Seventeen minutes later, Deepwell is rolling up in a reinforced paddy wagon, the kind of ironclad mobile prison you use to arrest whole armies of angry drunks at once. Not fashionable. However, I cannot physically fit inside a normal Watch street cruiser, so I’ll just have to accept the blow to my style points.
He gets out and opens the rear door for me, because it would look weird as shit if a mid-ranking Watchman pulled up and just let some freak clanker slab hop into the back of his wagon without prompting.
Inside, it’s not what I’d call a hotel room. High brackets mounted in two lines along the walls, for chaining lawbreakers’ wrists above their heads. Only the barest whisper of cushioning on the benches to prevent suspects from splitting their own bodies on hard metal edges. Whole rest of the interior is stark metal with some kind of transparent laminate, so the precinct can hose the cabin down without any fuss, in the event of detainees getting all splattery.
I hunch my head down and take a seat by the drivers’ cab window grate. Even though this thing was designed to contain 6-8 arrestees without too many broken bones, you’d have a hard time fitting more than two of me in here.
The Lieutenant fires up the engine, and we’re off down the road.
He looks in the rearview at me and says, “Since I’m kind and generous enough to risk my career by playing chauffeur for you, you wanna fill me in on what exactly’s been going on?”
I tell him the entire thing, more or less. There isn’t much reason to hold anything back anymore. If he’s going to be on my side, I might as well be honest with him. I even tell him about the missing cryomancer. He’s cheesed with me about it for a second, but loosens up after he hears about me getting one of my eyes knocked out.
“Seagraves. Fuck. I won’t lie - I’m kind of heartbroken that you didn’t call me after gluing him to the street. That arrest would have made me Captain all by itself. Hell, they’d probably skip Captain and just make me Major of the entire district.”
“He was professional with me and tipped me off on who hired him, so I threw him a bone.”
He snorts. “Don’t let any officers other than me hear you say that. Seagraves’s augmetics are greased with gallons and gallons of Watchman blood. Some guys have made it their life’s mission to take their vengeance out of his hide. I don’t think there’s anyone in the city the Watch hates more than Krint Seagraves.”
“Would you’ve been able to arrest him? The guy’s so strong that he probably funds his operations by punching people into diamonds. The only reason I got away from him was magic and about seven dump trucks full of luck.”
The Lieutenant doesn’t have an immediate response to this. “... Maybe not. No one else has been able to pull it off. But I would’ve fucking tried.” He lights a cigarette. “Anyway. Him being involved confirms at least one thing - the Brotherhood want you in a vat. Or in a bag. In something. So much for bribery.”
“Yeah. And if they keep pressing, they’re gonna get me eventually. The entire Brotherhood is more enemy than one guy can handle, even if I am a lot of guy. Hence the Library. If I’m going to make it out of this alive, I need to learn some new tricks.”
“I understand that. I don’t love it a whole lot, but… put it this way, you’re about the only arcanist in this city that can say ‘Hey Deepwell, I’m gonna go become a more powerful wizard, just like Kartullus!’ and not get immediately Watched all over.”
“... Didn’t Kartullus get more powerful by devouring the souls of… I think precisely nine-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine willing sacrifices?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Featherlight. I am a good citizen who does not pollute his mind with tales of atavist mumbo jumbo. But yes, he did. And then he turned the entire world into a zombie-infested undead empire and ruled over it for four hundred years.”
“I don’t want to rule the world. I mostly want to rule my apartment.”
“Some would say that’s how it starts.”
“Others would say that doing anything past that would take ambition, which I am notoriously bereft of.”
“People change.”
I look him flat in the eyes. “Look, Deepwell. If I come out of the Library scattering lunglocker spores and plague juice everywhere while cackling about becoming an invincible death mutant to drown the world in a tide of disease and monsters, I give you permission to shoot me right in the face.”
“... Would that even stop you at that point?”
“Probably not. But I also give you permission to just… I dunno, tell the Mayor or something. A single Wellwarden would probably be more than capable of cutting my ass in half regardless.”
“I don’t really want to get anywhere near a Wellwarden. If you go all Primordial on me I’ll probably just skip town and let the Brotherhood handle it. I’ve got family in Valtea. I’d be fine farming.”
“Not gonna lay down your life for the security of the city, big man? Badge too heavy?”
“I love my job and I love my town, but it pays to know when love needs to run out.”
You know what’s interesting? He’s lying. It’s in his vitae - you can see the wavering, the subtle bruised-shadow discoloration that comes from hidden shame. He wouldn’t cut town if there was a real, honest-to-gods megamonster on the streets. He’d wrestle it with his own two arms and die trying to cram his revolver down the beast’s throat. He’d go out like a goddamn supernova, just as blinding as his vitae is.
Most people lie to make themselves seem more valorous than they actually are. Deepwell is lying to make himself seem more cowardly. I wonder why.
We’re quiet for a little while. Deepwell and I aren’t friends. We’ve just worked together for a few years. Neither of us is really comfortable enough with the other to engage on a personal topic, but we’re too familiar to erect a panicked sonic barrier of small talk between us. We just let the city judder and limp past us. It’s not rush hour, but it’s Wellspring City, so driving is only marginally slower than going backwards, regardless of what time of day it is. The trains ride on rails high above the streets most of the time, so they’re always faster when you can catch one. The only reason I wanted a ride is for once we’re outside the Wall.
And honestly, I just really don’t want to exit the city’s protective clamshell by myself. I’ve mentioned my issues with agoraphobia. I’ve only had to go outside the Gate maybe two or three times in my life and I always hated it. Horizons are overrated. It’s just a fucking line with two colors on either side. People always getting so het up over them like they have intrinsic meaning.
