The Mirrored City

by Michael J. Bode

  “No.”

  “It’s best I do this before the madness overtakes me.” Book opened the vial and drank. “Go.”

  Soren’s eyes fluttered open. He was still alive, but his head throbbed. His arms and shoulders burned. His hands were bound above his head and had been hung from something. Other bodies, hung from hooks, crowded the rafters of the musty chamber; it smelled like they were underground. The chamber was dark save for a few candles placed on a rune-inscribed circle on the floor.

  A woman moaned softly next to him. He jerked his head around his arms to see who the noise was coming from. A fellow prisoner, a bald woman with a badly beaten face, hung next to him.

  “Hello?” he whispered desperately.

  No response.

  He made a futile attempt to rip the ropes binding his hands to the chain. Without the Proteans’ strength, it was futile. But he had something else—the blood magic Daphne had given him. He felt it within his body, ready to lend him power. He had little practice using these new abilities or any abilities. When the Sword had possession of him, it had done all the work. He wondered if the blood strength would be enough.

  That horrible monster had appeared from nowhere and had beaten the crap out of Daphne before taking him. He’d been too afraid to do anything. Now at least, he could act.

  He willed the magic into action, and his veins burned with power. Literally drawing magic from his blood, his veins grew thick and ropey on his arms. He felt strong as a bull, but the bonds were tight. If only he could get them off.

  To his horror, his veins lifted themselves out of the skin on his forearms, like pulsing red tree branches and started working at the knot. He shut his eyes and looked away, vaguely aware of his veiny tendrils loosening the rope. His body knew how to use the power, even if he didn’t.

  His mind flashed back to that dream. Had he and his sister really been in Patrea? It seemed so real, yet there was no way it could have happened. Days ago, he had been a beggar. If Maddox had never come to the Palace… Soren shuddered, remembering the intimacy in the bathtub. His feelings made no sense.

  The ropes snapped, and he fell to the floor. He groaned in pain as he landed, his legs buckling under him. He fell to his side, nursing his wounded limb. He knew from experience he’d dislocated his knee.

  By reaching for the Light Daphne had given him, he felt soothing relief flow through his body. His veins had retracted during the fall, leaving his arms unscratched.

  “Fuck me,” Soren said, climbing to his feet. The blood magic was nearly depleted. He could feel it like a kind of phantom stomach, along with four distinct reservoirs of power: Light, Fire, Blood, and Death.

  The single archway leading into the chamber was mortared shut. He was trapped down here.

  “Think, Soren, think,” he muttered to himself. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but, by the Host, he had survived on the streets for years with no help from anyone and no special abilities.

  He wished he could have absorbed the teleportation magic of the chimera, but he knew it was immune since it had been born from the biomancy of the Ancient Fathers.

  The chimera was a self-assembling construct of living tissue, a harvester that collected fresh organic base materials from the dead. They were designed by Father Glass to act as a counteragent to Macerian necromancers. They were simple-minded creatures, little more than organic animals that could understand the commands…

  “How do I know that?”

  The knowledge continued. They were not typically grafted with teleportation organs—this one was feral; it must have evolved the capability after five hundred years of reassembling itself. A natural mutation in an organism with heterogeneous genetic composition?

  “Fascinating.”

  He had gone from knowing so little to becoming a savant. The possession by the Sword had been a less complicated transition, probably because the Sword’s intelligence remained compartmentalized, using his neurons to execute decision making. Heartstone would make for capacious storage of factual information if the exo-intelligence used the personality of the host for emotive, interpersonal, and intuitive reasoning.

  “Shit.”

  He was still no closer to leaving. With a properly equipped laboratory, tissue specimens, an incubation crèche, and several months, he could probably engineer a simulacrum custom made for killing a chimera and getting out of this room.

  Unfortunately none of those things were present. Candles were set about the ritual circle, and a small pedestal had an ugly black jar atop it. And the woman was still alive. He had never been one to stick his neck out for anybody, yet he had felt what it was like to live without fear for a few days.

