Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1)

by Brian Niemeier

  The massive iron-paneled gate was locked, but the mechanism was old and crude. Teg noted the large square panel that framed the keyhole. The black metal bore a stylized relief depicting a full moon glowering down on a secluded glade. The huge wolf standing in the middle was the clearing's most obvious occupant, but Teg soon picked out two more figures: a bat hanging from a gnarled bough and a rat peering from the bole of a willow. The creatures’ dead iron eyes seemed to stare at him no matter how he turned his head. As soon as the lock was sprung, Teg threw open the door and rushed inside.

  Teg found himself in a large round room where the air was still and cool. He breathed a heavy sigh and inspected his surroundings.

  The tower’s first floor struck him as unremarkable. Brass lanterns dangled from chains, shedding mellow light. The inner walls were of the same bluff sandstone as the exterior, and sunbaked brick lined the floor. Besides the iron-jacketed main door and an archway giving on a staircase, the room's only other feature was a wide circular fountain in its exact center.

  Teg scanned the cobbles at his feet for pressure traps as he approached the earthwork basin. Leaning against its raised lip, he peered into the shallow, fresh-smelling water.

  This can’t be what it looks like, he thought.

  Not until cool wetness kissed the tip of his nose did Teg realize that he’d drawn so close to the pool. By then he knew that he'd stumbled upon the richest wishing well in existence. Countless gold coins gleamed in the hanging lanterns’ light, resting under mere inches of water. There weren't just coins, but golden rings, chains, and pendants as well.

  Moved by a sudden greed that seemed to arise from beyond himself, Teg plunged his hand into the fountain and withdrew an intricately engraved medallion. He knelt at the basin's rim and held his prize up to the guttering lamps; turning it in his hands to view every detail.

  The shock of cold water spilling onto his legs woke Teg from his daydream. The pool was rapidly overflowing. A pair of loud metallic thuds rang out, and he saw that a lattice of thick steel bars had slammed down over the suddenly closed front door. Across the chamber, a bronze gate slammed down to seal off stairwell.

  No sooner did Teg realize what was happening than he was on his feet, sloshing through water already ankle-deep.

  Stupid! He cursed himself. You got greedy, and it made you careless.

  There’d be time for self-loathing later. At the moment, he had to focus on escape. The choice of exits was easy. Even if he managed to pass the barred front gate, it would mean saving himself at the cost of the mission. No, onward and upward was the only way.

  The water was up to Teg's knees when he reached the bronze door. Predictably, it had no visible lock or latch. The cast figures of serpents and mermaids laughed at him through a scum of corrosion. The scratches marring those bronze faces told Teg that many of the tower's unwanted visitors had met tragic ends under their mockery. He also guessed that none of them had carried splinterknives.

  Teg reached as high as he could and sank his humming blade into the door. The water would carry him upward, and he couldn’t waste time fighting the rising tide while he worked.

  “She’s Elena Braun, daughter of the station’s head shipwright,” said Lt. Wald, a female officer who’d been stationed at Caelia.”

  The confirmation unnerved Stochman, recent events notwithstanding. They’d taken Braun's daughter alive, though “alive” was a loose description of her condition. “What’s been done to her?” he asked.

  Wald ran a hand through her short blond hair and sighed. “I don’t know. She’s always been strange. But no one dared to ask her father, and she hasn’t said a word since we found her.”

  Stochman leaned back in his captain’s mess chair and steeped his fingers. He considered himself a rational man who eschewed the metaphysical speculation required to unravel such puzzles. Yet he perceived a relation between the sockets in the girl’s back and the power shortage, which had coincided with the last cable’s extraction.

  Nevertheless, a solution was needed if he and his men ever wanted to leave the pit the Gen had pitched them into. The quest for that solution brought Stochman to the brig, where the girl was interned for lack of a better option. Though the drab steel walls had never housed another prisoner, the air smelled even staler than in the rest of the cursed scow.

  Two partitions made of metal bars emerging from perpendicular walls formed the girl’s cell. Stochman unlocked the door, rolled it open with an unexpectedly loud clang, and stepped inside. “It’s rather lonely here,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like new quarters?”

