Hard Reign

by John Hook

  “Yes, you do. You were duped.” I felt great respect for Roland and I hoped that was coming through, even if I was being a little harsh. “You can take some solace in the fact that he was pretty good at it. He even made you go along with things you never should have gone along with. Take pride in the fact that, when it really counted, you overcome the strength of his hold on you.”

  I looked at Taka and Kyo. “How well is the city defended?”

  Taka answered. “We have good numbers of troops placed strategically around the city and scouts moving about in the surrounding countryside for signs of enemy activity, including more Grays moving in. We even have scout runners going between here and Haven for communication purposes. I’ve, of course, added some technology to the mix.” Taka’s face lit up.

  “Do tell.”

  “We found a nearby place to quarry those explosive rocks and I’ve refined the process for wrapping them in clay containing lava. Also, based on designs Izzy helped me work out, Blaise and I have constructed some rooftop catapults. In an all-out attack, we could essentially shell their side of the city.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. It could cost lives of those trapped over there.”

  “I also designed some temporary bridging. Risky as we can’t test it, but uses the catapult mechanisms to shoot a rope-and-plank bridge across the lava. They’ll be rickety and only allow one line of troops over at a time, but if they weren’t waiting for us on the other side, it could work.”

  Roland spoke up again. “Why all the questions? Reviewing your troops?”

  “Some folks in this city may want me to be their king, but the troops belong to you and Kyo. However, I need to ask for a small expeditionary force and I need Izzy, Kyo and Blaise. I need you to tell me if that will badly cripple the city’s defenses.”

  “What is it you are planning to do?”

  “I can’t find out anything about Rox, so I want to do two things that might be possible. I want to find out where whatever is being extracted at the pain farms is being piped to and I want to free anyone still in the pain farm. I need Saripha, Izzy and Blaise for the latter as they will have to reconstruct how they did it last time. This time, there are a lot of towers.”

  “And you want troops in case the Angel shows up?”

  “I don’t get the feeling traditional combat tactics are effective against the Angel, but maybe I can learn about Rox. If Knightshade shows up, the troops can distract him, but I’ll likely have to handle him.”

  “You figured out your powers yet?” Roland gave a friendly smirk.

  “Kind of. Sort of. Not really put it to the test. The troops are just in case we run into any resistance from the lower part of the food chain. I saw evidence of Shirks at the towers. Don’t know how many or whether they employ demons as well.”

  “Take what you need.” Roland nodded to Kyo. “I trust Kyo’s judgment. I’m sure, whomever you take, we’ll be fine.”

  “Quentin.”

  Izzy almost startled me with the alarm in his voice. He was looking over the edge of the wall, his eyes pointed down at the opposite shore near a bend in the lava. It was very easy to miss them. They kept very close to the edges of the lava and blended in. If you didn’t look close, and if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you could look right at them and not even notice them. It was a pair of the flaming monkey-like demons we had encountered in Ohnipoor. As I watched the two scampered around a bend and disappeared.

  “What?” Roland asked, peering over. “I don’t see anything.”

  Izzy turned to me. “What do you think they’re doing here?”

  “I’m not sure. Could they’ve been here all the time and we not know about them?”

  “We didn’t know about the caverns and, as I recall, they were cavern dwellers,” Izzy noted.

  I could see Roland and the others were agitated trying to figure out what Izzy and I were talking about. I told them about our encounters with the fiery demons before.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that in all the time I’ve been here,” Roland said grimly.

  “So why are they here now?”

  “If they are allied with Gerod, they might ford the lava.” Izzy was thinking out loud.

  “As I remember, they weren’t very friendly towards Knightshade.”

  “However, we are spotty on the relationship between Gerod and Knightshade,” Izzy pointed out.

  “You don’t believe he is being oppressed by Knightshade either.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Yeah, that was certainly a fool’s errand Gerod sent you on before. I’m still not sure what the point was.”

  “I think, to trick me out of my power in whatever that dream chamber contraption was.”

  “So how does this change things if these creatures have joined Gerod?” Kyo asked.

  “I don’t know. We don’t know much about these demons. However, I’m not sure that’s what’s going on. We saw only two and they seemed before to travel in larger groups. They were being sneaky, staying close to the lava. And they weren’t circling our part of the city, they were circling their part of the city.”

  “Or maybe they’re returning from spying on us,” Blaise said without much emotion.

  “Anything is possible. Since we don’t know much about them, it’s hard to prepare. However, I’m going with my gut on this. They didn’t try to attack us in Ohnipoor. They did attack Knightshade. I don’t know what they’re up to, but I suspect they have their own agenda. I’m afraid we’ll just have to wait to see what it is.”

  I looked at Roland.

  “What do you think of my request now?”

  “You mean, letting key tactical people go when I’m about to be overrun by flaming monkeys? I’d say just a normal day with Quentin Case.”

  I smiled sweetly.

  “I always think your gut is crazy, but it has generally proved to be pretty reliable. That’s good enough for me. Take who you need and good luck. You’ll be in more danger than we will, I suspect.”

