I was alone, free to walk without stealth, so I explored the strange space where I had entered. It seemed that the only people I heard were the targs I'd frightened off, and the other sounds merely abrasions from some brand of maquisard kinematics. I considered drifting below ground to see what might be causing those tremors, but I felt watched, so I kept moving upwards, finding an empty cellar where I could prop myself against the far wall and sleep with my boots on the door.
Turk had provided me with a canister filled with the nourishing gel fed to the sleepers of Elvedon. It tasted foul, but fortunately only a small sip was enough to give me strength and stave off hunger. I'd fastened the cannister to he back of my belt so it dangled just beneath my knife sheath, and so found it difficult to put away after having a sip before going to sleep. I was so tired that I just let it fall between my knees. Traces of Elvedon found me there, and this time when I killed Patches, Turk was watching, standing behind Patches and observing our every move. Just as my spear sent its rupturing wave, Turk stepped around and froze time, looking closely into the cracks in Kharn's patchwork armor.
"It was a painless death," Turk said, "most humane."
"Most humane," I agreed.
I was stiff when I woke up, and exceedingly parched. I licked my dry lips to wet them, then reached for my canteen. It was dark in the cellar, but my eyes were never bound by natural light. Still, I could not find my canteen, nor my cannister of gel, nor my knife, nor my spear. Fortunately I had balled up my shroud and tucked it into one of my closed pouches.
Without any sustenance, I quickly rose and slipped between, wanting to quickly find the person (or people) who robbed me. Naturally I suspected the targs, but they were nowhere to be found. Nobody was to be found, in fact, so I let my stolen goods go and went in search of a place where I could find food and water. It occured to me that I had no form of currency, nor any knowledge of what was used for exchange in this city. But I was a warrior with many unique abilities, so I had no doubt I could offer services in exchange for supplies.
The place where I entered the city had no visible doors, and rather than hunt for the way the targs found in I drifted through a maze of empty hallways and dusty closets before finding a plaza where people were milling about. There was a circle of flambeau around the perimeter, and within the torch circle was a crude splatter of red pain in the shape of a fish. A small boy gathered fragments of food off the ground which he put into a shiny black bag. There was a cluster of elderly people in a corner watching the boy, and a tall, muscular woman with a bow by the far wall. I began to feel woozy from the effort of maintaining my position above and between, so I backed behind the wall I'd just passed through and emerged- to a crowd of screams.
I instantly readied my spear, and I remember being confused as to how to handle the scene. There were no people in the room when I passed through it, and now there were nearly thirty, gathered in the far corner and hiding their eyes. I heard a door opening somewhere above me, and another woman like the one I saw was on a catwalk aiming a bow. She loosed her shaft, and I just barely caught it with my spear. I thought I might be able to claim I'd stepped out of a shadow, as it was a tall, poorly lit room whose purpose was not evident, but something in my mind knew there would be no reasoning with a frightened mob and an aggressive guard, so I exerted myself, and was no more in that room, having felt a rush of that non wind that sometimes ushers one from here to there when being nowhere leaves you in want for some measure of strata. I've come to know that those winds can be the sum of thought, and so random, or at times, be the source an especially strong one, the forceful direction of some lingering espion.
Where I had been, a district used by vagrants who thought non-contextualized sacraments would avail them of their needs (thus failing to grasp both the rational component to faith and the blind mechanics of life), was essentially a great honeycomb of unfurnished rooms. Many of these rooms had false walls with seams so fine a hair could not be wedged between. In corners, cradled by wall and ceiling, were miniature and sightless gorgons called oculi. When I felt myself drawn upward I had accidentally slashed through one of those second walls, and the nearest oculi sent a beam that brought a battery of skeletal forms from a shadowy space onto the floor where they were still crouched when at last I left the city.
Sitting on a bare floor, looking across a patio to a black space punctuated by occasional blue floodlights, I watched a trio of women walking on ropes, balancing themselves with long beams. I pulled myself upward and got my bearings, finding myself on a balcony over a deep and far reaching chasm. There was more light on the floor, and besides their mass of sodden rags, I was told the place was populated by the droning hum of a crowd worn dull by poverty. There were less than one hundred people gathered there, but it seemed a thousand after the empty spaces that had welcomed me into Thirty-Third Day.
The balancing girls ignored me, or they saw me and were too pressed by their venture to react. One seemed to hang her gaze on me for an instant, but I imagined then that she was only pausing before she completed the pirouette needed to reverse direction at each end of her rope, for I could not see any landing where they could set down their balancing beams and regain the patio. The ropes, it seemed, were fastened to the wall too far below for them to reach. The answer came when a fourth girl dropped down, landing on her rope so that her foot seemed to pass through it. I was amazed with her acrobatic prowess, as she managed to catch herself and begin her walk from a fall some twelve feet high. I looked to where she came from and saw that there was a network of catwalks, along with a narrow string of metal rungs landing in a shadowy corner of my patio. It seemed to also be my only way to make any progress, so I climbed the rungs.
