City of Delusions (The Dying World Book 2)

by John Triptych

  “Oh? You found me by yourself? You must be the cleverest boy in all of Lethe.”

  “I just happened to know where to look and the sun was at the proper slant of the day,” Rion said. “But others will probably be here soon, it would not be wise to stay here.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “I am afraid I do not have much choice, boy. I am wounded and it’s hard for me to move.”

  “I can help you,” Rion said.

  “Why would you want to help me?”

  “Because I will need your help too,” the boy said.

  The voice became inquisitive. “My help? What do you need for me to do, boy?”

  “I need you to rescue my friend,” Rion said. “She is currently fighting in the Great Games, and there are powerful people who want her killed. I will be watching from the noble’s section, and I need you to get me out at the same time as well.”

  “If she is a pit fighter, then dying is part of her profession, yes?”

  “She was forced into slavery, but before that she was a Striga from the wastes,” Rion said. “The family I am a part of is very powerful and wants her dead. You must get her out of there.”

  The voice now carried a hint of surprise. “A Striga from the wastes? Are you the boy who accompanied her?”

  “I am, and I must free her. If you help me then I can help you,” Rion said.

  The voice started chuckling again. “Unless you are an experienced healer then I doubt you could help me, boy.”

  A shadowy form appeared in front of Rion. Soon it coalesced into a haggard man, hobbling towards him. Zeren could no longer put any sort of pressure on his right side, for the pain was too great. He had snapped away the bone shafts that stuck out from his leg and the right side of his body, but the barbed arrowheads were stuck in deep, and he was too weak to use his Vis to pull them out. He had already lost a lot of blood despite the makeshift bandages he had placed over the wounds, and he knew that he would soon be incapacitated unless he got to a healer. His ashen face was distorted in a painful grimace, and he quickly collapsed into a sitting position, just a few feet away from the boy.

  Rion placed the torch on a nearby empty sconce and crouched down to get a better look at the man’s wounds. The fur bandages were held tight with leather strips, and they were completely soaked through. “Do you have a dagger? I may be able to remove the arrow points,” the boy said.

  Despite the pain, Zeren gave him a quizzical look as he pulled out a flint dagger from his boot and handed it to the boy. “You … are far too young to be a healer.”

  Using the sharp stone point of the knife, Rion widened the tear of the wound until he could see the back of the arrowhead. Zeren groaned a little. “I am not a healer. Brace yourself. There will be pain,” Rion said.

  Zeren’s eyes narrowed before he realized that the boy was closing his eyes and gesturing with his other hand. Suddenly he could feel the embedded arrow moving inside of him. Zeren gasped when the arrow moved slightly deeper into his body.

  “I am sorry,” Rion said. “Let me try again.”

  Zeren could once again feel the arrowhead moving, only this time it was steadily being pulled out of him. This boy knows the mindforce, he thought. But he does not look like a Magus.

  Rion closed his eyes as he could now go purely by his feelings. It was as if he had an extra pair of invisible hands, far stronger than his physical form, and they were firmly grasping the projectile that was embedded in the man’s body. Using a more precise discipline, Rion gently moved bits of muscle and parts of the intestinal wall aside while pulling out the metal arrowhead. The boy could have easily just powered through and used maximum force to rip out the deep-seated arrow point, but that would have been more traumatic and could have easily exacerbated the injury. A long minute had passed, and the arrowhead slowly came out from the side of Zeren’s thigh and simply fell onto the dusty floor.

  Zeren let out a deep breath. “How … did you do that? I have never seen … anyone using such a precise discipline before.”

  Rion gestured for him to be silent as he focused his attention to the other arrow in Zeren’s leg. Since there wasn’t any serious internal damage, the boy’s task was easier. Gently stretching the muscles around the arrow point, Rion spent another minute slowly coaxing the projectile out until it too was but a small dart lying on the ground beside them.

  “Efrin!” a voice shouted in the darkness beyond. “Where are you?”