  The girl didn’t say a word. She sat huddled on her cot, facing away from him.

  “Was the mechanic your friend?” he asked. “I hope you don’t blame me for his death.”

  Several moments passed with no answer. The commander picked up a cable that had lain useless on the deck since his technicians had given up reattaching it.

  “Do you know what’s happened to the power?” he asked.

  Braun’s daughter didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  “You have fascinating disfigurements,” Stochman said. “Are they painful?”

  The girl drew her knees up against her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

  “I haven’t slept, you know,” he said. “Not since I regained command.”

  The stupid trollop just stared at the wall of her cell, never deigning to look at him.

  Stochman’s patience finally ran out. He'd had enough of pirates and demons; of the cold and the dark and whatever this creature in a pretty girl's skin really was. He was done with decorum; done with decency. It was time to get results.

  “What did the scum do to you, bitch!?” Stochman railed as he whipped Elena's bare back with one of her own cords. “Are you their insurance—some kind of dead man switch?”

  Again, the improvised scourge came down. The girl flinched, but held her tongue.

  “Why do these cables go right through you when we try to plug them in? Are you doing that?” Another, harder lash elicited a faint whimper that made Stochman grit his teeth in satisfaction. “You were their doxy, is that it? A hole for each of them? Tell me I’m wrong!”

  A hand gripped Stochman's wrist like a vise, halting the cable in mid-stroke. “Leave her be,” said a voice as pitiless as a moonless winter night.

  The commander wheeled. Standing behind him—and still gripping his trembling fist—was a grey-cloaked figure in a stark white mask. “Vaun Mordechai,” Stochman hissed. “I thought you scurried off with the rest of Peregrine’s rats!”

  “Thank whatever powers you wish that I did not,” the masked man said. “You’d have found boarding far more difficult in my absence.”

  Stochman sneered. “So you're a traitor and a freak.”

  Mordechai relaxed his hold, and Stochman yanked his wrist free. His smile faded when Mordechai pulled back the hood of his cloak and removed his false porcelain face. Stochman beheld a hard, ashen countenance under a bristle of light brown hair. But he hardly noticed those features once his gaze met Vaun's eyes. They were iron grey and grim, but most terrible of all, they were dead. No, Stochman realized. They're not dead. But they're not alive either. What the hell is he!?

  “The young lady and I have much to discuss,” Mordechai said.

  Stochman had expected the mask’s removal to temper Vaun’s sonorous voice. It didn't. Fighting the shaking fit that threatened to unman him, he stumbled out of the cell.

  Mordechai stood amid a tangle of cords that ran in from the hall, passed through the bars, and ended at the foot of the cot where the girl huddled. Her blank sockets shone like misplaced eyes whose gaze Stochman couldn’t meet.

  Mordechai moved to Elena's bedside and knelt to examine the whip marks. “You’re safe now,” he said.

  “He didn't hurt me.”

  “I'm sure there was no damage,” Mordechai said. And indeed, the angry red welts were already fading from her ivory skin. “Still, the pain must have been c
onsiderable.”

  Elena said nothing, but emitted a pathetic sniff.

  “I have long hoped that we two might speak at length,” Mordechai said. He paused, awaiting the girl’s reply.

  “Everyone thinks I have answers for them.” She glanced at Stochman. “They’re wrong.”

  The girl’s delicate face looked melancholy under the dark curves of her eyebrows and the light brown waves of her hair. She really was beautiful—like a perfect exit wound.

  Mordechai ran an ashen hand through Elena’s forelocks. “You are very special.”

  Elena regarded him with one rose-colored eye. “You think you know what I am.”

  Mordechai stood. His cloak fell to the deck. Stochman tried and failed to look away as the freak unfastened his shirt and bared his back. Five black dots marked his skin in a pattern matching the girl’s sockets. He turned his back to her, and Stochman could finally avert his eyes.

  “We are of a kind,” said Mordechai.

  Elena sat up and stared at the marks. “You feel a part of yourself missing. Something taken from your soul.”

