by Ren Cummins
“Get out of my way, cretin!” she yelled, swinging her hand towards his head. Surprisingly, however, the cleric’s reflexes were surprisingly swift and he caught her by the wrist. She stared intently into the eyeholes, only now making out the fine crack barely visible across the repaired mask. Inside the apertures, she saw a familiar pair of light blue eyes.
“Afraid not, lover,” he said, twisting her wrist to lock her arm painfully straight. In one fluid motion, he spun around, using the momentum to toss her helplessly from the skyway and over the city below. She fell, screaming, only to vanish into a distant spot of scarlet upon the street far below.
The cleric pulled up his ill-fitting mask to see if she might have somehow survived the fall, but eventually seemed content.
“And now,” Favo said, replacing the mask, “I believe it is time I made my departure.”
With one white-gloved hand, he held up a ring of keys he’d managed to pull from her belt while he’d thrown her over the side. His eyes, shadowed behind the pilfered mask, seemed to weigh the difficult decision he saw before him: the response time of the Queen’s guard would likely be fairly swift, once the street enforcers reported the body to them. Remain, or depart?
He did a quick calculation in his mind – he’d probably have ten or fifteen minutes to go exploring before he needed to be mingling safely in the city and hope to make it back to the secret tunnels he’d been using to get past the Wall the past few years since he’d come across it. Ten minutes in the right places could be much more than sufficient. Safety? Or the possibility of treasures unimagined?
He sighed. Curiosity, as always, won out.
“I owe it to her to examine the sort of valuables of which a highly-respected agent of the Queen might be in possession. It would be a decided shame to let all those acquired goods go to waste or fall into the wrong hands.”
As faint calls of alarm made their gradual way up the walls below, he meandered deeper into the tower, a gentle song whistling past his lips.
The City of the Dead
Chronicles of Aesirium: Book Three
Chapter 1: Legion
The young girl paused at the edge of the intersection beneath a scarcely-sheltering communications pole, a sigh drifting from her lips; it fluttered out like some fragile creature, only to be lost in the crashing torrents of the evening downpour. Her pale skin stood out in stark contrast of the darkness, reflecting a touch of the wan glow from the sodium lamps that infrequently dotted the streets. Combined with her exhaustion and the drops of rain on her skin, the yellow tint from the lamps made her appear jaundiced and ill, but she was too tired to care.
The cables that ran from junction box to junction box provided the barest degree of protection from the rain, but also seemed to gather it into larger, heavier drops. She had her parasol, but there was just enough of a breeze coming between the tall buildings of the lower west neighborhood that the front of her dress was heavy with rainfall; the bottom hem sagged with the added weight, causing it to pick up some of the grime from the walkways.
Tilting the parasol back slightly, her wearied eyes peered briefly up towards the sky. Too many clouds, she thought, frowning. Can’t even see either of the moons tonight – at least that would have offered a bit of sparkle to disperse the shadows. Lately, it had begun to rain randomly throughout the day, even when no clouds were in the sky – that was strange enough, but the thick cloud cover added a sense of despair to the precipitation.
She adjusted the scarf on her head, pulled back a few loose strands of brown hair, and shifted away from a particularly loud stream of watery runoff spilling from the junction box above her head. Each time she passed below one of these evenly-spaced metal structures, the drops made it sound like her umbrella was being pelted by small rocks. A quick moment of math told her she was only a few blocks from her building, but the streets were empty. There’d been a failure on the conveyor for her segment of the line, and it had forced her to stay an extra hour on her shift. She wouldn’t mind the extra money at the end of her week, but it meant she’d had to ride almost completely vacant train, and now had to walk home by herself. The swing shift was decidedly the least tolerable – even with the magnetic trains running every quarter hour, they couldn’t go everywhere, and the dimly lit streets cast a pale yellow glow only as far as the precipitation allowed them. Tonight, that wasn’t very far at all.
She shivered in the cold. Walking home alone shouldn’t be a concern; she was one of the strongest girls on the line. However, the rain felt particularly cold tonight. Something in her bones gnawed at her; some trigger for anxiety that wasn’t explained by just the rain or the empty streets.
Structure and order meant everything in the elegant and efficiently-managed city of Aesirium, from its recycled-energy transit system to the staggered labor schedule. The one thing it could not control, its citizens half-joked about, was the weather. Tonight, the rain was falling, nearly straight down upon the last remnants of the swing shift as they headed to their apartments after their daily ten hours.
Readjusting the parasol over her shoulder, she looked both directions on the street – a superfluous action driven by years of ingrained habit – and crossed to the other corner.
On this block, the lights were out along her side of the street, casting large gaping shadows across her path. Her eyes scanned the buildings – lights were out in the buildings as well, but this wasn’t too unusual. Most of the city was asleep while she and her crew worked in one of the energy plants, and extraneous lights were kept off to conserve energy. Still, it had the effect of being a bit extra anxiety-inducing. She pulled her thin rain jacket tightly about her and began walking more briskly.
