Jeremy picked his way down through a honeycomb of tunnels. The gold-streaked obsidian was not differentiable and he didn’t dare retreat, but he made certain he was descending, choosing left or right turns at random.
He came around a bend and stopped a few feet from the barrel of Walter’s pistol.
He slowly raised his palms.
“Okay. You’ve got me dead to rights,” said Jeremy, almost relieved.
Walter thought for a moment.
“You’re not dead to rights. But someone else is. Jeremy… I can’t do this, man. I can’t see what I just saw. Wallace-Graham. We did it before we came after you. It was horrible.”
“Did you shoot her?”
“Yeah,” he breathed, “but I pulled away. She didn’t die. Tommy finished her.”
Walter lowered his gun.
“I had you in my sights in that shootout but I missed. On purpose.”
“Felt like I got pretty lucky. Now you’re gonna let me go?”
“Yeah.”
Jeremy looked at him for a moment and nodded.
“Get yourself out of this. “
Walter nodded back.
Jeremy bit his lip.
“About Tommy. Put him down if you get the ch-“
“Don’t say that. There are still things we could do for this city.”
Jeremy closed his eyes, and then opened them.
“Just get out of it, man.”
Walter looked at him with emotion, but he didn’t say anything. Jeremy turned and descended the tunnel.
After a few more turns, he came into an open cavern that contained a graystone section of flooring and wall embedded into the obsidian, a shrine pushed far from the thoroughfare by the shifting of the rock.
It was lit by brilliant orbs on staff-heads encircled by something silicate. There were statues bowing in decay, shorn of the full splendor of their forms, and there were engraved sarcophagi upon which collapsed skeletons lay in raiments which had not lost their luster.
Old ash flecked the air, each inhale bringing hints of things killed by fire.
At the heart of the shrine stood what appeared to be a skeleton in a veil of wax, or so its smooth crown and sharp cheekbones indicated- nothing more was visible from within the waxen shroud.
It was arranging bones in the air around it, a deep constellation taking the outline of a thing that didn’t exist in this universe. It moved them without moving, and they hung where they were placed.
Ephemeral white lines were traced between the bones, curves like bloodless slits of skin that came and went as Jeremy skirted around the shrine. The lines were imperceptible from the side. They contained the way to something that was not yet ready to appear.
The thing in the shroud rotated towards Jeremy. He stumbled back, placing his hands on the wall. He tried to form words, but could not think of what to say.
“You’ve come further than most,” came a voice. It was Jeremy’s voice, and it spoke liplessly from behind the veil. The thing’s jaw was tucked so that Jeremy couldn’t be sure if it was moving.
The figure rose slowly into the air and its shroud flared at the bottom and began to rotated around the skull, lifting just a little, revealing nothing.
“You came from the sanctuary,” it said.
Jeremy fell to a seat against the wall.
“Do- do the ones- in the sanctuary know you’re here?”
“Yes. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Can- can I… what do you want?”
“The same thing that you want. To compete my work.”
“Yes,” said Jeremy, nodding, “I just came- for something-“
“You came for something to steal.”
Jeremy was silent.
“There is nothing to steal. There is only an inheritance.”
Jeremy held his breath.
“Much has been carried off. Bones for treasure.”
Jeremy swallowed.
“There will be no such trade,” it said.
“What- what will the deal be?”
“There is no deal. There is only the fixation of something long stuck between worlds.”
“…You?”
“Something else. An interloper. A thief. It could not take what it would possess. It cannot relinquish its last chance. Your work here will end at the place where it abides.”
“Thank you. Do you want me to leave you alone?”
“I have little interest in the before time. What’s done is dead, what’s left is dying. I would show the ark of codes to the sunshine as a last look to a place of memories, but no substance.”
“A parting gift?”
“An obligation to a long deceased brother. That work is dead. It is no longer necessary. But still I will allow you to complete it. Or I will destroy this place and this city when I enact the rip. Perhaps that is your preference.”
“No, I… I don’t think that is necessary.”
“Necessary… it is desirable. Look above you.”
Jeremy saw the streets of Twinmartyrs. Black armored cars trailing red and black banners. Many men and a few women in black garb, red livery, carrying wood-furnitured rifles and stamped-metal submachine guns, cigarettes in their lips. Crates hauled by donkey cart, motorcars carrying loudspeakers.
“Your city… would you not deny it to your enemy?”
Jeremy was flushed.
“Not if it meant destroying it. There are good people up there. And people waiting to be good people.”
“It is not the den of sinners projected in the solar archives? Can you even argue such a thing?”
“Even so.”
“The ark of codes is the only repository of our ancient laws. The interloper’s fixation. You would bring them among men with only one law?”
“I suppose. If only to make them safe. Why hide them in the first place?”