  “Uhhh,” the woman moaned. Her feet were eye level, and she was missing a sandal.

  “Hey.” Soren said more loudly, “You need to wake up.”

  One of her eyes opened slowly. It was vivid blue. “S-Soren?”

  She was the female Courtesan from his dream, only bald. Even bloodied, she was beautiful.

  “Shannon,” Soren said.

  She smiled radiantly. “I’ve waited so long to meet you, Brother. I’ve always known something more was out there for me. Seeing your face… You’re as handsome as all the Fathers who came before you.”

  “I have to get you down before that thing returns.”

  Shannon sighed. “It’s a chimera. It should be encoded to respond to our commands.”

  “It’s mutated. Don’t ask me how, but it’s not the same as a battle hulk.”

  “It must have grafted itself with Protean tissue during all these centuries.” Shannon paused. “How the hells do I know all this?”

  “Our proximity is triggering racial memory,” Soren said. “I think so, anyway. I didn’t know what half the words I’ve been using even meant until I woke up here.”

  “What language are we speaking?” she asked. “Is this what Patrean sounds like?”

  “I didn’t even notice I had switched,” Soren said in Thrycean. “We can figure this out later. I need to get you down.”

  “If you’ve been in contact with the aberrant chimera you should be able to mimic its translocation,” Shannon said, staying in the Patrean language.

  Soren shook his head. “It’s immune to our touch. Hold on. I’ll figure something out.” He grabbed for her foot.

  The second their skin touched, he felt a surge of power flowing through his body. Beneath his skin, red glowing streams of Patrean runes flowed over the striations of his muscles. Shannon’s body was covered in blue runes. It was the knowledge of the Vinculum, the genetic data for all the Children of Patrea inscribed in their flesh.

  Soren’s eyes rolled back in his head as the bond between them opened. It was like having the best orgasm of his life, but it didn’t stop. It kept getting more intense, making it impossible to think or break away.

  Shannon’s blue streams of letters flowed into Soren’s flesh, and his red worked its way up Shannon’s leg, mingling. The fragments of ancient code merged, forming recognizable sentences.

  “Last Scions of Patrea,” the words said as they moved through their bodies, “if you are reading this, then the Empire has fallen. But there is hope. The Warriors have fulfilled their ancient duty and survived long enough for you to be born and reunited. Encoded within your blood is the key to recreating Patrea. You must complete the syzygy, and from your children, the bloodlines will be reborn.

  “We know not what world you will come into, but if the Oracles are correct, it will be one far more primitive than the world we know today. The other empires have fallen beside us, and theurgy is likely little more than a craft steeped in superstition. Creation has lost its greatest minds, but this, our Children, is an opportunity. No one is left to oppose our vision of perfect eugenics.

  “The Fathers were never able to complete our work. You must do better. You are the pinnacle of evolution and the true future of humanity. You must destroy imperfection and inferiority, but do so with compassion and wisdom.
<
br />   “We know our Warriors will thrive. They are yours to command. Contained within you are the Master Codes. Activate them and fulfill your birthright.”

  Soren broke contact. He looked at Shannon. Her face was healed. Distantly, he knew she had access to his Light during contact. “Syzygy? The Fathers want us to… fuck? But you’re my sister…”

  “We’re parts of a dyad. It’s not the same as it is with humans.”

  “I, uh…” He didn’t know what to say. He had gone from beggar to magician—to whatever the hells he was now. “You know what the Fathers want from us, right?”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “It sounded bad,” Soren said.

  “Burn these ropes off me,” Shannon insisted. “You can heal me later. I sensed your magic when you were touching me.”

  “Okay.” He aimed his hand at the ropes and willed a jet of flame toward Shannon’s wrists. It was nowhere close to the amount of power Maddox had displayed when he burned the Palace, but it did the trick.

  Shannon fell, and Soren caught her in his arms.