At the halfway mark of the street, the rain suddenly stopped, her feet shuffling on nearly dry cement. She looked up, having forgotten about the skyway that connected these two buildings more than thirty stories up. Shaking her head at her nerves, she found herself laughing softly. After more than a year working on the night shift, she would’ve thought she’d be more comfortable with the darkness by now. But something just felt…not right.
Her breath caught in her throat when she realized that although she’d stopped laughing, she could still hear it. Unlike her laughter, light and delicate, this was deep and guttural; it sounded more like someone coughing than laughing.
She spun about, seeking the source of the sound, but though her eyes had mostly adjusted to the deep shadow, she could see no one. Additionally, no matter which way she turned, the laughter – distant though it may be – seemed to be coming equally in all directions.
The blood all but drained from her face when the pieces fell together and she looked straight up. And that was when it attacked.
Her scream tore through the rain, the sounds of distant machinery and the inevitable hiss of the steamways. The sound bounced from building to building, eventually filtering into the general hum of the city and dissolved into the core static to which all the citizens of Aesirium had become immune.
All the citizens, that is, but its most recent.
* * * * *
“Stop moving around, Mully,” she hissed. “It’s no fun here outside the pack, either.”
His muffled retort was almost indecipherable, and Rom chose to ignore it. She sat on top of the maglev train, holding her parasol out before her to try and shield herself from the rain. Aside from the occasional exposure to the elements, she enjoyed this means of travel across the large cityscape the most. It gave her the air and the speed that she enjoyed so much, without the risk of jumping too far and smashing into the ground or another building. According to Mulligan, it also gave her the defense against being seen leaping from rooftop to rooftop at distances far greater than would be possible by the normal people who lived here. Back in Oldtown-Against-the-Wall, they had already mostly accepted her as a Sheharid Is’iin, and, as far as she could tell before she left, they thought of her that way and not as the white-haired orphan that spoke to animals. To them she had
become known as a ‘Reaper’; a sort of godlike being with responsibilities over the souls of the dead, according to the traditions, but in a favorable manner. It hadn’t been too long ago that the title bore a certain degree of animosity and fear – by the time Rom had left, they were talking about throwing her a parade and making a statue of her.
She smiled to herself and instantly regretted it for the bitter taste of rainwater that made its way into her mouth.
On this side of the Wall, however, it was not so simple.
Another round of squirming in her knapsack distracted her. Keeping the parasol in front of her, she slid the pack around her to rest in her lap. She unfastened the flap and peered in at a decidedly annoyed Mulligan. His horns had grown in well atop his head, curling around until the tips pointed down past his grey-furred jaw. Golden eyes glared at her from the darkened confines of the pack.
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about, I’m the one getting soaked,” she said above the noise of the wind and high-velocity rain.
“My wings are getting all crinkled, Rom,” he grumbled. He shifted his weight a bit, trying to clear more space between his back and the confining cloth of her backpack. “Plus, I’m starving! It wouldn’t have been too great a trouble to have at least included something to eat, would it?”
“I think you’re already taking up enough space in there,” she teased him, mostly ignoring his glare. “Sorry, Mully. We’ll get you something just as soon as we’re home, though, I promise.”
“We just left,” he pointed out.
“You were the one in the hurry,” she reminded him. “Now stop fussing, this train isn’t easy to balance on.” Closing the flap back up, she carefully rotated it behind her, slipping her free arm back into the strap. Her black dress was nearly soaked, but her oversized black boots were still holding their own. She needed new laces again, she noticed. They had already been decently worn out when she had first gotten them, but she hadn’t put them through serious wear since she’d come over the Wall. No monsters in here to fight – and there hadn’t been any outside the Wall before she’d left, not after the attempted invasion instigated by the Queen herself.
All in all, she’d had very little to do as a Reaper for the past two years. She wondered how Ian had managed the long years he’d been alive. Or Memory. Or any of them. She hadn’t gone into the Spirit World to speak to them in months. She didn’t know what she wanted to say to them. Besides, it still wasn’t entirely safe for her, there.
The scarf across her hair and forehead was still tight; she took a moment to double check it. She’d let her hair – visible as a long ponytail out the back of the scarf – return to its natural shade: the otherwise more unnatural pure white color with which she had been born. She had let the dyed brown color eventually wash and grow out. Trying to find someone to dye her hair here in the city meant risking her secret to people she wasn’t certain she could trust. And the only people she could trust she hadn’t seen since leaping here from over the Wall. Many of the laborers wore hats or scarves to keep the inevitable grime from their hair, so Rom dutifully kept her distinctly stark-white hair generally tucked up and out of sight. At any rate, white hair – even for a fourteen year old girl – was, though rare, not quite so difficult to explain as the purple gems embedded in her forehead. The traditionally recognized hallmark of a Sheharid Is’iin (meaning, according to Mulligan, Spirit Harvesters) the two spirit gems cast a faint and continuous glow, as they would until her death. They began to appear at the outset of their life as a Reaper, and were the focus of their association with the world beyond. If she meant to go on living beneath the Queen’s notice, she’d have to keep them as much a secret as possible.
