He was me, and I was him, but we could not be further apart, though we were one and the same.
"Me," I said with a nod.
"You," was his reply.
He was not alone. Fomorians flanked him. Not the stunted wretches I had met before, but strong and healthy ones that would have stood as high as the Judicator's knee, were the Judicator still standing.
"The boy is gone," said Lord V.
"You saw to that." My voice was cold.
"There's much you don't know about that boy."
"Perhaps," I conceded. And then my riposte, "but I know he did what he had to to survive this place, which tells me a great deal about its lord."
And V smirked, and when he did I grew so disgusted with his hubris, and I wondered with fear if I did not exude the same thing when my lips rose in such a way.
"You need only look inward for that," V said. "Victor 39, the great success, it's long past time we met. Come with me. Your days of aimlessly perusing old paths is over. Your true purpose awaits you."
"The fragments of the founders?" I asked.
But he shook his head. "Our path transcends anything laid out by any maker."
I saw a vision then. A man's body rising from murk, slick mud forever sloughing off in clumps, and from the murk rose hands, covered in silt, salt and ash, some cracked and bleeding through their earthen raiment, some wearing gaudy rings. The pawed at the body, who tried to cry out, and lacked the strength to swat the hands away. Every time he seemed to close to raising a foot from the ooze he was born from a hand would caress his cheek, or tease his chin, or place a finger on the center of his brow, and he would try to see the form that hand belonged to, but he only saw the murk. I saw a man because I felt this way, but be you man, woman or child, or tyfloch, tarrasquin or megathere, I'm sure you know this feeling. My hope is that when the murk is thoroughly cleared from the sky, such emotions will seem strange and utterly unrelatable to any minds subsuming this text.
How he plucked thoughts from my mind, that filthy bastard. I thought to myself that it would be difficult to lie to V, as we stood there squared off. But then it occurred to me that he likely expected me to lie, and that I would be more dangerous to him if I told the truth exclusively. But my thoughts were cut short but an urging from behind me. So many hands; some fingered, some not, touch my shoulders, but one mouth whispered into my ear. Go.
The halls we walked through were bleak as any i'd seen, but seemed fresher and cleaner since they had been cleared by Lord V's vermin. I saw one of the arachnoid women that descended upon us during our heist. She clung to the wall with slender fingers that were much too long. They were elegant, tipped with red nails. She saw me with a start and came suddenly towards me, stopping at Lord V's shoulder, though she leaned her hideous, skeletal body towards me. She stretched a hand black as charcoal to me, but V calmed her with a stroke to her face. Black and silver veins writhed around the bones of her arms as she purred, turning to following her master who walked on unphased by the clicking of her fingers. I thought of Patches climbing the wall and flinging them to the ground, and I felt a twinge of melancholy.
With a wave of his fingers V opened a door. My sense of time had returned by then, though I couldn't be sure exactly how long after we left My Lady before it did. But I could see after we passed through the hidden door that we had entered a part of the city that Tythus had not taken me to. We crossed a long gangway that spanned a chasm, and were flanked on either side by towers of black steel that rose infinitely above us. A small glimmer of blue stained silver hinted at a patch of sky directly overhead, though most of our light came from lamps that I knew to be very large, but seemed tiny specks from the great distance between us. I wondered where we were, and what terrors of fomorian engineering might be lurking either nearby or afar. All the while Lord V was silent, never looking back, and I kept close as I could without angering the arachnid. Halfway across the gangway I stopped to admire a pair of statues, both male and female of human form. They rose out of nothing, there being complete blackness below, and pleaded with the sky far above our heads. I knew I could see them in full detail if I wanted, but I chose to view them with common sight, loving the beauty of their pale bodies, so stark against the gloom, perfectly accentuated by their writhing poses and immense size. I wondered for a moment whether they had been erected before or after the Fall. But by the time we had crossed the gangway I had forgotten they were there.
We stood for a moment at a wall so flat and encompassing that it seemed to wrap around us. Even in my truesight I could see no seam, and yet Lord V made a gesture, and the largest of the fomorians produced a bundle. In it were my things; my armor and my tabard, my cape and my shroud, and of course my knife and my spear. My boots I wore, and I was wrapped in a robe given to me by the Lady before leaving.
"Take the weapon," said V. I did, curious. He turned his head and nodded towards the wall. On a whim I walked forward and struck it with my spear, and a portion large enough for us all to pass through faded away. Beyond the illusion was another vast wall. Its size gave the impression of closeness, but by the time V and I stood before it my legs were tired. A dimly gold light shined from some twenty yards up, casting the shape of a pyramid onto the wall. I ran my fingers along it and was surprised to find out it was made of stone. Faint shapes could be discerned. While they were worn by time, it was clear to me they depicted a battle. I made out an antagarthan holding an armored human in his lower arms while pummeling him with his top hands. And there were tarrasquins, and other saurians as well, and an unmistakable giant wrestling some larger creature. A flock of tyflochs dropped bombs from above, save for a few that were caught in nets or shot with harpoons.
"Here," V took my hand and guided it, and before I could see it I felt the familiar beak. Before they were husks, they were the Dolomites. There were seven of them on the relief, looking down sadly from a hill. In their midst was a human boy. "And here," he guided my hand again, reaching to its full extent. Along the way I felt numerous impressions like the Dolomites with polearms, and above them all were two finned serpents with sapien torsos holding kongoreis in their right hands.
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"It is they who ask us to sacrifice our own."
It is they who have been calling.
"Yes, it is. And you would sell out our own to sate them? Relieve good people of limb and eye and life, so you could what? Awaken antique colossae who might blow a few rocks out of the sky? I told you, Victor, our path is higher than all this.