  She reached out to touch his face and brought him in for a kiss. He wanted to resist but couldn’t. She was his kin, but every fiber of his being had been hardwired to want her. His manhood sprang to attention, enflamed with ancient desires.

  He could no longer resist his instinctual urges. Overriding need consumed him as he laid her on the stone floor and undid his pants. She spread her legs, arching her back to invite him. He wanted it more badly than anything in his life. In that moment, they were slaves to their desires, oblivious to the chamber of horrors and suspended corpses around them.

  He slid himself inside her, knowing it would be a perfect fit. Blue and red sigils danced across their skin like a bioluminescent tide of language.

  “You feel so good inside me,” Shannon whispered as she rubbed his nipple through his sweat-soaked satin shirt.

  “Fuck yeah.” In the back of his mind, he realized that now probably wasn’t the best time to consummate his family reunion. He had no control over himself, probably due to a pheromonal compound released by her skin. He was a cog in a machine of natural selection.

  Distantly, he was aware of a pounding noise, but he continued to fuck his mate. She was everything he had ever wanted. She was his destiny. She shared his sensations as he shared hers. They were one being as they approached climax.

  “FUCK YEAH!” Soren bellowed as the wall of the chamber exploded into rock and dust.

  Soren turned to see Maddox, a Bamoran man, and a light-skinned Turisian woman step through the rubble of the blocked archway. The woman’s eyes were wide with surprise and horror.

  “Shannon? What? What in Ohan’s name are you doing?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Scorned

  LYTA

  There is only one emotion, but it wears many masks, love & hate being among them. It is an actor playing every role in a play, moving the story along by whatever means necessary. Anyone who has felt the slap of betrayal knows how mercurial love can be.

  —THE CYNOSURE, TRAVELER’S PROVERBS

  LYTA SANK TO her knees on the cold stone floor of the Diviner’s basement, clutching her stomach. She would have given anything, even her own life, to see Shannon safe again. Now Lyta wanted to claw her eyes out to erase the image of a man fucking her lover. Tempting… but they would just grow back. Every inch of Shannon’s skin was glowing with violet symbols.

  “Lyta,” Shannon said, scrambling to her feet. “It’s not what it looks like. Soren is my paired mate.”

  “Ew,” Maddox said, which was exactly what Lyta was thinking. He was inspecting the circle of runes around the twins, trying not to glance up at the mutilated bodies hanging from chains on the ceiling.

  “I had no control over what I was doing,” Shannon explained. “We’re hardwired by our creators to procreate. The union of the male and female is called the Syzygy. It’s the only way our bloodline can reproduce outside random mutation in the Warrior bloodline.”

  Lyta tried to speak. This isn’t happening.

  “I still love you,” Shannon said, walking toward Lyta. “You are my best friend, but I’m not the same person you knew. Now that I’ve achieved awareness, I’m so much more than her now, and my connection to Soren is a part of my life.”

  Heath put his hand on Lyta’s shoulder. “We should get out of here. You two need to have this talk in private—when Lyta’s ready.”

  Maddox continued to patrol the circle. “Does this sysz—whatever you call it, release a lot of arcane energy? Like of a massive magnitude?”

  “Yeah,” Soren said. “It amplifies our powers equal to one of the Patrean Fathers.”

  “You two need to get out of that circle—now.”

  Shannon and Soren sprinted toward the edge of the inscription and smacked into an invisible wall of energy. Their hands pressed flat against the air.

  Lyta sprang to her feet and pounded the air as hard as she could. The air rippled as the invisible field absorbed her blows. Shannon’s and Soren’s blue eyes went wide with fear.

  “It’s already becoming active,” Maddox said.

  “Maddox,” Heath said. “Get that thing down.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at,” Maddox said. “This writing is alien, and the circle’s been charged by multiple blood sacrifices. The Sword is the only thing that could break through.”

  “We don’t have the Sword,” Heath said. “You’ll find another way.”

  “There isn’t one! I have a fucking stylus and that’s it. It’s like trying to tear down a castle with a fork.”