The rain was falling much harder now, making the distant Wall nearly invisible in the darkness of the horizon. Just beyond it lay Oldtown-Against-the-Wall, she knew, and beyond that were their expansive agricultural fields. Even further were the wilds and the mountains, and past that no one she knew had ever been. As far as she could tell, she was the only person from Oldtown to have successfully made it past the Wall in more than a hundred years. For the residents of Oldtown, the Wall was a reminder of their exiled status in Aesirium, a city which had passed judgment upon their ancestors and condemned them to a potentially unending sentence of life beyond the Wall.
Rom’s eyes went from the impermeable shadows through the rain to the glittering spires of the Royal Castle. It was the only landmark within the city to remain in perpetual daylight; an artificial benefit accorded the High Exalted First Daughter of Unending Sun, or whatever she’d commanded the citizens of Aesirium to call her this week. Shaking her head with a faint chuckle, Rom wondered why she was forced to live in fear of such a woman; at least, under the pretense to which most people were otherwise unsuspecting. Rom, however, knew better. The Queen was not simply a woman of royal blood who sought to destroy Rom. And she’d been willing to try and destroy an entire town of innocents in order to do it. But her fear was not so inexplicable - she suspected the Queen to be working with Artifice, a Sheharid Is’iin who had turned from their ordained duties and had taken the lives of her predecessors, either directly or indirectly, as in the case of Rom’s former mentor, Ian. And if the two weren’t working together, the Queen certainly knew enough about Artifice to be a good place for Rom to start her investigation.
Even though it had been two years since his death, thoughts of Ian still caused her to fall into a touch of melancholy. He’d had his own spirit gem torn from him by Artifice years before, but had managed to survive as a mortal for a good deal of time until after he had found Rom. She sighed, biting her lower lip. She didn’t want to be sad tonight, she decided. In spite of the rain and the cold, she was determined to do her patrol of the city and get back to a warm bath and a soft bed, and do so without anything weighing on her heart.
She wasn’t sure anymore why Mulligan insisted on these regular trips through the city at night. There’d been no sign of anything ‘poised on the edge between life and death’, or any sort of undead or twisted creatures here at all. It was all too ordered, too structured, too…
As if her thoughts had summoned it, she felt it – a faint stain upon the general blanket of life that covered the highly-populated city. Her head jerked to the left as the train sped through the lower west side of the city. Getting to her feet, she closed the parasol and leaped off into the darkness, in the direction of a sudden pang of unnaturalness she could sense.
Inside her pack, Mulligan held tightly to the cloth. He could feel it too. And yet…something about this felt different. This was not to be a simple creature they would face. This would be something much different… and, he suspected, far worse.
* * * * *
The rain affected her leaps – while she could normally cover several blocks in each jump, the rain was more difficult to jump through than open air, and the rooftops were slick. She even managed to fall from one rooftop, but the same powers which gave her legs such power to move so far and so fast also helped her absorb the impact from the fall and leap ahead again.
She came to a stop on one of the sky bridges – broad, sheltered walkways built at regular intervals and at alternating heights between most of the tall buildings. Rom knew she was close to whatever it was, but it was hard to track; elusive and ethereal, it felt like trying to catch a handful of mist. Below her, she saw a young girl walking alone beneath a battered umbrella. Given a different set of circumstances, Rom realized that this could have been her life. Just a girl, a family, maybe a job; certainly none of the strangeness that now accompanied her. For a fraction of a moment, she envied the girl, and the lack of complications, the simplicity. She could grow up, fall in love, marry, have children, and watch them grow up and continue the unending cycle.
The girl below her spun suddenly and screamed, tearing Rom free of her mental wanderings. As Rom dropped to the street below, she could see the girl struggling with another person. She couldn’t get a good look at him in the s
hadows, but something in the way he moved made him seem more like an animal than a man.
The girl screamed again at Rom’s abrupt arrival, and the person holding her threw her aside roughly.
“It’s okay,” Rom told the girl. “Just stay right there and don’t make a sound; I’ll take care of him.” She took a pair of crossover steps to try and draw the attacker’s attention away from the other girl, presenting herself to him as more of a threat.
As she’d hoped, he turned his back to the girl he’d thrown to the ground and faced Rom, crouching low and defensively.
Rom remained standing straight, trying to present the more obvious target. She kept her knees bent only slightly, listening and watching for any indications of his intentions. After a few tense moments of hearing only the rain and the ragged breathing of her enemy, her opponent finally leapt at her. Rom swung the parasol – mentally chiding herself for not having changed it to something more immediately offensive – but her opponent dodged it nimbly by ducking low beneath it.
“Well, I should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy,” she joked, “but you are – whoa – not too slow.” She jumped over him as he lunged for her feet, letting her momentum carry her in a simple arc, landing on the walkway between the man and the girl.
The parasol, in accordance with her simple mental command, began to shift its shape, extending and curving in a moment to resemble a long staff. Both ends twisted in opposite directions, the top curling into a broad crescent, and the bottom in a smaller, twisting resolution only vaguely resembling the letter “z”.
“Okay, let’s try that again,” she said, but her words trailed off as she got her first good look at her attacker in the flickering lights from across the street.