He waved his fingers and the wall rose into emptiness, then he pushed me, and I fell, and when I looked with opened eyes I saw a distance no body could survive. I wondered if this was my end, and for a long time I let myself fall, until some instinct seized me and I passed between, plummeting now like a rocket through a pink glow that ended in a great lotus stem, and through that stem I travelled between rings of light until I rematerialized in a hangar like the one I took Northwind from. But no pegasus was stabled here. The thing that was had a body long as an angel's reaver, and when it reared its belly split down the middle, ribs protruding like teeth. I wanted to die then not because of my usual moroseness, but because I feared being consumed by this thing and rolling around in its intestines until being excreted, only to be devoured and excreted again and again until the thing grew tired of me. And then I'd become a play thing for the masters of the city, to inflict all manner of horrors on for a sporting show, the perfect gladiator, or for their doctors to use as a training dummy for apprentice physicians.
But these things didn't happen to me. The hangar was empty save for a cluster of strange machines in a semi circle around me, and Lord V was there, waiting impatiently.
"You're pitifully untrained," he said.
Filthy bastard.
We passed through again, and I saw that in that space he was pure gold. On the other side of the hangar's doorless wall was an antechamber. I looked over my shoulder and was amused to see the same relief on this wall as the one above, only in a much fresher state. The beast wrestling the giant was the one I feared before.
You have nothing to fear, said My Lady, Painted Lady.
You have everything to fear, said Lord V.
You'll be safe, said she.
I'll save you, said he.
Greeting us was a large entourage. And do you know the wonders of the stylus? It is writing now before I'm conscious of my own thoughts. There it shows them all; the Valkyr and the Dagons, the Neo-hedonists, Mamasuna and her eunuchs, and the tribal mothers of the Tipua Targona, from whom the targs were outcast, having praised Belial as Lord rather than V. V raised his arms and they prostrated themselves; even Pothos of the hedonists, fat as he was. His attendants, high ranking officials within the order by their own rights, assisted him into the proper stance before assuming it themselves. It was he who first spoke.
"Did you bring back another eidolon for us to put through the paces, masterful radix?" asked Pothos when all again stood. While his subordinates heaved him up, he managed to maintain a startling measure of poise.
V ignored him at first, but when all the others refused to move or speak, darting their eyes uncomfortably back and forth when V gestured for us to be followed, he turned to Pothos and said "Yes". Then he addressed them all. "This one is different, as you'll surely see." And then he spoke to the guards, of whom there were many. "You will not touch him."
What I did not see among V's company were tyflochs, tarrasquin, luciens, antagarthans, or giants. The massive chamber could have easily housed a pair of magetherian guards, but only our kindred was present throughout all of the lower city, the true city.
Filthy bastard.
I felt the Lady's hand as I followed Lord V through hallways so large entire settlements could have been built within them. There were massive lamps on every wall, ensconced deep within their ancient metal, and chandeliers of flames I could not begin to identify in any spectrum of sight shimmered every color, as they were the spans of elephants, and likely greater in weight.
What else I saw on the path to V's mansion I will paraphrase for now. We did not walk through any byways or market squares, or any plazas or metropolises, but through an immense highway walled off into oblivion on either side. The road was crystal that had been so finely polished we seemed to be walking upon air. Beneath our feet was an aquarium populated by fish of even more hues than the chandeliers. There were no doors and no windows in the walls, and a tall doorway on the far end. It was there that I did see giants. But they were not guards. Their corpses had been taxidermied and coated in clear plaster, then gilded, and they were in twisted poses, pleading for mercy from some thing high above.
Filthy bastard.
There was script above the door. I doubt any but V and I knew it. He, being the one who commissioned its writing, and I, having slaved at the Bibliotheca, knew it to be the binary gematria of the djinn. The numerals were the length of my arm, and so elaborate was their construction, complete with gemstone decor, that they ran from the floor on the right side to the floor on to the left. Do not ask me how I knew that V had inverted the flow of the language. What they read was profane, for it spoke ill of our fathers.
AND ALL THE ARTS OF LIFE THEY TURNED INTO THE ARTS OF DEATH.
"The Dolomites sought life, not death," I said.
"And yet Rouge Adept spearheaded experiments on the living, and his brothers did not protest," V replied.
"They were not always how we knew them," I said, recalling faint images of tall men from beyond the clouds who admired the gifts of every species.
Then V stopped his relentless progression and turned. "How we knew them?"
"How old are you?" I asked. He whirled around and continued his onward march. Clearly, I struck a nerve.
"Was the city always this much grander below ground? Or did you rearrange when you moved down here?"
Another nerve struck. He turned, and this time came very close to me. I envied him his beautiful long hair.
"You've seen less than one half a percent of Thirty-Third Day, knew the Dolomites for a few years, took one chemical bath with a terminally ill quasi-ascendant, and activated a single nelumbo codex by accident. Oh and don't let me forget, you observed a brief conversation between Turk and Blitzkrieg. Have you any idea how many years of my life I wasted facilitating peace talks between those two children? Speaking of children, I could tell you Jadus's first words, and how many times he threatened to murder his father before he finally did. I can tell you how many footholds the Devils gained on the surface before the colonizers were finally defeated; betrayed by one of their own, mind you. And who was your Kendra? An orphan of Ossary? A vagrant from one of the arks? Some wildling raid survivor? An escaped paracoita?"
And he struck a nerve. In truth, I knew next to nothing about myself and my world, but he seemed to know next to everything.
"Keep quiet and follow me."
Filthy bastard.