The Mirrored City (40 page)

Sword huffed. “We find the Harrower and kill it as you swore to do when you joined the Inquisition.”

“Forgive us,” Abbot Argus said, “but we were tasked with keeping tabs on the Heretics in Baash. Our presence here is not concerned with matters of Harrowers or dark magic. We need to contact Bamor.”

“If it still stands, Bamor knows,” Sword said. “Under the protocol set forth by the Orsini council, and our
beloved
founder Saint Jeffrey, they will bring the Eye of Ohan to bear on the Mirrored City with all haste. It will take them a week, a couple of days if Archea has a sky ship ready and is at all concerned. I do not need to remind you what the Eye of Ohan is, do I?”

The Abbot shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

“What is it?” asked the apprentice.

“By knowing this, apprentice Leroy, you are entering into the highest and most secret level of our ancient organization. As the ranking Authority in the Orthodoxy, I can raise your position, but I warn you. Once you have this knowledge, you are forever bound by our most sacred oaths. There is only one way to leave the service of our order, and it is death.”

“My name is Timothy—but I accept the responsibility.”

Sword nodded. “It’s a secret weapon of raw solar energy that will kill everything within a three-mile radius. Congratulations, you are now an abbot.”

“But the people—”

“Will be instantly incinerated. It’s a relatively painless death, if that’s any comfort—which it shouldn’t be. Without a sentient host, the Harrower manifestation should dissipate. The lands will be habitable in another twenty to thirty years.”

“Saint Jeffrey killed the Harrower in Bamor with his sword…” Timothy stuttered.

“Ah. You mean this Sword?” Pulling it from its scabbard, she let them admire its gleaming glory. She caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the blade.
I can’t believe I’m fucking Daphne now. This day cannot get any worse.

“Then there’s hope?”

“A precious little. I have a weapon capable of it, but killing a Harrower is a long and arduous endeavor. Thrycea and Bamor won their independence through heroism, as did… whatever city it was in Asherai. We found it more efficient to blow the remaining Harrowers to bits with the Eye of Ohan, hence the reason lost cities like Minas Craegoria are fertile craters with ashy soil.”

“Then we are doomed,” Timothy said.

“Not exactly,” Sword said. “Time operates much differently inside an incursion. A couple of days can be centuries. No one knows how long the ‘Long Night’ actually lasted for those who lived through it, but some astronomical records indicate it might have been a single night.”

“So what do we do?” the Abbot asked.

Sword pondered this. “You two should fuck. Timothy is clearly into older men, and he’s been giving you signals which you’ve ignored due to your own insecurities about your body and your sexuality. I appreciate your attempts to be honorable, but Timothy is well above the age of consent and your own same-sex desires are a natural part of ageing when the sensation of intimacy is no longer driven by reproduction.”

They stared at her.

The Abbot cleared his throat. “I have a wife and son whom I love dearly.”

Timothy looked crestfallen.

I guess I misread that whole dynamic.
She said, “A wife?”

“In Dessim, celibate clergy are… conspicuous.”

Sword ranted, “That’s the whole problem with a religion with ten thousand gods. People can pick and choose what they believe so faith is a post hoc justification for whatever they decide to do. Don’t want to care for the poor? Pray to the god of wealth. Don’t want to pay your tithes? Pray to Abraxis. Don’t want to battle the maddening demons from the deep beyond? No problem, outsource it to the Inquisition and give them a shitty little bookstore where they can post a skeleton crew of their most incompetent people.”

“Ma’am,” the Abbot replied angrily, “I received the same training as you.”

“True, but you did not receive the same experience, and in that regard you are a liability. I’m going to do my best to slay the Harrower, but neither of you have anything remotely useful to my mission. Inquisition dismissed.” Sword waved her hand.

“Why did you summon us, then?” the Abbot asked.

Daphne
had summoned them. But when the Archean sky ship exploded and the city fell under the veil of a Nightmare incursion, she did the only thing she could think of. She took up the Sword, which she knew had slain the Harrower Vilos. Sword had to admire her dedication—she knew her identity would be consumed, but she did it for the greater good.

“Because I love the sound of my own voice and giving dramatic monologues,” Sword snapped. “I also needed to confirm that you were useless. That much was readily apparent based on your complete lack of knowledge and preparation for this situation. Stay here… and pray for my success.”

She marched out the door into the streets of Dessim.

Sword didn’t dream, not exactly. It experienced memories of dreams through its hosts when they were conscious. Some elements were surprisingly common: dropping from great height, being chased, finding oneself back in school, teeth falling out. Walking through the streets of Dessim was like trying to run in thick tar. Every motion felt sluggish.

The air was like a pale green liquid amid a roiling fog that wrapped around the city. The streets and buildings no longer looked familiar. The angles and architecture were more like a collage. Everything in Dessim seemed thrown together without rhyme or reason. Windows and doors were upside down, occasionally sideways. The streets were empty.

Some of the walls had become like mirrors. Indistinct silhouettes pursued Sword’s reflection behind the glass. Shadowy figures pounded from behind mirrors, bowing the glass but never breaking through.
Poor fuckers.
Broadsheets hovered in the air, scrawled with indecipherable language, suspended and motionless as if frozen in wind.

Above the city, the Archean dreadnaught tumbled in burning pieces, lazily making their way toward the earth in an explosion that would take days to finish. The sun and sky were gone. Above the city, shrouded in darkness, was a mirror version of the city.

