by Mark Johnson
First published 2017 by Cloud Ink Press
www.cloudink.co.nz
Copyright © Mark Johnson 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This novel is a work of fiction.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or digital, including photocopying, recording, storage in any information retrieval system, or otherwise, without prior permission from the publisher.
Art direction by Greg Simpson
Cover design by Greg Simpson and Patrick McDonald
Cover illustration and maps by Patrick McDonald
Text design and typesetting by Greg Simpson
Printed by Ligare Ltd, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand
ISBN 978-0-473-41204-3
Mark Johnson was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1977. He lives there still, with his wife and two children. He has worked as a high school teacher and as an independent publisher.
This book is dedicated to Aman
Maps
Timeline
Year of our Lords Polis
0 — Founders’ War begins
4939 — Fall of Ceneph
4950 — Mother Farrah arrives in Polis Sumad
4958 — The Tower is completed
5002 — Mother Farrah dies
5065 — Harient and Toreng arrive in Polis Sumad
5074 — Harient becomes TowerMiss
5094 — Sarra arrives at HopeWall
5101 — The Immersion Chamber is found in Polis Armer
5101 — Four renegades arrive in Polis Sumad from Polis Armer
Prologue
“This is not a mine, sir,” said Sergeant Tummil.
Damulen Reeben followed Tummil’s gaze to the stone lookout tower, barely visible in the cloud-shrouded moonlight. Almost hidden in the small valley, the building had cross-barred windows and basic, external outhouses. Its small windmill had rusting blades and its copper wires hung loose. Possibly those wires had recently fallen from their connection to an internal battery, or they may never have been attached.
Two shrill beeps sounded from Reeben’s scanner. “Says it’s clear,” he said, fumbling the metal mechanism back into the leather pouch on his belt.
Tummil licked his lips. “Currency counterfeiters?”
“Probably,” said Reeben. He beckoned to his waiting corpsmen, standing silently. “Though it could be electricity hoarders, or suppression energy addicts. We’ll have a look and get home before —”
“We’ve company,” Tummil interrupted.
Over two hundred feet away, figures emerged from behind a hill. A metallic clanking reached Reeben’s ears and he swore. “Tell me my eyesight has failed, Tummil, and that’s not plate armor they’re wearing.”
“It is! They’re Seekers all right, Sir. So, the site’s contaminated.” Tummil counted quietly. “Twenty. A Head’s Complement.”
A Seeker Head’s Complement meant serious chaos infection: there’d be rampant chaos energy nearby. The Center would have notified the Seekers that they had detected it, at the same time they’d notified the Investigators’ office of excess electricity pulses.
Tummil and the rest of the squad turned to survey the valley. All eyes checked the green hills and the stone tower. At least there were Seekers to help if any cadvers had scented the chaos energy.
“There’s little history of cadvers or chaos surges out this way, Tummil.”
“Could be a dark shrine, Sir. Enemy worshippers.”
Reeben bit his lower lip. “We’d better not stay long, Sergeant. If the Seekers reckon there’s enough chaos energy floating about, we’ll leave them to it. Remember, watch out for anyone fighting over stupid things.”
Tummil swallowed.
He slapped Tummil on the back. “Relax, boy. Poltergeists can’t follow us out of a chaos zone. Nightmares are the worst that can happen once we’re out. But we’ll go through decontamination when we get back to the station, so don’t fret.”
Tummil’s jaw flexed and he shook his shoulders.
The Seekers stopped far enough from Reeben’s team for both parties to ignore one another. The Seeker Head and her deputy, a Missionary, approached. When she removed her helmet, Reeben recognized the Head from other investigations, though he’d never spoken to her.
“Evening, Head. You had a safe walk out?”
“Terese Saarg, Armer Stone Chapterhouse.” Saarg extended a hand perfunctorily. “We were not bothered, Examiner.” The woman was the youngest Reeben had ever seen in command of a Head’s Complement. Perhaps thirty years, with a slender fitting of dull, metallic plate. Her brown ponytail brushed her neck.
“Damulen Reeben, Jurat Quarter,” he said, shaking her hand and nodding toward the entryway. “We were told this was a likely electricity hoarding operation. We came expecting to make some arrests, though they’ve scampered.” He patted the scanner at his belt. “But if you’re here, there’s more?”
“The Center hologrammed us after you. Said they’d detected more than electricity.” She looked past him, to the lookout tower.
A lookout tower, at a mine, in Polis Armer’s rural farmlands, was suspicious, for no other reason than that it didn’t need one. The doors were thick enough to keep out the most crazed cadver. And this mine’s doors were thick, he knew, for the battered wooden front door lay in the mud a short way off, its internal side facing the sky, its hinges shattered.
“Is the site secure?” Saarg said.
“We scanned. It’s clear.” He pointed at the broken doorway, with dents and splinters on its internal side. Whoever made that damage had been trying to get out, not in.
Saarg looked back at him. “Did you check the land register files?”
Of course I did, girl.
“Yes. The land was commissioned for iron channeling four years ago. We cross-referenced, and discovered a fake mining company with perfect paperwork. The square footage they claimed was too small to require regular inspections.”