The catwalks seemed to lead me nowhere, but I knew that couldn't be. These girls had to have come from somewhere. Still they paid no attention to me, so I searched the area thoroughly, finding nothing but the rungs to my patio, so to there I returned, wondering where next to go. I was very hungry, and very tired, but hunger drove me to avoid rest, opting instead to keep searching for a place to climb downward. I did find an empty shaft with a thick jumble of metal wire which I climbed as far down as I could, but there was a pile of twisted metal that made any more descent impossible. I was too fatigued to pass between, and in any case, I felt an awareness of me that I wished to avoid. I then groaned all the hard way up that cable, and at the top, though I wore gauntlets, my hands felt raw.
I returned to the patio, contemplating a jump to the bottom, which I would recover from, of course, but would expose me in every way I wanted to avoid. I looked up again, groping with my eyes along the ceiling for passage to a floor above, but in the dark expanse of the ceiling I saw nothing but the web of catwalks and the glint of the blue floodlights off of squares of dull glass.
I'm ashamed to admit, but I panicked. I ran wild with my spear, and almost blunted its point stabbing at a wall. My poor servile jinn tried to utilize the weapon's elemental power at my behest, but without the blade penetrating a surface its shockwave was ineffectual. Perhaps it might stun an opponent if the blast were close to their ear, but it was useless against these solid walls. Where I nearly blunted it, there was a space that with my ghost sight I could see a difference, but it was solid, unbreakable. Desperate, I went to the balcony and called to the balancing girls. They did stop and look at me, wavering as they maintained their poses on the ropes. I asked if there was a way down, or up, then asked where I could find food. They stared at me, likely uncertain which question to answer first, and in a huff I withdrew into the room behind me and forced myself into a state of calm, then passed upward with great pain. Where I found myself was even less helpful than before. I was inside the ceiling, with no idea which tile would be removable allowing me to return.
I learned that day that hunger pangs are temporary. They leave fatigue in their wake, though, and that tiredness may have aided me. I slept, there inside the ceiling, and when I woke I felt calm. I then carefully scanned with my dark sight and found a trail of ductwork that rose to the next floor. There was a loose tile nearby, which I moved and climbed through. Above there I found a place I could have lived in almost comfortably, being it an expansive, euclidean fortress of alcoves and niches each large enough for a proper campsite. There were ladders built into the walls, so I climbed upward, and downward, and upward again, meandering without direction. In that space I saw row after row of mannequins, an army of lifelessness, some marked in ways that stirred professional curiosity. The whole space ended in a stretch of walls that narrowed as I progressed, though their skin grew transparent and mirrors that did not reflect my weary form lay just beneath, their gaze fixed sightlessly on each other in switchback succession. At the end of that shrinking tunnel was a hatch I barely fit through.
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At last I heard the sound of speech! I crawled through the hatch as silently as I could manage. There was a cushioned chair beneath me, a stroke of fortune I almost laughed about. From the chair I crouched, crawling along the molding of that wall and keeping behind couches, bookcases and long, rectangular storm cases. Eventually I worked my way around the wall to a vantage point, and could see a desk in a starkly bright corner at the end of a seemingly endless aisle between storage racks. Seated at the desk, a small, obese torso protruded from a chair that was fixed to a track that ran along the floor and disappeared into the heights of the room by means of a gradually ascending ramp.
I lowered myself to my stomach and crawled like a lizard down the aisle, hoping to be too low to be seen. Also, the floor was white, though the room was dark, with only blue lumen-gas tubes on the ceiling. I hoped my light clothing would camouflage me against the floor. I clung to my spear with my smaller fingers in my right hand. Each movement was calculated and slow, and I am proud of myself for having gotten so close, being as hungry and tired as I was. But my strength was spent by the time I neared the strange figure in the chair, leaving me helpless against the foot on the center of my back. I readied myself for pain when I heard snarling, accompanied by a line of thick saliva pooling next to my face. The obese torso; bereft of clothing and hairless, gleaming with sweat and jiggling with every move from its shortened arms; was busy looking into a panel of thick, rounded glass, stubby fingers making circles over a softly glowing field.
"What is it?" The vice was more of a secretion.
The snarl turned into a slurp.
"Is it armed?"
A clawed hand took my spear, then another slurp.
"What is it?" Still running malformed hands over the field of light.
A gurgle and a whimper, then another snarl and I felt the weight of my captor pressing down on me.
The torso sighed. "Is it wearing a fish?"
I felt myself being turned over. I was looking at tragic sight, a tarrasquin whose horns and jaw had been removed. Its lips were sewn partly shut, with only the corners of the mouth left open for breath, water and food. I craned my neck to look at the torso, and saw that it did indeed have a head, though not a neck.
The tarrasquin gurgled again. Saliva splattered on me as the tarrasquin shook his head.
The torso pressed its arms against the desk and leaned back, then pulled itself around to look at me. Its eyes peered over a collar of wrinkled, fatty skin.