  We shook hands.

  Kyo rounded up a small but able unit of her most trusted fighters from Rockvale and some of the Zaccoran troops that knew the surrounding mountains. Izzy said his goodbyes to Anika, who felt she should remain and help Roland. He managed two quivers of arrows on his back, his favorite bow and a short club in his belt. Blaise had both a long and short club. Kyo had her long sword on her back and we both had a short sword. Saripha packed a bag she wore over her shoulder with poultices, oils and other concoctions that she made. Although the bag had some weight, she seemed to carry it almost effortlessly.

  In actuality, I was hoping we wouldn’t need our weapons much. Fighting battles would just get in the way of trying to find out what I was trying to find out. The only attention I might want to attract would be the Angel. If that happened, everyone had been instructed to flee, not attack. I was pretty sure, if that happened, I would be the focus of the Angel. The Angel wouldn’t care about the others, dismissing them as insignificant.

  We headed out as if headed to Haven. If there were observers from the Dark Men or the gray demons that our scouts had missed, we didn’t want to raise suspicion of a tactical offensive move. As usual, Kyo disappeared quickly into the canopy to make sure. We then doubled back through the mountains and in a day and a half were in sight of the pain farm.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Izzy asked as we watched from our perch just inside the tree line overlooking the towers. My chest tightened as I thought about the numbers of lost souls trapped in there experiencing pain with no end, no habituation. Every so often I remembered that I was in there, or something I had once thought of as me. I couldn’t quite get my head around the metaphysics of it and it bothered me. It was as if I had abandoned myself. It made me feel cowardly.

  This part of the plan was the hardest.

  “We aren’t going to approach the towers just yet. I need to know where the extractions are being piped to and try to figure out why they are doing this.
If we disrupt it, like before, we won’t find out. I don’t know why it’s important. Just gut again.”

  “So, we are just going to leave people suffering a bit longer.” Blaise’s face clouded a bit.

  “This isn’t just happening here, you can bet. We need to get ahead of what is happening here if we are going to have a chance of closing it down for good, everywhere.”

  “Might not be able to.” Blaise’s eyes shone with anger.

  “We have to try.”

  Blaise’s expression became more contemplative as the anger receded as quickly as it had risen.

  “We do.”

  We followed the tree line, circling around the pain farm. The advantage of so large a collection of towers is that the final pipe exiting from the farm was quite large, collecting as it did all the output of all the towers. They didn’t bother to try to bury it as they had done with that first tower we found. The pipe was mounted on wooden stilts, which carried it out of the pain farm and into the trees. That meant we didn’t have to approach the pain farm itself. We just circled around to where the pipe came into the trees where we were less likely to be observed.

  When we reached the pipe, Izzy scrambled up and felt the edge of the pipe.

  “Same rubbery texture. Still don’t know what the material is. Might be similar to that membrane-like substance used on the control panels in the towers. Whatever is flowing through them is warm.”

  Izzy climbed back down.

  “Could they just be drawing blood for some purpose?” Kyo asked.

  “I don’t think so. I certainly had no indication that was happening to me and none of the people we released before had anemic glamours. Granted, these glamour bodies probably do better with blood loss than living bodies, just as they can go without food or sleep. However, if that’s what they’re up to, they could just strap everyone to a gurney. No, the pain itself is part of the process.”

  “Maybe they just like pain,” Blaise observed.

  “Bet they do. However, I think the sustained level of pain is what is producing what they’re taking. Like a runner producing endorphins. They are collecting something from these bodies. We have to find out for what.”

  We followed the elevated pipeline, which headed through a ravine towards a mountain in the distance. Eventually the stilts holding up the pipeline became shorter and shorter until it was running in a trough-like frame very close to the ground.

  “Might be interesting to puncture the pipe and see what leaks out,” Izzy mused out loud.

  “I don’t want to do anything until I get a better idea of what’s going on. Besides, its designed to withstand the elements. Might not be easy to pierce, even with your arrows.”

  We traveled in a wing formation. I, Izzy and Blaise were point following the pipe. Kyo was up in the trees scouting all around. The rest of the unit followed on either side, hanging slightly back, looking for any signs that anyone else was joining us and spread out so no one could surround them all.

  When the pipe came to the mountain, it went up on stilts again and curved around, following a ridge line. The ridge line was exposed and could be viewed for miles around, so we followed in the trees below.

  We came out on an open plain. The pipe continued towards another mountain, which must have been its destination because beyond it was something I had never seen here before.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Blaise echoed my thoughts.

  “Appears so,” said Izzy with no surprise.

  “It’s an ocean beyond that mountain.”

  However, something else had caught my attention and stopped me in my tracks. The pipe we had been following was being joined by another structure, a squared-off metal housing that was also on stilts. It came from the other side of the mountain and joined the pipe and both ran in parallel to the next mountain.

  “That thing looks like metal,” Izzy said.

  “I think it is.”

  It also made an awful racket. Something was being transported inside that squared housing, and none too gently.