“So, whoever it was, they wanted isolation,” she said, her gaze fixed on the entrance.
A memory surfaced. “Farmers have been telling stories about this area,” he said. “Howling ghosts.”
She didn’t seem to have heard him. “What strikes you as odd about this place, Examiner?”
“No mine needs a lookout tower.”
Saarg spread her arms wide. “The trees have moved away. It’s an even circle, at least five hundred feet to the nearest trees from here, with this mine at the center.”
The old rule: the natural couldn’t abide the unnatural. This was why Inspectors and Seekers often investigated the same cases: one side dealt with visible, mundane humans, the other looked for intangibles and energies. And occasionally the monsters that fed upon chaos energy.
“Then how did the Center miss the chaos energy until now?” Reeben said. “This place has been here for years.”
Saarg looked to the dark doorway. “Well, I believe you have jurisdiction, for the moment, Examiner.”
Very well, then.
“Have the troupe check inside, Sergeant,” Reeben said to Tummil. “Let me know the instant we need Seekers.”
Their truncheons at the ready, the eight corpsmen followed Tummil into the shack.
“Examiner! We’ll need those Seekers!” came his muffled shout moments later.
Saarg ordered her troops into the shack. Reeben and Saarg entered behind them.
Illuminated by
the glowbulbs that the Investigators were sticking onto the walls, the shack’s inside was as shabby as its outside. Stale bread crusts were scattered over dust-coated bench tops, in cold, empty rooms. Dirty clothes and battered paperback novels lay discarded atop musty furniture. Then they came to the kitchen. A battered black hole was all that remained of a camouflaged trapdoor in the floor.
This mine hadn’t been used to attract raw iron to the surface, as legal mines did. Whatever madmen had built this mine, they had actually dug into the earth.
Reeben’s face had lost all expression. “Should we send for back up?” he asked.
“I’m not certain we have time, Examiner. If the Center only learned of this place tonight, perhaps Polis did, too.”
Their eyes met, Reeben’s fear, and probably Saarg’s, remaining unspoken.
“Masks on!” Reeben shouted. Saarg gave a similar command.
Saarg’s face disappeared beneath metal and dark glass, and she attached the mask’s ventilation tubes to her backpack. For the first time in months, Reeben took out his own lenses and vent.
He removed his scanner for the second time that night, and dropped it, counting as it clanked twenty-nine times on metal steps. So perhaps thirty feet down. They waited two minutes for a high-pitched beep. “No heat,” he said. A second, different beep. “No movement. Might be abandoned. So probably no cadvers. And since we’re going underground…” He gritted his teeth behind the vent. “… you have jurisdiction, Head.”
Saarg nodded. Her complement took the stairs, their clanking steps and the hum of their shockpoles the only sounds.
Reeben and Saarg descended, his Inspectors following. The cylindrical, vertical tunnel was tight. It made him want to breathe faster. He’d expected a rope ladder, not spiral steps. As usual, his hip twinged when he stepped heavily on his right leg. Almost forty years ago, on his third raid ever, a thug with a wooden bat had gotten lucky. Once.
“The stairs are metal, Head.” Reeben’s voice echoed, the vent making his voice sound metallic and harsh. The recycled air tasted stale.
Saarg’s voice was pensive. “And deep. How do you think they did it?”
“Not with spades. And what made these dents?” He almost lost his balance on deep grooves within the stairs, and steadied himself, one hand against the smooth wall of the stairwell. If something waited down here, just above Swallowing depth, he wouldn’t be able to climb those stairs fast enough. He’d have to let younger and faster Seekers and Investigators go ahead of him.
“Teeber?” Saarg said to her deputy when they emerged at the stair base.
The Missionary was taller than Saarg. She shrugged. “We haven’t gotten all the way in for a good look yet, Head. Looks like an office complex, not a hoarder’s den. Too tidy.”
Through his lenses, Reeben’s gloves were rendered in shades of gray, as he stroked the smooth walls. These walls. It was as if they had been somehow baked into shape instead of excavated. And there were no reinforcing wood or steel buttresses in sight. He’d never heard of such construction techniques.
A shout from the Seekers ahead declared the area safe. Moments later, an anxious male voice called for Saarg. Reeben followed her down the curved corridor, past small bedchambers and lounges.
Reeben noticed something. “There’s nothing on the walls, Saarg. No calendars, pornography, or even cork boards. Nothing to hint who these people were.” Or what interested them, which was unusual. Criminals always left something in a hideout to hint at their vices. The absence suggested a sense of order, or discipline, greater than the criminals he was used to. He had the distinct sense the hideout bespoke a military discipline, more than some particularly austere thieves or smugglers’ collective. There was no proof of that, just a feeling he couldn’t pin down.
A group of Seekers gathered and whispered at the end of the corridor, crouching over an object, like tracker dogs taking a scent. A trail of dark, dried drops led to a severed arm in a shirt sleeve. Reeben didn’t see Saarg draw her shockpole, but he recognized its quiet hum, and the thrill of its vibrations lifted the hairs on his neck.
“They’ll be long gone, Saarg.” He bent over to inspect the arm. “The wound isn’t fresh.”