“The laws are manna on a liar’s lips. They must be parsed only in times of wisdom.”
“This is no time of wisdom, so… why give me the choice?”
“What do you love, Bridgewell?” it said like it was toying with him.
“I love experience.”
“Does that makes you a suitable moral agent to safeguard our ancient laws?”
“It does.”
“Why?”
“Because the moral agent’s not here and he’s not coming. But I can do his work.”
“Very well. A pearl is better carried in the belly of a swine than underneath the earth.”
It waited a beat.
“Descend. There is a black pearl in a subterranean sea. That is where you will find your treasure.”
“Thank you,” said Jeremy, and edged along the wall to the far tunnel, in which there was a downward curve. The thing turned back to the suspended bones and the white lines between them.
Jeremy descended the tunnel, breathing hard through his mouth with eyes open wide.
After many minutes of shaky, uncertain work guided by his flashlight, Jeremy came to a confluence of tunnels, terminating in what looked like a displaced landing of white flagstones with a speckled line of red stone tiles, beyond which lay blue water against the gold-black wall.
As Jeremy prepared himself to enter the water, rapid footfalls announced the arrival of Walsh’s gang.
“He’s going for the sump!” yelled Tom Walsh, “Alan, Joe, I can’t swim, you got him?”
“We’ve got him!”
Jeremy sprinted for the water, praying to the Burning Eye there would be something on the other side.
Walter ran up behind the gang and Tom Walsh grabbed his jacket as he ran by.
“Walter, you stay with me!”
Jeremy dove into the water, which was cold but far from unbearable. He opened his eyes and found that the tunnel simply continued underwater, and that it opened up into an inky blackness a few yards in front of him. He kicked off his shoes, dumped out his duffle bag, abandoned his pistol and took his bootknife in hand, then swam forward. He felt Alan and Joe jump into the water behind him.
He swam out into the open.
It was a subterranean sea-gorge. The expanse before Jeremy shivered with rivulets of light from lunar crystal in the vault of the abyss, and vast walls of stone were apparent in the left and right distance. Below, there was a deeper dark unreached by the bonelike ripples of light that caught on currents here and there, but there was a great dark form illuminated ahead. It was an unmoored, spherical berg of jet black ice. Jeremy swam towards it and saw that there was a cavity, barely perceptible but for the breaking of a stream of light on its surface. The water grew colder and colder as he approached.
He entered the narrow tunnel and put his feet on the slope, breaking the surface of the water. He lurched forward, breathing the freezing air. His feet burned with the cold. The glassy ripples of the black ice walls offered no relief, just a neat rectangular corridor leading into the darkness. Jeremy clicked on his flashlight and saw a pedestal in the center of a four-way meeting of corridors ahead, when Joe and Alan began splashing up from the water behind him.
“Burning Eye! That nearly killed us!” Alan breathed, crystalline steam billowing from his lips.
Jeremy shone his flashlight at them and they winced. They quickly extended their switchblades, and then froze as Jeremy waved his bootknife in the flashlight beam.
“You really wanna have a knife fight right now, or should we find out what the fuck this place is?”
They raised their knives but didn’t advance.
“Ok, you go first,” said Alan.
Jeremy backed away from them and turned, advancing towards the pedestal, listening for their footsteps.
The pedestal was a simple four-legged platform of black ice, but there was a small wooden structure on top of it.
Jeremy approached it, shone his flashlight up the other three corridors, put the pedestal between him and the daggermen, then examined the device.
It was a bundle of a hundred glossy wooden rods set onto a round wooden base. Each rod carried parchment that terminated in a central anchor. Jeremy drew out a rod and the parchment slid through the interposing forest to be revealed.
Inky symbols began to flit across the parchment, and concurrently ember sigils traced themselves in the air above the device. He let the rod return to its position and stepped back in wonder as the aerial sigils died away. Alan and Joe approached the device. Alan gazed down at it in wonder, and Joe walked up one of the other corridors.
Jeremy shone his flashlight after Joe.
Something was standing in front of him in the darkness.
It was like an incomplete pillar of static electricity, portions missing here and there, with patches of pure blackness.
It began to move towards them.
As it came, the contours of the walls, of all matter around it smudged, smeared and enlongated as if reality was fresh paint and the thing was dragging a hand across it. Joe fell on his rear, frozen, and his legs shook as he tried to move them. His face was a mask of uncomprehending horror, grief at the destruction of his reality’s schema.
“Joe, get up!” cried Alan.
Alan rushed towards Joe then stopped. He hurled his switchblade at the thing, but there was no apparent impact on the pillar or anything else in the corridor.
Jeremy opened his canvas sack with shaking hands and knees, pulled the wooden contraption into it, then fastened the sack, barely able to work the connectors. He bolted for the way he’d come and then froze, staring, as the thing moved through Joe. His body was distorted around the pillar like an ovular bubble, nothing missing but everything in wrong proportion and fused together, nothing functional.