"Interesting," it wheezed. A quiet moment followed, then lead to what I took for this creature's version of a nod. "Solitary."
---
Solitary was a cage within a cage, where the surgical amputees prowled around me and looked with hunger at my immaculate features and limbs. I pitied these creatures, and knew that I could be used as stock to replace what they'd lost if there were a sufficiently skilled physician, but I had things to accomplish. Whatever their aim in holding me was, I had to escape. It never crossed my mind that they were clueless to my nature and only acting defensively. It wasn't long, fortunately, before I was interrogated, giving me the chance to learn from their reactions to my answers.
Two antagarthans came, one with an additional pair of arms grafted on, both stunted and shriveled and purely vestigial. The other, less altered one, had metal plates where a mouth and nose should have been.
"How did you find us?" asked Six Arms.
"The acrobats showed me the way."
They both turned sharply towards each other, then slowly back towards me. Six Arms repeated his question, and I told him the second time the targs let me in. He stepped close to my cage and grasped two of the bars with his small arms, which I had thought vestigial. They seemed to glow, and I screamed as the current ran through me. The question was repeated a third time, and I answered truthfully.
"I'm not sure. I'm not from here, and I got lost and stumbled upon this place."
Another current ran through me, and I thought to slip between but I was too distracted and fatigued, so I screamed again, though a little less. If there was anything I was truly weary of, it was the idea of senseless interrogation, so I removed my shroud. It did not have the desired effect. This time the current was enough to cause me to faint from the pain, and I was no longer in solitary when I woke, but a tank like the one I woke in at the good doctor's clinic. Danders stabbed me with a dagger that left a scar, and in like manner I had needles in my arms that prevented me from slipping between, even if I could in the state I was in. But I felt myself wavering, not only in a state of panic, but in a state of altered being, and I did not want to slay another innocent (though I have always been prepared to), so I wrestled myself into a state of controllable calm.
I'd been fitted with a breathing apparatus, and the fluid that contained me was warm and had a soothing texture. My eyes stung a little, but not unbearably, and while my default vision revealed little but murky clouds, I could see well enough with my ghost sight, though in that strange, atomic form that reveals both all and nothing at the same time. I discerned a motley of humanesque shapes, and the two antagarthans who questioned me. Behind them all was a hulking form of indistinct shape who seemed to fill the rest of the room. I could hear voices, but not words. I realized that after turning my head, there was a sudden shift in the volume and stillness of the gathered forms. Hoping they hadn't observed enough movement to think me awake, I held still. My cunning plan failed.
I writhed as a noxious gas poured into my lungs through the breathing apparatus, and when I woke again I lay on a floor, bound by the same sort of restraints found on that small table I loved, and looked on in horror as one of my arms was being grafted onto the body of some malformed creature in the very same room. Fearing what I'd see, I forced myself to look at my left side. What I saw would to the exoteric initiate have seemed just deserts; the stump of a new left hand in infant form oozing from a sublimely matriarchal orifice in my mutilated shoulder. When the pilfered limb refused to obey the subject's whims, I smiled through the pain left over by the analgesic.
That most petty of victories left me wondering if I would not have fared better to announce my presence to Lord V. But that was no more than a piteous musing, and one I gave no lasting credence to. Even at that early time, I suspected that Victor 33 might have self serving interests towards Victor 39. Also, I was growing increasingly aware of the absence in any recent folklore of Victors 34 through 38. So, laying there, I recalled that terror I felt when Belial 11 lost his only personal companion, and to the shock of the physician performing the barbaric graft and that ramshackled eidolon he'd sequestered, his victim no longer lay on the floor, but came standing through the partition and emptied their throats with his own.
I was anxious to be gone from there, but I found myself as I had in the care of Doctor Danders, only I was inconvenienced by my sprouting arm. I had new weapons at my disposal this time, however, and I used them. Strangely rested, and pressed by circumstance to not think of the minutiae of life, I returned to the ether and plunged through the building, manifesting at whim and questioning my wide eyed captors till I was clad in my own clothing and armor and again carried my spear, who I then named Typhon, as I had an inkling that in this place I might be seen as more than the sum of my parts, and could possibly benefit from the trappings of legend. So when I lifted my spear, exerting myself to let its photonic demarcations bleed through and be seen, I called out its new name, making sure that Morc, the globular torso who I first saw, witnessed me in my anger. He sat there, his fat arm wagging, fat little fingers a flailing, screaming about a white shadow. Though I detest its source, I accepted the epithet.
My flight from that wretched place was not as easy as the procurement of my affects. Their realm had no natural doors, and it seemed endless, stretching outward and upward, fingering around many blue lit districts where people huddled in cramped rooms and dingy corridors, calling such dreary spaces their home. When at last I found a place where there were discernible exits, I decided to remain, pushing the boundaries of my transitory stamina, and was able to linger between planes for surprisingly long stretches of time.