unique in that he is a stronger creature for it. Among Lezar’s court, Bullworth is a legend for his warrior prowess combined with his tranquility and even temper.
“I’m sorry to hear the bad news” he says, mostly to Sabetha.
“We’ll get by,” She replies.
“After tonight,” I say, “rumors will do as they do, but let’s just say we had an intruder and we’re trying to find out who sent him.”
“Best of luck to you,” Bullworth says in his deep voice and nods us on down the next tunnel. I wait till we are out of sight to start dabbing at the dirt stains on my pants with a handkerchief wet with saliva.
We come out into a sixty-three foot high cavern filled with eighteen tin-sheet huts, forty-three garbage bag brimming shopping carts, and nine barrel fires. Towards the center of the village, an overturned subway car, rusting and hollow, glows with candle light from within. Children playing inside, dance with their giant shadows.
Over to the right, two hundred feet away, is a long dirt slope leading up to the roof of the cave. At the summit are three makeshift doorways each six feet squared. They’re made of plywood and framing lumber with door hinges and simple latches, like hands on a clock, that keep them closed. They’re built into the ceiling itself which is the bottom of an abandoned building above. It was slated to be over eight stories based on the materials and foundation but it looks like the construction crew only ever made it to the third floor. Through those three doors is a labyrinth of tunnels that lead through the rubble of the abandoned building’s basements and into the outside world. It’s a perfectly camouflaged front door and easily defendable.
Another one of Lezar’s warriors, also in hybrid form, sits on a metal beam sticking out of the long dirt slope leading to the three doorways. Only one of his arms is bestial and clawed, the other comparatively meek and devoid of hair. In the smaller one he holds an M1 carbine rifle. He sniffs at us to let us know he’s watching, then continues to survey the cavern from his vantage point.
There’s not much to see. Haggard people scurry about, hunched over and eyeing everything distrustfully. The whole scene is eerily apocalyptic despite the world of consumerism and excess just a half mile away on the surface. Suffering is everywhere and soon I feel guilty for trying to keep my designer pants clean when these pathetic darkened, humans raised by wolves, are scrounging for food. But like the topside world does, I just tell myself they are here because of their own decisions and choices and that if they wanted to get out, there are opportunities for the determined. I tell myself that because I know the truth about these ilk and gazers. I know about the havoc their wolf-sides wreak on their human-sides, about the beast they know is nearing but cannot stop themselves from becoming. I know about the poverty they were born into and the hopelessness that traps them here.
Continuing on, we come upon a group dropping pinches of fluorescent blue dust into their eyes. It’s an acidic drug known as flush or blush that leaves burn marks on the user’s cheeks and causes blindness. But like all drugs, legal or illegal, it makes the world go away for a while. Sabetha, the scout and I cross through the rest of the subterranean shanty town and go through a set of double iron doors, built into the cave wall. On the other side is Lezar’s chamber.
Four
Lezar is an old gazer. He is smart enough to know he’s smarter than his peers, but not smart enough to realize how small that disparity is or how much smarter people like me are. He holds a gathering of local wolves in his hall and controls the most organized network of shape-shifters in Central Gothica. To make himself seem more important to outsiders he tries to connect his lineage to Maynard Creek, the gazer who ended the blood wars. If for no other reason, Lezar respects me because I knew Maynard, and I know that the connection is fabricated. He’s nevertheless made a significant impact in uniting the local packs and I respect him for that alone even if he doesn’t himself.
The sad part is what other groups, like chyldrin think of this accomplishment, and in truth, the meager ties that hold the court together do speak to the impoverishment and disarray of the gazer community.
Other well-off gazers reside in or near Lezar’s court, the hall we have just entered, and if you want
to get something out of Lezar you have to play along with his courtly charade. He thinks of himself as a prince, wearing a faded brown robe and crown of scrap metal. His throne is made of garbage and knickknacks and he sits there proudly. By his side stand two guards and an advisor, and around the rest of the hall are representatives from various gazer dens.
“Delano,” he says cheerily as I enter his hall. “Sabetha,” he says with slightly less enthusiasm. “My good friends. What do you think, eh?” he motions behind me with a long arm. “I just had it finished Thursday.”
I turn around and look up at the archway over his door. Carved into the stone with halfway decent workmanship is the phrase: the poor man is not he who has little, but he who desires more. I read it aloud.
“Excellent. Excellent,” he says enthusiastically. “Now tell me, what brings you to my court?”
“An incident of sorts.”
He flashes me a deadly sharp canine smile from his weathered features and beckons me to continue. Sabetha stands statuesquely beside me with her head bowed slightly and strands of auburn hair falling over her eyes. She’s behaving, for which I am grateful. Her kind is not welcome here. I step forward and look around the court with my jaw set so that my teeth grind against each other. “Our home was attacked.”
“A violation of sanctuary?” Lezar leans forward intently. Such violations are only taboo among the darkened elites. We have something to lose and so we want the laws to mean something, but they don’t. He relaxes and sits back. “Surely not some of mine?”
“No, no,” I answer quickly, “the infiltrator was alone. But perhaps you may have seen this fellow.”
“Do tell,” Lezar prompts. I forgot how much he enjoys the whole messenger in the court thing.
“It was a man-like creature that wore the faces of the ilk as its skin.” I look around the room. Gazers in all forms and sizes eye me skeptically. To them I’m an enigmatic messenger from a distant world they don’t understand and some avoid my eyes. “I doubt it could be anything other than the work of a surgenitor. I’d even say it looked like old Fabriano’s handiwork, if you and I both didn’t know for damn sure he was dead,” I say, playing on his nostalgia from the last time he left his court to join a fight. “Regardless, it was strong enough to gain entry.”
Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) Page 4