Jeremy sprinted up the corridor. Alan screamed, turned and ran after Jeremy.
Jeremy looked over his shoulder.
As Alan ran, his body smeared and lagged behind him, his skull growing long and his hair thinning across it, his limbs extending until they were noodly and disjointed and his lope was no longer tenable, and then he flopped out, the sound of his enlongated body terribly real against the silent ice. The thing approached behind him. Alan opened his mouth and eyes to scream and his mouth grew wider and wider as he did, his scream got more and more sonorous and inhuman, and his eyes swelled into milky orbs that suddenly blossomed with ill-proportioned, membranous pupils. Jeremy took a plaintive gasp and dove into the water with all the might that desperation could bring him.
He swam with hot delirium to the porous obsidian face that the shrine-city had been crushed and sheared through. He retrieved his spare boots, but was clearheaded enough to pull himself back out and enter another tunnel, lest he be ambushed on his emergence. There was nothing but the silent dark when he came through the water at a set of luxuriant alabaster steps that had once perhaps been used for baptisms, but it was a dredged place sopping with subterranean seaweed that was pale and translucent, almost luminescent.
Soaked and freezing, he dragged himself from the water and began his ascent. After inestimable minutes of climbing, Jeremy came across Walter. He’d been shot in the back of the head and left where he lay. A note was crumpled up on the ground by his body. It was Tom Walsh’s hit list.
One final entry had been added at the bottom. This one had been written in blood. Traitors.
Jeremy hobbled into the stone thoroughfare and was marked again by crystalline scrollwork as he made for the spiral staircase into the House of Petition.
He reached the chapel hall. Tom Walsh was sitting in a pew, leaning forward as if in prayer. Jeremy stood, holding the bannister, staring at him.
Tom looked up.
“I take it my men aren’t coming back from the underworld?”
Jeremy didn’t respond.
“What? No witty remark?”
Jeremy remained silent, but began walking slowly towards Tom. Then, he noticed two dark figures near the bulding’s front doors. A pair of Anarcho-Syndicalist fighters with bolt action rifles stood gazing at the 2-ton truck.
They looked over at Jeremy and Tom.
“Hey, you two, get out. Church’s closed.”
Tom stepped into the aisle and lifted a hand towards the door.
“Shall we?”
“We could take them out and settle this.”
“No, no sense in winning the battle and losing the war. The street’s crawling with them.”
Tom began walking towards the doors and Jeremy followed him not far behind.
“You don’t seem so torn up about any of this.”
“The path’s clear. What more can you ask for in life?”
“A functioning city-state?”
They walked through the doors and into the street.
Jeremy looked up into the sky. The leaves were a tan yellow beyond the shadowed branches, and the sun streamed through myriad layers of clouds like snow on a shaggy dog. It was good medicine for the cold and wet.
Black armored cars trundled by, men eyeing the pair from the machine gun slits. A rifleman in a bandolier stood on a roof, his boot on the chimney. Jeremy cast his gaze across the downtown skyline and saw a red and black flag streaming over the statehouse.
They walked up the cobblestone lane. There seemed to be militiamen on each street they crossed. The remaining citizens of Twinmartyrs watched them like disembodied eyes from windowblinds and fences.
“You overheard our conversation,” said Jeremy.
“I did. No room for cold feet in my organization.”
“What organization?” Jeremy sneered.
“The one that’s gonna grow and grow. Plenty of idle hands to put to work around here.”
A pair of slat shutters sprang open from over a nearby window and a flurry of submachine gun rounds thundered across the street. A line of pulverized rock leapt between several militiamen like a cutting charge and they collapsed, one screaming, one silent. Jeremy jumped in shock and glanced up at the window, then at Tom, who was sprinting through the gate of a garden wall.
“See?” yelled Tom.
Jeremy saw a group of Anarcho-Syndicalist militiamen up the street slapping an armored car to get it to stop, and then a pair of them knelt and opened fire on the window with their rifles while another rushed the building and prepared to put a hand grenade through the window.
Jeremy dashed into the garden and Tom leapt out from behind the wall, trying to stab him in the chest. Jeremy threw out his forearm and jarred the thrust to a halt. Tom grabbed him by the collar and put a foot behind Jeremy’s legs, trying to push him over backwards, but Jeremy twisted deftly, catching hold of Tom’s knife-hand wrist, stepped across his extended leg and threw him onto his side in the grass. Jeremy retrieved his bootknife and dropped his duffle bag as Tom scooted away from him towards a little well, knife raised like an ice pick. He stood up.
There was a barrage of gunfire and then a low blast from the building behind Jeremy.