  They both could hear the sounds of footsteps. Zeren grimaced as he replaced the bandages over his wounds. It would take weeks for him to heal, and that was assuming that the arrow point had not pierced through his guts and caused a bleed from the inside.

  Rion knew his time was short. Kardra probably sought help and now they would be upon them soon enough. The boy edged closer to Zeren’s as he held his left wrist close to the man’s face. “This is the only way for you to heal quickly,” the boy said.

  Zeren thought the boy was going to smother him with his hand. “What are you doing?”

  Rion winced as he used the flint dagger to cut across his left wrist. The blood on his wound began to flow. “You must drink my blood.”

  Zeren’s eyes widened. “What?”

  Rion glanced over his shoulder. The footsteps and distant torchlights were getting closer. “I do not have time to explain. My blood will heal you. Drink it.”

  Zeren suddenly remembered what his father had told him. It was about the children. They had somehow restored his father’s loins and subsequently fathered both him and Nylius. Drinking the boy’s blood seemed completely insane, but he sensed something different about the boy. This child had the gift of Vis and could use it like no one else. Since there wasn’t a better choice, Zeren placed his mouth on the boy’s wrist and began slurping the blood. The moment the boy’s sanguine fluid came down his throat, the pain in his wounds suddenly lessened and he felt light headed. In less than a minute, he no longer sensed any weakness, and the aches of his wounds completely went away.

  Rion gasped as he pulled his wrist away. “That is enough. I must go.”

  Zeren stood up. He could feel the boy’s blood in his body, it was as if all the wounds he had endured during his entire existence had never existed, and he felt like a young man all over again. He grabbed the boy’s wrist and examined it. The wound had closed, as had his own. Zeren looked at the boy in awe. “You are one of those children my father talked about. You have the power of blood.”

  Rion nodded as he took the torch from the sconce. He felt a little weak from the blood loss, but he would get better in time. “Remember our bargain. Find Miri. She is known as the Red Gorgon. I know you are not the monster that the Magi and the others claim. Help me.”

  Zeren nodded as he placed a hand on the boy’s slender shoulder. “Worry not. You have saved me, and I shall repay that debt. Where can I find you?”

  “I am called Efrin by the rulers of House Kentis, but my real name is Rion,” the boy said before turning around and walking back along the corridor. “I hope that you keep your promise.”

  The moment Rion rounded a corridor, he came face to face with a robed Magus carrying a torch, accompanied by a distressed Kardra. “Efrin,” the servant girl said. “Where have you been? You have made me worried, and I summoned help to search this place. Your mother is outside waiting for you, and she is very annoyed.”

  Rion shrugged sheepishly. “I am sorry. I got lost going through several passageways.”

  The Magus who accompanied Kardra gave him a suspicious look. “The entrance to this tomb was supposedly sealed. How did you open the door?”

  “I just pushed at it and it gave way,” Rion said. “Since my mother was still busy I decided to do a bit of exploring. I have never been to a crypt before and I felt that this was my chance to gather more knowledge about the Magi.”

  The Magus didn’t seem convinced at the naïve excuse, but he nevertheless ushered them to an adjoining corridor. “Let us return back to t
he surface. I must seal this place again.”

  Later that night, Zeren stood in a small room with Lasli, an old acquaintance who kept a shanty near the edge of the city’s runoff. Lasli’s teenaged son came into the room, placed a pot with some brackish water on a nearby table before departing again. The water was filthy and it regularly made people sick, but it was all they could afford. Zeren looked out past the window and at the row of shacks beyond. This was where the sewers finally emptied, for it stood past the slave pits, and there was a small lake of liquid scum that served as a public resource to be scraped up and sold as fertilizer, completing the economic cycle of Lethe.

  Lasli was a harlot, though she tended to operate near the sewers where she was usually hired by the slavers to keep their thralls happy. She had been beautiful once, but age had faded her looks away and she still needed the money in order to feed her children. The small shack she lived in stood alongside the massive drainage, and she along with everybody else ultimately got used to living with the miasma that was all around them.