  I walked the curve of the mountain, following the metal housing back in the direction it was coming from. Something was pulling at me. My gut again. The rattling sound from the housing above me was mind numbing. Metal was a rare thing in Hell and here it was being casually used in abundance.

  I made my way through the trees. I could hear distant sounds. I couldn’t decide what they were, but they were very percussive and echoing. I emerged at the edge of the tree line and was standing at the edge of a cliff. Izzy grabbed me from behind as I was about to step over the edge.

  Blaise let out a low whistle.

  Below us spread a vast open earth pit, terraced into layers with a great, deep, seemingly bottomless hole at the center. On several of the terraces, men and women swung metal instruments breaking up rocks from dirt and loading them onto small carts sitting on wooden rails. These carts, when full, were being pushed up in the blazing heat to what appeared to be a platform in a wooden tower. A pulley system moved the platforms up and down and at the top, the broken rocks were pushed into the mouth of the metal housing which, I realized, must have a conveyor system. The men were shirtless, sweaty, and covered with dirt. The women weren’t shirtless and that was about the only way to tell them apart from the men. All bulged with lean, wiry muscles from prolonged periods of hard, hot work.

  “You remember talk we heard in Antanaria of working in the mines?” Izzy whispered.

  “Yup. And I think we just found them.”

  18.

  Up until now, I had never seen anything in this place I called Hell that indicated it had ever seen an industrial age. This was different.

  We crouched low to take in the scene without drawing excess attention. The mine was vast. It looked as if two mountains had been decapitated to open up the ground sufficiently. The terracing spread out far in rectangular beds that dropped to different depths. The hole that was in the center could have swallowed several city blocks and seemed to go down forever.

  The big hole must have been where the mine first started. No one worked near it. Instead they were digging along various terraced sections as well as along the lower terraces. They seemed to start cutting in rectangular patterns and then dug out more and more. I thought the rectangular shape might have made the terracing easier. Each rectangular section had a rope-and-pulley mechanical lift, bigger than a dumbwaiter and smaller than a passenger elevator. The wooden compartment being taken up and down in those wood frame shafts could be loaded with the rock that was being dislodged and, using big wheels, the compartment loaded with rock was brought to the top. Each rectangular “dig” had a branch of the metal housing with an opening at the end. The rock would be unloaded and thrown in, making a loud noise. It was impossible to see the mechanism from here, but the rock was carried as on a conveyor through the metal ductwork, rattling loudly. The branches came together into one line of conveyers that went off in the direction of the mountain by the ocean that we had seen.

  I watched the workers closely. Hard to see details from where we were, but this was clearly a slave camp. These were not sun-browned muscular bodies that worked hard by day and drank hard by night. Again, that curious property that your glamour reflects how you think of yourself. They were muscular—they knew they were doing hard work even if these bodies didn’t feel it as much as living bodies. However, they were in other ways like the “mass” in Rockvale when I first arrived. Their skin was gray, almost faded. Their clothes were colorless too and only enough for modesty, men in shorts and sandals and women in shorts and something that looked like A-shirts, but there was nothing provocative in the revealing of flesh. They were sweaty and dirty and tired and without emotion. They worked ceaselessly. There were a few, scattered Shirks standing around at the tops of the pits, but there was almost no need and they seemed to be bored and paying little attention. This was not a place that would suffer a slave rebellion. These men and women had given up long ago.

  “What d
o you think is going on here?” Izzy asked.

  “I think we’re seeing what happens when the folks in the dream chamber get turned into protos.”

  “They bring them here, shove a tool in their hands and they dig,” Blaise summarized.

  “No muss, no fuss. As the proto settles into a personality, they don’t even know there’s a different way to be. Don’t need much food or sleep, no creature comforts. They just dig until they drop.”

  “But why?” Izzy asked. “The indication we got is they eventually get returned to Antanaria, where they get to live the good life for a while and earn their way to the dream chamber. Why such an elaborate scheme?”

  “Remember how Haven was before?” Blaise asked.

  “People thought they were free of demons.” It was the first thing that came into my head. “Only, in reality, there was something much worse waiting for them.”

  “Exactly.” Blaise smiled.

  “Why the ruse?” I looked at Blaise.

  “I don’t know, but I’d say they seem to be working very hard to get people’s hopes up.”

  “They are sick and sadistic.”

  “No doubt. However I’m thinking there’s more to it,” Blaise returned.

  “Almost always is. You think they’re getting something out of that hope?” I replied.

  Blaise looked at the workers below and his eyes lit up with anger. “Something. Psychic vampires.”

  “Maybe not.” Izzy spoke up.

  “Then what?” I could see Izzy’s wheels turning.

  “We know these bodies are biological as well as manipulated by thought. It is as if the mind-body relation is much stronger than it was in life. However, even in our former world, we were discovering that thought could change biology.”

  “You think they are getting chemical changes by doing what they are doing?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But why?”

  Blaise pointed in the direction of the mountain by the ocean. “Suspect we have to go see what they are doing over there to answer that question.”

  “I think I need to get a closer look at what is going on here.”