by Lee Isserow
15
Three options
Talika Rei was having a bad day.
Despite being one of the Lead Operators in the Circle's tactical division, on Comstock's order she had been reduced to being nothing more than a recruitment officer. She was being punished, that was more than apparent. He was taking his anger out on her, as if it was her fault that they lost one of their most decorated officers, let alone the rest of the tactical team that had been out of contact for over a day.
She was striking out, over and over. It wasn't that Nichols was unique as such, but the natural magick that flowed through his bloodline was rarer than the other adepts. Even so, Talika knew full well she couldn't go to back to her superior having failed at the task. The only other shadow adept on their books was one that had been marked as 'deactivated and unresponsive to communiques'. Unless he wanted to try and convince her, an old woman, a bi-centenarian at that, to be part of the next incursion (and convincing the pensioner to be as much would in itself be a mammoth feat) they were out of options.
She pulled up their roster of assets, scrolling through the thousands of names, traits, adepts and training whilst her eyes stared blankly at the light changing on the pixels as the words and images spun upwards. Tali was barely even registering the natural skills of the small number of adepts on their books. It was rare these days to find an adept. Those skills were being bred out, diluted and adulterated by the mundane sapien genes muddying and polluting the magickal gene pool. Not that that was how she would have put it, but the rhetoric of the bloodline-conscious factions within the Circle were definitely on her mind then and there. These days even a coupling between two magickally inclined people wasn't guaranteed to keep the line alive.
Her finger stopped moving, stopped scrolling through the endless list of names and faces. The asset didn't have to be an adept. All adept magicks could be technically be learned, and there were plenty of magickians that had dedicated their lives to devouring every text, and practised every discipline. She just had to find one of their assets or agents who had that dedication. Narrowing the search with filter after filter, there were three options.
The first was Garret Liah, a sixty-five year old who barely looked thirty; full head of hair, not a single trace of a wrinkle. She skipped straight past him, someone who cared that much about aesthetics, who was funnelling so much of their time and effort into glamours to fix their appearance was going to be distracted from the task at hand. A dimensional inversion, let alone the incursion itself was never going to be his primary concern, lest a hair get out of place.
Shana Kanta was the second option. Six foot four of legitimate Amazonian stock, she had more toned musculature on one arm than Tali had on her entire body. Bright blue eyes shone out in her photo, flanked by long, flowing locks of the darkest and shiniest hair Talika had ever seen on a person. Given her list of skills, she was shocked to discover that Shana was only twenty six, and yet she had been rated no lower than a three point nine (out of a total possible five) for every adept skill. Literally every adept skill, Tali re-read, just to make sure she hadn't miscounted. The only issue that stood out was that as proficient as Kanta was, she had only barely been field tested. It was all good and well being able to absorb information like a sponge, and conjure and cast in controlled environments, but this would be out in the real world. Lives had already been lost, and Tali couldn't help but imagine that Shana might freak out in the real world, and risk yet another team.
The last asset was Baal Niko. He was of Egyptian descent, with an olive complexion and sharp features that looked like they had been hand carved like the Sphinx. In his bio, it claimed that he was a direct descendant of the god Baal himself. Tali sighed and checked the user login information on the file, discovering that Niko had authored it himself. Given that he had written his questionable lineage on his file, in big bold letters no less, set off warning flares. She didn't even want to have to make a call to the owner of that kind of ego, let alone actually be his operator on the mission.
As far as Tali was concerned, that settled it. Kanta it was. As she raised her hand, extending the index finger to begin signing out the sigil to make contact, Tali chewed on her lip with hesitant anxiety. She would have to be a calm, reassuring voice in Shana's ear the whole time she was out in the field. A supportive, encouraging influence to keep her mind clear and head in the game. Talika wasn't sure she did either of those things particularly well, and as she traced the symbol out in the air, picturing Shana's face in her mind's eye, she let out a long, slow sigh. Pulling her finger back in towards her palm, she stuck out her thumb and little finger to seal the sigil and initiate the call. Using a studious magickian rather than an adept wouldn't be anywhere close to perfect, but it was the only option they had.
“Hello?” she heard a voice say in her periphery. Kanta had answered the call.
Talika swallowed hard over a lump in her throat. She couldn't bare the thought of any more of her agents – her friends – dying in the service of disposing of the damn threat that had been set upon them. The only way they would get through this was with a shadow adept, or in this case, the next best thing. She took another deep breath, gritted her teeth and pushed those thoughts aside.
“Shana Kanta? This is Talika Rei at the Circle. You're being activated.”
16
Too many details
A soft breath flowed in and out of Akif's lips as he slept, joined by the occasional grunt and adorable grumbling hum of a quiet snore. Jules lay next to him, listening to the sound of his sleep with a smile on his face, but he was all too wide awake. It had surprised him that 'Kif was so instantly accepting of the basic lie he had told about the interview. He didn't have to go into too many details, hadn't even needed to use any of the explanations he had concocted and beta tested in his imagination. And yet, an uneasiness was hanging over him, preventing him from entering the sanctuary of slumber. Staring up at the ceiling, Jules watched the dull grey of the shadow-filled room, light from street lamps coming in through the window, casting a cross-hatch of yellow across it, a giant 'X marks the spot' right above him. Being watched, that's what the uneasiness felt like. As if something or someone was observing him. It started on the train, but it had only got worse since he got into bed.