“Ah, Head? Examiner?” said another Seeker, pointing through the door.
Reeben looked inside. “Gods,” he swore, stepping back from the door and suddenly glad of the monotone limits of his lenses, and the staleness of his vent.
Seekers upped the charge on their poles, the humming now like a swarm of angry wasps. Tummil muttered an oath.
Once, the parts would have made ten or so bodies. It was hard to be certain. There was no order to how the limbs and torsos had been splayed about the chamber. Some of this must have been done with blades, while some were torn or ripped open. Hands, arms, and heads lay amidst dark, dried blood. It painted the ceiling, walls, and floor.
“Oh my God,” Reeben gasped, not caring who heard.
Forty years. Forty years and he’d never seen anything like this.
In the center of the room was a large, empty metal box, with pipes plugged into its base. The box’s rectangular front cover had fallen open. “That would have been the electricity generator to make this place run,” he said, his voice higher than usual. “But the box is larger than a generator should be. And where did it go?”
Forty years specializing in medicine and mechanics, and he’d never seen a generator container that size.
“Flies,” Saarg snapped.
“What?”
She indicated a nearby leg. “Where are the flies?”
Reeben stared at an arm, which lay beside the box. Likely a man’s. “It’s been decomposing over two weeks.”
“Complement, search this room,” Saarg called. “Then check each room is clear before moving further. Touch nothing!”
Missionary Teeber echoed Saarg’s orders. The Seekers complied, still whispering to one another.
Saarg joined Reeben, who’d come to stand over a mangled male torso. He didn’t know what to do, and just stared at it, waiting for his brain to clear. She bent and pushed the torso over.
“Saarg! It’s a crime scene. Leave…” He stopped. “Burned Gods!” he swore. The lower half of the body had been torn away, but enough remained for him to recognize the large tattoo on the torso’s back: the image of a ruby flame encased in a blue cage.
“They’re Seekers?”
Saarg neither moved nor spoke.
“Saarg?”
“This… These… They went deep undercover. A month ago,” she said in a monotone.
Reeben watched her. Something was… off in her behavior. Of course she was upset; he’d be surprised if she wasn’t. But there was something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Was it her posture? Her voice?
“I’m sorry, Saarg. Your colleagues. Looks like they found a Madman’s Bridge.”
There was an old ghost story called The Madman’s Bridge. Children were told that, sometimes, if they waited at a crossroads at midnight, a portal to Hell might open. Few survived contact with that portal. But if they kept their body — alive or dead — on the earthly side of that portal, their soul remained their own. Those who crossed the portal willingly lost their sanity and their soul.
“Time to get more people down here, Saarg. And what would an undercover mission have —”
The earth trembled. Not hard, nor loudly, though the shake felt resolute and determined, somehow.
Oh Gods, no.
Saarg turned from her fallen colleague, and stood quickly. “It’s going to be Swallowed, Reeben. Polis won’t leave somewhere this large underground for long. We adopt Swallowing protocol?”
“I concur.” So much for procedure. There was no rule of law when a Swallowing began. No matter how well-trained or experienced the servant of law, few professionals operated perfectly as the ground shook l
onger and harder each time.
“How long do we have?” he asked her.
“An hour. Perhaps two. I have a warning siren, don’t worry.”
Reeben took a deep breath. They didn’t even have time to call in weavers to analyze any chaos weaves. He’d ask about the undercover mission later.
They moved to the empty metal box.
“Look.” He indicated an imprint on the box’s side. “A hexagon sigil. That’s Polis Sumad. I’m guessing this box, and its contents, came from there. And these fittings on the base? They’re for power transmission. This box must’ve housed a generator.” He’d seen his share of illegal generators. “That’s odd. These fittings mean electricity was flowing in and out…” He looked up at Saarg, assuming she didn’t understand what was important about that. “Generators don’t take power, they produce it.”
She was silent and motionless a moment. “So where did the generator go?”
He touched the fittings. “If it was a generator. Saarg, what energies do you and yours feel down here? You haven’t mentioned any of the chaos energy the Center alerted you to.”
Saarg still hadn’t moved. “We can’t sense any, Reeben. We are somewhat confused.” Her voice was calm, her words precise: as though she didn’t want him reading her state of mind.
Chaos energy was the power of evil. Of dark shrines and cadvers. Seekers underwent genetic alteration to detect that evil, so it could be eradicated. Whatever had painted these walls with Seeker entrails could only have been evil, but Saarg’s troops couldn’t sense any chaos remnants at all. Which, as far as he knew, was unheard of.
This subterranean hideout, and whatever had happened here, was above his pay grade and beyond his experience. All he could do was ask obvious questions.
“If there’s no chaos energy,” he said, “why is Polis coming to Swallow so fast?”
“I don’t know. Maybe He’s surprised this place existed.”
“Head!” came another Seeker’s voice.
Gods, what now?
Reeben followed Saarg further into the structure, stillness punctuated by footsteps and their deep, amplified breathing. After passing offices, lounges, sleeping chambers, and a kitchen, an Assistant Seeker indicated a door. Reeben pushed it open and drew back his hand in shock.