“Mmm, never be first through the door,” said Tom, shaking his head, “I’ve decided to let the An-Syns get nice and relaxed before I start trying to bump em off.”
Jeremy rushed at him, taking swipes and stabs with his knife, and Tom backed away, trying to stab Jeremy’s hand and wrist with every attack. The duel gradually became a hesitating game of cat and mouse.
“Why not join em then, Tom? Go undercover. Hell, you’d like it!” said Jeremy, his face a vicious mask.
“Good idea! Then I can get rid of anybody I don’t like with their channels! Just say they’re not Syndie enough and get ‘em killed!”
Jeremy started making wide, aggressive swipes at Tom’s eyes, and Tom raked a downward slash across Jeremy’s arm accompanied by a chilling loosening of skin. Jeremy brought his arm in low across his midsection and Tom darted a stab in at him, but Jeremy twisted and stumbled a retreat.
Jeremy switched his knife to his other hand and shook out his arm, blood running from his cuff.
“But why start with the big dogs, eh? Lot of trash to clean out in this goddamned town. Lot of malingerers, lotta useless people,” said Tom.
Jeremy began circling him, shifting his weight to his forefeet.
“Yeah, I think I will join the An-Syns! I can make the bigwigs fry whenever I want. Why not start right here at home? Lot of pillars of this community I could warm up on!”
Jeremy let his face become a murderous rictus and launched a wide swipe at Tom’s eyes, just as he’d done before. With a dark grin, Tom launched a stab to impale the well-telegraphed attack. Instantly, Jeremy lowered his knife, darted back a step and sent an upwards kick into the handle of Tom’s switchblade, which went flying out of his hand and landed somewhere in the garden.
Jeremy lunged in and planted a stab clear through Tom’s windpipe and jugular. The weapon slipped free of the gushing wound. Tom staggered backwards, face aghast, as blood leapt from his neck in time with his heartbeat and cascaded down his chest.
“Warm up on that,” Jeremy spat.
Tom put a single hand to his wound and crooked his head slightly as if to not worsen the cut, holding himself tense. Then, eyes cottoning over, he took a single unsteady step forward and pitched sideways in the bloody grass.
Jeremy gazed at him, pressing his sliced arm to his body as the wind rustled the garden.
He heard bolts racking from the garden gate. He looked over at the pair of Anarcho-Syndicalist militiamen and dropped his knife.
“What the fuck happened here?”
Jeremy just held his wound and shrugged.
A older man come to the garden doorway from where he’d been investigating the building and stood between the militiamen. He pushed his glasses up his nose and gazed at Jeremy. The militiamen looked down at the bookish, balding man. He was one of the theorists whom Jeremy had rescued.
“This man is a Union operative. What’s happened?”
“This was one of the assailants. A known assassin, ask anyone.”
“Good work, Mr Gardner!”
“Who are you?” asked one of the militiamen.
“Professor Oswald Greene! I wrote your induction primer, and I’m a man in very good standing, if you know what I mean!”
“Okay, I was just wondering,” said the militiamen and gave his companion an annoyed look.
Oswald approached Jeremy.
“You’ve been cut.”
Jeremy sighed.
“I’ll deal with it. “
“It needs treatment… if you’re to travel.”
“Yeah. Just need to find a sewing kit and some vodka.”
“Men! Bring a medical bag.”
“Thanks.”
Oswald leaned in.
“I don’t have long before my enemies reacquire me. I need to get out of this place, and so should you. Where will you go?”
“I might stop at Vineforest to get provisioned, but I’m not sticking around there. I’m going east. I’ve gotten something out of all this, and I’m gonna make sure it doesn’t go to waste. I’m gonna make sure people know. That they can learn from what I’ve found.”
Jeremy shouldered his duffle bag.
“I suggest you do likewise.”
—
Jeremy sat outdoors with a group of professors and other researchers at the Thrice Confit, a bistro in Ascension. A waitress set down his roast and gave him a sly once-over. He smiled and turned his attention to the mutton, knocking garnishes aside with his knife. He took a bite and sat back with his eyes closed, just chewing.
“Did you have far to travel?” asked a librarian who’d missed the pilot session examining the ark of codes at the University of Ascension.
“Long way.”
A waiter set a vodka buck before Jeremy.
“Two of those please.”
“Mr Bridgewell,” asked a professor, “if you don’t mind me asking, what was it like spiriting the ark of the codes out of Twinmartyrs at that dark hour?”
Jeremy wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“The first thing is that you meet all kinds of interesting people. You get to know them. Then you go your separate ways. What sticks with you is how they lived their lives. What choices they made at zero hour.”
“Hmm. Do you have any insights about that?”
Jeremy was silent for a moment.
“I can tell you some things that happened. Any insights would be unique to you.”
—