Trying to get his mind off it, he thought back to the story he had told Natan as he tucked him in. The tale of Kala Niktu and Shaman Kahgo fighting the Dagonites. Natan really enjoyed the story for some reason, even though it was about a species of hideous mutant fish people. The fable was one of a series of tales his grandmother had told him about the Dagonites, but the only time they ever decided it was time to leave their island, somewhere south of the equator, and try and conquer the world. Jules remembered that when she first told it he was surprised that they only vied for world domination the once. “What else do mutant fish people do with their days?” he remembered himself saying at the time. As he lay in bed, he couldn't help but agree with his younger self.
There was, as always, much he had left out of the story to make it suitable for bedtime. The description of the Dagonites was where it had to begin. As far as Natan knew, they were literally reverse-mermaids; bottom half man, top half fish. And they wore trousers. Jules was certain to mention that, because otherwise he could only imagine his son picturing fish-men with genitalia bouncing back and forth with every step, and nobody needs that in their mind's eye, especially not before bed.
The truth, or at least his grandmother's version of the truth, was far more grotesque, and that was taking even the bouncing genitals into account. They had the basic bodies of men and women, but were completely hairless. Their skin was sporadically scaled, not entirely fish-like, but not entirely human either. They all had oversized eyes, some had full-blown fish eyes that bloated out of their faces like half-inflated balloons. Most of their noses were flat against their faces, and were often gilled, comprising of thin slits of skin that went from their nasal protuberances across their cheeks. Thi
s, in turn with the mutated organs in their chests, allowed most of them to breathe underwater. But not all could. They were, after all, mutated fish people. They all had webbed toes, many also had webbed fingers, and some were even born with long, flat flippers instead of arms. Their mouths were rounder than human lips, and had neither the muscles to smile nor frown, only those which allowed the mouth to open and close like a goldfish. Given their aquatic life and corresponding diet, human jaws and teeth were of no use to them, evolutionally speaking. Instead, they had a single cylindrical tube to their stomach that was lined with teeth, undulating in and out in order to chow down on anything that had the misfortune to enter their gaping gullets.
The reason the Dagonites looked as they did was complex to say the least, and thus was also stricken from the bedtime story, as it was far too sordid and sickening for a young child – let alone an adult – to hear. Their deity, their forefather, came to the island from beneath the ocean. It was not born there. It originated from a far off realm, beyond time and space, much like the majority of the creatures of cosmic proportions that cropped up in these tales. When it traversed through the realms (which once again, involved it slithering through one of the anal cavities of a much larger dimensional entity) it emerged in the ocean somewhere south of the equator, and spent millennia hibernating at the bottom of the sea bed whilst it waited for life to spawn on the planet. Unbeknownst to it, life evolved (at least in part) due to this period of slumber. Bacteria that had spent aeons crawling across its skin contaminated the waters, mingling with the bacteria that was already present, both naturally occurring and that which had arrived with previous infiltrators from other realms. It woke, thousands of years after it first arrived to discover that not only had life spread out across the planet, but also those that lived in settlements close to the place of his sleepy sojourn were compatible as mates. It knew this, because it could sense its own genetic material in them. This creature yearned for procreation, to spread its seed, and that is exactly what it did, sending hundreds of its thousand tentacles up to the surface. They slithered up the beaches, these many arms, covered in not only suckers but many pustules, in between a myriad toothless mouths and unblinking eyes. The first thing it did was slaughter the men, to cull any potential threats to its new brood. The male villagers, armed with only pitchforks and torches of fire were no match for the appendages, each of which was up to fifty feet tall when at their full height from the water, not to mention being thicker and stronger than mere mortals. Its skin was slick with an oozing sludge that put the torches out instantly. The teeth of the pitchforks tore through only the outer permeable membrane of the gigantic fiend, but could not get past a thicker, scalier layer of skin that lay beneath, as it was as hard as steel, rebuffing the implements with no effort at all. The tentacles ripped the men apart limb from limb, decorating the sandy beaches with fluids that once used to be so very content just circulating inside the men's bodies. It heaved its mighty, bulbous body from the water, giant eyes greeting the moonlight for the very first time. Its skin, if you could call it that, was covered in barnacles and coral, not to mention pustules that burst as it grazed them against the sandy beach and tore them against rocky outcroppings, spurting a foul smelling purple ooze. This actually made its crawl all the more easier, relieving friction and making it all but glide through the small woodland that separated the beach from the village, bulldozing trees in its path with the greatest of ease. These things, the males and the trees, were of no concern to it, the creature only had one, singular purpose in mind. It stopped as it came close to the township, a behemoth silhouetted in the moonlight some hundred and fifty feet above the treeline, many eyes looking at the houses with an unquenchable lust. It observed from there, as it sent its tentacles bursting through doors and windows, probed throughout the shacks and cabins until it found the females of each house, and proceeded to slip the tips of its appendages up between their legs. Each of these slithery demonic arms could shift in shape and purpose, the suckers and eyes receding, becoming long and slender as they violated each of the women. Crude lips formed at the tips of each of the gelatinous arms, which belched a reproductive enzyme deep into every one of the poor women. Then the tentacles pulled back, the creature returned upon the path it had made in the woods, returning to the ocean never to be seen again.