  Mordechai faced her again but said nothing.

  Elena pressed a hand to her heart. “What you're looking for is in me.”

  Vaun clasped the girl’s hand between his own. “I don't understand,” he said.

  “My soul is made of fragments from many others. Including yours.”

  Mordechai's hands dropped to his sides like lead weights. “A composite soul?” he said at last. “Why would anyone commit such wanton butchery?”

  “For the reason you suspect.”

  “To retrieve a soul from the Nexus.” Vaun spoke slowly, but his voice held growing conviction. “They excised pieces from living souls to reconstitute one of the dead.”

  Pain clouded Elena’s face. She lay down and said nothing.

  Vaun replaced his shirt, cloak, and mask. “We are siblings, after a fashion,” he said solemnly. “Leave this prison with me, and help me unlock the secret of our plight.”

  Elena closed her eyes. “It's too late.”

  Overwhelmed with a fear he could not name, Stochman fled the brig.

  40

  Teg squeezed through the hole he'd cut in the bronze door and tumbled onto the stairs. He sat up, spat out metallic-tasting water, and let a shuddering breath fill his burning lungs. Water kept pouring through the hole, and he retreated up the stairs in a hasty reverse crab walk.

  Teg wondered if the fountain would eventually flood the whole tower. Luckily, the water crested at the second floor landing. After a few minutes—more than enough time to drown a man—the flood began to recede.

  Good to know I can leave the way I came, Teg thought. He stood up and resumed climbing the staircase that spiraled around the tower's inner wall. Window slits admitted just enough hazy dawn light to see by. His swift yet cautious ascent ended at a simple wooden door.

  Chastened by his earlier misstep, Teg subjected the exit to the Formula’s full scrutiny. The door itself—made of stout oak—hid nothing sinister.

  The door opened on squealing hinges that echoed like startled children. Beyond it, a dim hall curved away out of sight. Teg stepped into the corridor and followed its leftward curve.

  The beating of large wings echoed from behind him. Leathery membranes brushed the back of his neck.

  Teg spun to find the hallway empty. He heard only the pounding of his heart. He turned again and hurried toward a low arch, beyond which another stairway rose. Cool morning air flowed down from above. Without further delay, he started up.

  Teg emerged near the tower's upper east edge. The spire’s top lay under heavy shadow not yet lit by the orange band of light rising over the water. Square pylons rising from each corner supported the ceiling. The open spaces between granted breathtaking views of the dark Fourth Circle to the west, and to the east: vast waters under a brightening sky.

  A stout brazier sat atop a three-tiered dais in the middle of the floor. Even in the dim light, Teg saw firewood stacked inside. He readied his lighter and strode forward.

  Distorted shapes sprang from the shadows on Teg’s front, left, and right. They took him within arm’s reach of the beacon; not the small yet sinister animals emblazoned on the gate, but nightmarish perversions larger than men. Before he could raise a hand in defense, a long curved chisel drove into his chest. Powerful fanged jaws clamped down on his right shoulder, and a maw filled with wet needles latched onto the left side of his neck.

  Sickly red light exploded behind Teg's eyes. His consciousness shrank to three points of intense, rending pain and a hellish chorus of plaintive squealing, deep, feral growls, and high-pitched chittering. If he screamed, the sound was lost amid the creatures' savage cries.

  Teg's next action resulted purely from reflex. His hand ignited the lighter to which it had somehow clung, and his arm flung the rose-hued torch onto the dry wood inside the brazier. The fire caught and flashed into a roaring blaze that set the top of the tower alight.

  Teg deeply regretted lighting the beacon when he saw the bastard monstrosities that worried his flesh. Though varying greatly in appearance, their misshapen forms each blended human and animal features into blasphemous mockeries of both. Their presence filled the air with the fetid musk of a rabid carnivore’s den. The shock of physical trauma and the horror of the beasts inflicting it plunged Teg into merciful oblivion.

  Teg woke from blood-red dreams on a bed of coarse sand. Nakvin knelt over him, bandaging his agonized neck and shoulders. Her hair and robes blended with the mostly dark sky. When he looked at her, a weak smile touched the corners of her mouth.