  “Maybe I could use fire magic,” Soren offered.

  “No!” Maddox shouted. “Do not use any magic inside the circle. Even the slightest release of power could activate it, and you do not want to see what happens when the ritual completes. And for Guide’s sake, try not to fuck each other again.”

  “There are seven other signs in the Dark Ecliptic,” Heath said. “Why is it active now?”

  “Refer to my previous comment about the massive release of energy,” Maddox snapped.

  Lyta gave up pounding against the invisible wall. She didn’t even notice she’d been crying. Whether they were tears of betrayal or just the result of too many competing emotions, she couldn’t tell. She felt numb inside. “What happens now?”

  Heath took her hands and looked into her eyes. His silver irises seemed to flicker with their own energy. “Look, Lyta. I know this is hard. But we are inches from victory. Shannon is right there, and we will break this circle. You have to fight for that. You’re strong, inside as well as on the outside.”

  She wiped her eyes. She didn’t want to shed tears in front of Heath, but they were coming fast and strong now. “I should have gotten the Sword instead of looking for Shannon. If I had, we could break down the barrier and maybe we would have gotten here before they… this is all my fault.”

  He smiled. “You chose love above strategy because you have a strong heart. We all make that mistake. Once. The important thing is that it never happens again.”

  She gulped.

  He leaned in to whisper, “To take this thing down, we may need to make sacrifices. I need to know that won’t be a problem.”

  She looked back at Shannon and Soren. Lyta had given up everything to be with Shannon but had never asked herself if Shannon would be willing to do the same. Maybe a part of Lyta always knew she wouldn’t like the answer. “It won’t.”

  “Good,” Heath said. “Go upstairs and see if you can rip through the floor. Maybe we can get them out that way. Leave the support beams intact so they can climb the chains holding these corpses.”

  Lyta ran up the steps and into the Diviner’s parlor. The sky outside was overcast, and no lamps were lit. Sheets of cloth covered the furniture, and the bookshelves sat empty. A massive granite altar stood in the center, rings of dust showing it had once been crowded with idols.

  Lyta stomped on a plank as hard as
she could, breaking the heel of her boot in the process. The board caved in easily, and she was able to lift it. She worked on the rest of the floor. It felt good to do something with her hands.

  She found a dusty crawlspace under the whole of the room and another wooden layer two feet below the hole she had made. That had to be the ceiling of that horrid chamber in the basement. She channeled her rage and punched. The wood shattered, and she could peer down into the basement. A plank of wood clattered to the floor next to Shannon.

  “I’m through!” Lyta yelled and started ripping out more boards.

  “That quickly?” She heard Maddox’s voice of disbelief.

  Picking herself off the ground, she scrambled to work. She didn’t see the cloaked man come up behind her until it was too late. He grabbed her curly hair and tossed her against the wall. The shelves snapped against the force of the blow.

  “Well, well, well,” the man said. “The prodigal daughter returns.”

  “Quillian.”

  He shrugged. “Leland, actually. After I killed my wife and daughters, I took my brother’s place. Or was it the other way around? I can barely remember the life of my shell.”

  Lyta picked herself out of the ruins and readied a broken plank. She heard a chittering croak from above. The ragged halves of the chimera circled the room, skittering like spiders across the ceiling.

  “Relax.” He threw his hood back. “If I wanted you dead, I would already have had my pets cut you into a thousand pieces and reassemble you like a jigsaw puzzle. You are still one of us, Lyta.”

  She spat on the floor. “I never asked to be.”

  “Greatness rarely asks, child.” His voice sounded calm and soothing. “Now, why are you ripping up my beautiful hardwood floors?”

  “You took her,” Lyta snarled. She charged at him, swinging the plank as hard as she could at the top of his head. He made no effort to avoid the blow. The board shattered, along with his neck.

  His head lolled on the severed spine. “Such spirit. Yes, the woman who would be so perfect in my collection. She must mean a great deal for you to leave the safety of the noble House Ibazz.”