Three months later, every one of the women in the village gave birth to babies, but the births were unlike any births any of them had witnessed before. There was no water breaking, no umbilical cord. And their offspring's arms were more often than not tenticular or flipper-ish, legs of a few were the same, with vestigial hands and feet at the end. They had neither ten fingers nor ten toes, either more or fewer. And where their mouths should be, toothless suckers lay in their stead. The women considered destroying them, killing these things that were their children, and yet were not. But their gods would not let them do such a thing, it was forbidden, and thus they raised them as their own. These children grew faster than any normal human child, becoming the size of men in barely a year. However, their lives were somewhat truncated, living five to ten years at most, become fertile in their second or third year, much to the horror of the female villagers. Of course, fish-people were no challenge to Kala Niktu and Shaman Kahgo, and the battle they fought was nothing close to as harrowing as the years of torment that had beset the township for all that time since the creature first visited.
It was, Jules had realised in retrospect, not even close to a suitable bedtime story for a four-year-old. He chuckled to himself for his poor choice of tales, and chuckled further at the memory of his grandmother telling that same story, without censoring the massacre of the men, let alone the repeated violation the women suffered. For whatever reason, the old woman deemed it important that he knew the world he lived in. Not the world of man, but the real world, in which there was unimaginable darkness out there, not just in the shadows (for they both knew the shadows all too well), but beyond the shadows.
At that thought, the cross-hatch of light and shadows on the ceiling started moving. A car going by, Jules thought, but there was no sound of a car, and it was not a natural movement. The yellow hues of the street lighting became brighter, whiter, peeling out from the distinct line between shadow and light. The brightness crawled across the ceiling, down the walls, as if all the darkness of night was being sapped from the room. The texture and colour of the walls and furniture was taken too, replaced with that pure, bright white, encroaching across the floor, over the bed, under the bed. Jules tried to reach out to the shadows around him to use them as weapons, but there were none he could feel. He tried to reach for Akif, but he too was gone, swallowed up by the light.
Jules was completely alone, in a textureless, pearlescent void.
17
Shroud
Jules whipped out of the bed, his bare feet landing on the smooth, milky floor. It had the texture of cling film, and was warm to the touch, didn't quite feel natural. He reminded himself that it obviously wasn't natural, this entire thing was a magickal event brought on by some insidious force that knew full well of his adept, attempting to trap him in this place, an unpainted doll house version of his bedroom. His eyes darted every which way as Jules inspected his surroundings. The shapes of the bedroom were all still there, the alcoves at the windows, the doors of the wardrobes, even the bumps in the bed where his husband had been lying. Was still lying, he reminded himself. It was as if the entire room had been vacuum packed in gleaming white plastic from the inside out.
“It is time we spoke,” said a voice from behind him. Deep, emotionless, with an imperceivable accent that sounded as though each word had made the journey out of his lips from a different continent.
Jules lifted his arms as he began to turn on his heel to face the speaker, fingers primed to conjure shadows forth. The man who kept him there would no doubt be under the impression that such gestures were useless without shadows present in the room. But there were still shadows, everything in the roo
m might have been glazed with the white sheen, but Jules himself was not. There were still shadows, there were always shadows. Not just under his clothes, but inside him, from the empty space in his throat through to his lungs, his digestive tract and beyond. Jules parted his lips as he rounded out the semi-circle turn to face his abductor, fingers tracing through the air as he came to a stop. The darkness burst out of his mouth, a tidal wave of thick, black shadows that sharpened at the tip, a razor edged spike forming as it rocketed towards the man responsible for trapping him in the void.
A hand shot through the air, grabbing hold of the thick spear as it was mere inches from the man's face. “Impressive,” he said, accent still wandering. “I did not expect that of you.” A small smile came to his lips, a glint in his emerald eyes. Jules had seen those eyes before. “She taught you well.” The hand threw the shadow back towards Jules. They lost their shape, their solidity, turning to smoke as they withdrew back down his throat, pulling air back as they returned down his gullet. A large, growling burp emanating after he swallowed the darkness down.
“Who are you?” he asked. All too aware that he could not make out the features of the man who was holding him captive. He had a face, of that Jules was certain, but it was as if every time his mind registered it, tried to store it in short or long term memory, the image was deleted instantly. Dark skin, he could recall that, and those almost glowing green eyes were unforgettable. But the nose, the chin, the cheekbones, even the shapes of the ears and length of the man's hair was indeterminable.
“Shroud,” the man explained. “Provides figurative invisibility in plain sight. The shrouded is seen, and yet not seen. Registered, but instantly forgotten .”