  “Did I make it out?” Teg croaked, his throat dry and burning.

  Nakvin pressed a finger to his lips. “Don't say anything—not for a while. You've lost a lot of blood.” Looking toward the tower she said, “When the beacon lit up but you didn't come back, Sulaiman went in after you.”

  Despite his physician's orders, a hoarse laugh escaped Teg’s throat. The effort felt like coughing up sandpaper. “He’s crazier than we thought!”

  Nakvin held a foil-lined bag to Teg’s lips and squeezed a few ounces of spongy, tasteless gel into his mouth. He chewed a couple of times and swallowed with effort. He stood up, though the medic forced him to nudge her aside.

  “You can't walk yet!” she said. “The only place you're going is the infirmary back on the Exodus.”

  “Jaren wants to haggle with a demon,” Teg said as he hobbled toward the shore. “He couldn't get a good price from Dan without me.”

  Teg and Nakvin rejoined the others, who stood peering across the water. Sulaiman glanced at the approaching pair, and the mercenary nodded to the priest in silent acknowledgment of a debt owed. Sulaiman quickly turned his attention back to the river, where a short boat was pulling in to a rickety wooden dock.

  The small band watched in silence as the pilot of the flat-keeled craft guided his vessel in with a long wooden pole. Based on Sulaiman’s palpable loathing of the ferryman, Teg had expected a more grotesque spectacle; but there was nothing overtly fiendish about him. He looked to be of advanced age, with a tangled grey beard draped over his rust-colored robe.

  The ferryman moored his vessel and regarded his customers with stern, steel blue eyes.

  Sulaiman advanced to greet the ancient figure. “Hail, Karun,” he said. “What tidings, old psychopomp?”

  Karun’s pale lips peeled back over snags that resembled splintered bones more than teeth. “Hail to the priest of no-one!” he said in a resounding voice that belied his withered frame. “Many a long season has fled since last we met.”

  Teg saw that Sulaiman fought to keep his face impassive. “I have brought you custom,” said the priest. “Five of the living, including myself, who would cross to the Fifth Circle.”

  Rich laughter issued from Karun's throat, which seemed itself a tunnel to perdition. “You know the toll for the living.”

  Sulaiman grasped his metal left arm with his right hand a
nd pulled it free at the shoulder. Then he thrust the Worked limb at the boatman. “Well do I know the price,” he growled, “and gladly do I pay it again, the sooner to be quit of your foul presence.”

  Karun chuckled. The steel arm vanished into the folds of his robe, and he stood aside to let Sulaiman pass.

  Jaren approached next. Teg thought he would try to negotiate, but Karun waved him on. “The Gen have tendered advance payment,” the ferryman said.

  As Nakvin approached the skiff, she rifled through her small pack, coming up with two guilder pieces. Karun shook his hoary head. “'Tis not the weight in gold,” he said, “but the dearness to the bearer that sets the worth.”

  Nakvin's face fell. She glanced at Jaren, who gave a helpless shrug; then at Sulaiman, who stood one-armed and brooding on the boat's deck. Sighing heavily, she pulled her Magus’ robe up over her head. Standing on the river bank in nothing but her slip, she folded her badge of rank into a perfect square bordered by its thread-of-gold hem and slowly presented it to Karun. Nakvin flinched as the lustrous ebon robe vanished into the old man's rust red mantle. Then she haltingly took her place beside Jaren. Sulaiman doffed his cloak and threw it around her shoulders.

  Teg followed close on Nakvin's heels. Without hesitation he drew one of his zephyrs, ejected and emptied the magazine, and offered it grip-first to the ferryman.

  Karun buried the end of his pole in the mud and took the weapon in his spidery hands. He turned the pistol over and over, inspecting it thoroughly. “A zephyr fifty caliber pneumatic pistol,” he said at length. “Eight round magazine; semiautomatic, with filed-down front sights and checkered blue steel grips. Inhabited by a minor air elemental and consecrated to Midras.” Karun chuckled at this last observation and tucked the gun into his belt.