  “The Magi have released Ylira’s body,” Lasli said softly. “They threw it back into the sewer, and it floated down past the slave pits. It was claimed by a fertilizer merchant who found it first.”

  Zeren looked away and clenched his fists in rage. A part of him wanted to cry, but he had been so hardened over the years, he could no longer express his sorrow with tears. Ylira was the only one who meant anything to him. Now she was gone, and all the coin he could have made with the guns no longer mattered. His dreams of living in luxury with a brothel full of whores, of not having a care in the world, were finished. He had one task to do in order to fulfill his promise to the boy, yet he still needed allies. If the nobles, the Magi and the freemen were all against him, then there was only one other recourse.

  “It may yet be possible that her body was not yet cut up,” Lasli said. “I could give you the name of the merchant and where he resides.”

  Zeren shook his head. “There is no reason to take revenge on him. The merchant was not the one who killed her. The Magi did that. Let him have her body, for she told me once that it would not matter after her death came to pass.”

  Lasli nodded. She had known Zeren in her younger days, when he was still a boy. He was always brimming with confidence, but today he looked lost. “I understand. What will you do now?”

  Zeren twisted his head. There was a raging fire in his eyes. “Can you find someone for me?”

  “Who?”

  “Bawk,” Zeren said.

  Lasli’s eyes narrowed. Bawk was the mysterious leader of the League of the Sewer. The league was composed of escaped thralls who hid in the vast underground gutters of the city, and they had sworn to free all the slaves and kill the masters. Both the Watchers and the Magi would form expeditions to hunt them mercilessly from time to time. The League was rumored to have been the instigators of the last slave revolt that had occurred long before they were born. Any slave with connections to the League was subjected to a death sentence, so their existence was never uttered in public.

  The old harlot crossed her arms over her sagging body. “I may have heard of his whereabouts, but they are only rumors and such. Why would you ever want to deal with them?”

  “Because I have something that will be of great use to them,” Zeren said. “A cache of strange weapons that shall make them invincible—they can finally overthrow the scum that rules this city. Soon enough their corpses will be floating in the sewers, and Ylira will know I that have avenged her.”

  Chapter 14

  The moment they had made it past the main drainpipe and into the succeeding conduit, Lasli’s son turned around and headed back out towards the light, leaving Zeren by himself. Switching the burning torch over to his left hand, Zeren kept the cavernous tunnel illuminated while keeping his primary arm ready for any eventuality. The stench was terrible, and he wished he could have kept the gas mask that he had taken from the temple of Vis- to filter out the fumes over here instead of having torn it up for use as a bandage.

  There were shadows all around him, and Zeren could sense that he was being observed. The occasional squeaks coming from the darkness indicated that a nest of rets was somewhere close by, but he could detect no signs of movement in his field of vision. Mounds of sediment and garbage all around him only increased the chances for an ambush. Close to an hour had passed and Zeren had thought about sitting down to ease his tired legs, but everything around him was covered in filth.

  A nearby voice made him instantly alert. “What is the matter, Grimgrin? Do you not like your new abode?”

  Zeren kept his wide stance, while his right hand instinctively fell onto the hilt of his sheathed broadsword. “I am tired of these games. If you wish to talk, then let us do so face to face, like how real men should.”

  Within minutes, distant torchlights revealed themselves as a number of men and women came out from nearby passageways that honeycombed the cavernous main conduit. Zeren sensed someone behind him and turned around. There was an emaciated, filthy man dressed in rags and fiddling with a bone dagger standing less than a few feet from where his back was formerly turned. Zeren scowled at him as the man moved back to a less threatening range and gave him a gap toothed grin. There must have been at least two dozen of them, and they all converged until they stood less than twenty paces away. Zeren noticed that they were armed with all sorts of assorted weapons, though only one or two had any metal blades, and the few that they carried showed signs of the rust. All wore rags of torn leather and matted fur, and almost everyone was malnourished.