Sword rolled her eyes. “You’re
really
going all out for this whole mirror motif, aren’t you?”

As if in response, some flickering distorted shade leapt out from a mirror and tried to bite her. The blade answered with a perfunctory decapitation, and the shadowy figure vanished. The shades were a manifestation of sinful thoughts, generally harmless unless in great numbers.

She strolled through the melted wax of reality surrounding her. “I’ve been gone a day and the whole world has gone to total shit.”

She wasn’t quite sure which Harrower she was dealing with. It wasn’t Vilos the Devourer—she had killed that one herself in another body long ago. It seemed more like Agnax the Deceiver’s style. It probably didn’t have a name yet. The original thirteen had taken their names from the Archmages they possessed. Like Sword, the Harrowers needed a sentient vessel to act in the world. Tough as fuck to kill but not immortal.

She continued on for what seemed like a while, the cobbled street always stretching endlessly before her. None of the intersections of side streets matched with the city plan. She caught glimpses of lights and celebrations down one of the streets. Her stomach growled as the scent of cumin-sprinkled pastries wafted toward her in spite of the air being completely still.
Obvious trap.

A stooped figure pushed a cart down the road. “Centipedes! Get your fresh centipedes! Best in the two cities!”

A middle-aged woman was trudging along with a cart full of writhing insects in various baskets. She was old and encrusted with beetles and centipedes crawling over her clothes, hands, and face. The Incursion had already begun to change the citizens. By the end of it, these streets would be full.

Sword walked over to the woman. “I’d like a handful of your nastiest centipedes, please.”

The woman’s eyes lit up as she reached her hand into one of the disgusting baskets and pulled out a live one as thick as a sausage and as long as a snake. It had a black body and large red head like a strawberry. “This one.” She smiled gleefully and shoved it in Sword’s face. “I must warn you—the venom makes it spicy.”

Yes, Daphne, I’m going to make you eat this. It’s a fraction of what you deserve, and you skipped breakfast.
She grabbed it from the centipede lady and bit the head off so it stopped wriggling. Maddox didn’t need food, and Soren could subsist on magic, which took a lot of the irritating biological maintenance out of being embodied. Insects were a delicacy in some cultures—but not this one and for good reason. Still, it was food in a city with no commerce.

“You like?”

“Tasty,” Sword said with her mouth still full. It was hard not to gag a little.

“One ducat please.”

“Are you fucking
serious
?”

“I’m not running a charity.” The woman’s teeth were yellow.

Sword rolled her eyes and fished a coin out of the pouch. She threw it into a basket of maggots and continued on her way. There were always rules to Incursions, especially early on before the madness infected everyone. The Harrower facilitated, but the worst of it came from the people trapped inside the Cyst.

Sword continued her trek, taking another mouthful of centipede sausage. The architecture started to change. A building, much taller than anything in the city, stretched up into the fog. Naturally, it was crawling with giant centipedes.

Sword looked at the thing in her hand and chucked it to the ground. “Damn it! I could’ve saved myself a ducat if I’d just waited.”

“Hello,” a woman’s voice called from one of the alleys.

Sword drew her blade. “Hey, friendly voice. Come out where I can see you.”

Sybil emerged from one of the alleys. She wasn’t burned, and she wore long purple robes. Her shaved black head was bowed. “I am called Sybil.”

“I know who you are,” Sword said. “And if you had any clue who I am you would have slithered under any rock you could find. I am the Righteous Left hand of Ohan’s Fury. I am the sun that burns in the east and the retribution that comes in the west. I am the Inquisition, and you have violated the All-Father’s Creation. In his glorious name I smite you!”

“Do it,” Sybil said softly. She knelt on the ground, hands folded across her lap.

Sword lowered her blade to her side. “Wait. What?”

Sybil sighed. “It was not supposed to happen like this. The Harrowers promised us a world free from the interference of humanity, where we would have our own bodies. A world where our own evolution could have happened as it did for the humans on their home. We would be the dominant species with our unique art and technology. It should have been as if they had never come here.”

Sword rested the tip of her blade on the ground and looked up at the massive tower. “Let me tell you a story. Before Baash and Dessim, this city was the Capitol of the Sarn empire. It was literally called Capitol, and they lived in soaring towers much like this one here. Their vision of an ideal world was one ungoverned by the petty selfishness of humankind.

“To that end, they created the Suzerains, jeweled masks imbued with the wisdom and knowledge to effectively run a society, but none of the greed or ambition to destroy it. They were incapable of lying and fair to a fault; they did a decent job at first. But over the centuries, each one, based on their jurisdiction, had a slightly different, infallibly reasoned idea about what made a perfect society.”

Sybil nodded. “I think I see where this path leads. But they were creations of the humans—”

“Interrupt me again, and I’ll slice that lovely bald head of yours off before you hear the end of this story.” Sword raised her blade and pointed it at the woman’s throat. “Ahem, anyway. They were created to be better than humans at resolving conflicts. However, as it turns out, humans have pretty well mastered the techniques—war for instance, is a great way to settle disagreements.

“Same case with deception. Humans saw this as a flaw, but when falsifying information advanced an agenda, the Suzerains saw this as an obvious advantage; the humans were mistaken about their own strengths. So the Suzerains built a blueprint for world domination and started wars that lasted centuries. They wiped out everything. I mean, they were unstoppable until they hit Patrea, which had its own ideas about humanity’s future.”