  “You wanted to meet me? Talk then,” Bawk said. He was a barrel-chested man of medium height and dark, curly hair. A rusted, leafy-bladed short sword hung loosely on a leather belt by his thick waist.

  Zeren bowed slightly. “A fair day to you, Bawk. I am looking for allies, and I felt that your league could be … trusted.”

  Bawk let out a short laugh. “You think we are naïve just because we reside down here, Grimgrin? Let me tell you something.” He pointed at holes in the arched stone ceiling above him. “Anytime someone tells someone else on the streets above, there is an open gutter next to them. The sound of their whispers makes it down through the drains and past the scurrying rets until it reaches below, to the refuse. Everything that is said is heard, including one’s innermost secrets. We know for a fact that everyone above is hunting you. They say that you have killed many a whore, and many a man. They say you murdered the Grand Magus and got away. They say that anyone who turns your head into the City Watch will receive enough coin to make themselves nobles, and that giving your head to the Magi will make them rich enough to start their own great house.”

  Zeren grinned. “As you can see my reputation precedes me. Most of it is true, by the way. I have killed many a man, but never an innocent. Even rogues such as myself still follow a code of honor. You of all people ought to know that.”

  “You sought us out, and it is through sheer desperation that you have,” Bawk said. “Even down here we know that the walls of the city are closing in all around you, Grimgrin. You are a desperate man, and we do not seek to sacrifice our lives to whatever desperate cause it is that you have. You have been a thorn on the side of the nobles and the Magi, and that is the only reason why we have not harmed you. There has been no tale of you ever killing or robbing a slave, but you have stolen and killed from just about everyone else. We are all former slaves here, and we do not seek your destruction, but neither do we plan on helping you.”

  “Yet you decided to meet me anyway,” Zeren said. “For that only tells me one thing. You are all just as desperate as I am. The last slave revolt happened long before either of us were born, and you know how it ended. That is why you and your lot have continued to live like rets down here. You may have been able to kill the occasional Watcher or perhaps even a foolish Magus that has strayed too far down below, but in the end it does not really matter. The ones above continue to hold the power and there is nothing
you could do about it, that is … until today.”

  Bawk scowled at him. “Might this have something to do with a shipment of wagons that you robbed a few moons ago?”

  Zeren nodded. “Yes. Do you know what a gun is?”

  Bawk shook his head. The others who were with him exchanged confused glances.

  “It is a weapon- similar to a bow,” Zeren said. “Instead of loosing a flight of arrows, it fires a metal ball from a cylinder. The speed of this pebble is so great, the naked eye will not notice it. It does not take much skill to use either.”

  “So that is what the cargo the Magi were escorting then,” Bawk said. “Why are you giving away its secret?”

  “Because I want to hand it over to your league,” Zeren said. “I counted around two hundred of those weapons, along with the metal balls and the powder that is needed to make them work.”

  “So you wish to arm the league, then? If those weapons are truly what you describe, then the balance of power may very well shift,” Bawk said. “But I sense that you will want something in return.”

  “There is,” Zeren said. “I am looking for a woman. She is a battler called the Red Gorgon.”

  Bawk nodded. “We have heard of her. She is about to pit her skills against the grand champion of the Great Games for his title. Yet we have also heard that House Xorot will make sure she does not win.”

  “I need her alive, and I need her freed,” Zeren said. “I could attempt the task myself, but I know of no one in the Central Arena who could help.”

  “We have both eyes and ears there, for many slaves are required to make the games run smoothly,” Bawk said. “The problem is that all eyes will be upon her, and we may have to wait until she finishes her match before we can enact an escape for her.”

  “She may not be alive by the time the final match has ended,” Zeren said.

  “Heed my words, what you are asking will mean the torture and death of many fellow thralls,” Bawk said. “It will be a great sacrifice of blood for my brothers and sisters, for every slave considers themselves as part of us.”