Is this tough guy posturing making me seem more confident? God I don’t want to go out there.
But I have to.
The human condition is kind of funny that way. The very first thing any of us do is something we desperately, hatefully do not want. It’s not even a choice. We’d rather do literally anything else. We kick, and we scream, and it’s cold and terrifying and we just want to go back in.
Then we keep doing it over and over, every day, for the rest of our fucking lives. How fucked up is that?
I think the true mark of wisdom is when a guy finally figures out how to stop being born. It’s been 29 years and I still haven’t gotten there. Maybe someday. Until then, I’m clawing and bawling the whole way down the road.
“Why not just take another job?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Hm?”
“I know you know this isn’t the only bounty on the board. We’ve got plenty. Some of them even have names and pictures attached. Really easy. Kid’s stuff, frankly. I’ve already given you your consultant fees. Why not just… do something else? It seems like this job might be hotter than it’s worth.”
“Well… you know me, Deepwell. I love a good scrap.”
“... What? No you don’t. The last time I gave you a tip that led to you bagging a guy you complained for five straight hours about all the different places you’d rather be and things you’d rather be doing. All of them were ‘taking a nap in my apartment’. The gods put the brain of a total slacker into the body of a quadruple-threat fighting machine.”
“That is an exaggeration, officer.”
“Barely. Come up with a better deflection.”
“You want the short answer or the long answer?”
“The real answer.”
“Okay. The real answer is that I’m tired of living just for me. I used to do more and now I don’t do anything. I’m slipping into nothing. Yeah, most of me wants to jump ship and pretend like none of this ever happened. Just ignore all of it. Ignore the inquest, ignore the conspiracy, ignore the threats on my life and the lives of my friends, just roll over and go back to sleep. It’d be easy, Deepwell.”
He knows what I mean. “Yeah. It would be.”
“I’m not about to turn upside down and go full anti-Rec insurrectionist or anything, but… this shit has to stop, whatever it is. I’m just one of the assholes that got cursed with the power to do something about it. There’s someone out there trying to stir shit up in a major way, and we’ll see if they want to keep going after a Featherlight floats to the top.”
Deepwell smiles a little. “You kind of remind me of me when I was your age.”
My brow comes crashing down like a landslide. “I’m sorry, what? How fucking old are you?”
“32.”
“I’m 29, you imperious jackass.”
“People can change a lot in three years. Three years ago I kind of felt like you do now. I wasn’t sure about my place. Wasn’t sure about where I was headed and why, or if any of it was going to be worth spending my only life on it. Then something happened, and I crystallized. I knew where I was supposed to be.”
“Yeah? I wanna be a crystal. What happened?”
He fixes his eyes on mine through the rearview again. He’s still smiling, very slightly. But it isn’t a happy smile.
“I killed a man.”
His eyes go back on the road, like that’s nothing.
“... Oh.”
Neither of us says anything for a bit. Procedure says there has to be at least some amount of silence after someone says those four words in that order.
He continues, “No need to get all wilty on me or anything, I’ve had years to live with it. And this wasn’t the kind of guy you have a funeral for.”
The Lieutenant takes a long, contemplative drag from his smoke. “But it’s kind of funny, in a way. My career up until that point was in catching people, and I was pretty good at it. Killing isn’t in my job description. Not officially, at least. I didn’t want to kill anyone, that’s not what I signed up to do. But for years, I thought to myself that same tough guy crap you hear from every shithead young cop with daddy issues. ‘I’m not out to kill, but I will if I have to. Don’t push me, scum. It’ll be just like taking out the trash.’ I sat there with an itchy trigger finger and convinced myself that if it ever came down to me, I’d fire and forget all about it.”
“... I take it that’s not what happened.”
“No. It wasn’t.” He sighs. “You remember the Slither Pit?”
It takes me a second, but then I do remember. “Yeah. Ugh, yeah, I do. Jith Landup’s rape joint. I was on other work at the time, but I remember seeing his bounty go up once you guys had started closing in on him. I nearly took it, but then it went down.”
“Did you ever hear what ended up happening to him?”
“No, I wasn’t really paying all that close attention.”
“I happened to him.”
“... Ah. That’d be why I haven’t heard anything about him in a while.”
“We cornered him and he tried using one of his girls as a human shield. Gun to her head, told us to back off. Y’know, like a hero. We gave him all the opportunities the rulebook tells us to. Second and third chances. Procedure is clear after that, and a good Watchman doesn’t spit on the rules.
“Landup was never the brightest. He didn’t bother trying to hide his head behind the girl’s. And it’s not like we were at opposite ends of a slaughterball stadium or anything, it was an unmissable shot. I don’t have camera eyes like some of us, but I can play back that moment in my head, even now. It’s kind of incredible what a digpop shell does to a man when you fire it directly into his brain stem. In one frame there’s a whole and complete human head, sneering, insisting that you’re not bold enough to take the shot. You pull the trigger, and in the next frame it’s just two gallons of red paint and a handful of teeth.”
He takes another long drag. There’s no agony in his face that I can see. None in his voice, either. Change the words out and he could be talking about cleaning toilets, or balancing his checkbook.
“I killed Landup so bad I could taste him from twenty feet away.”
I suppress a shiver.
“Well… look, you’re not gonna catch me wringing my hands over the headless corpse of poor old Jith Landup, serial rapist and sex slaver. If there’s anybody that deserved to be turned into vat carrots, it’s him.”
He nods. “I know. That’s what I thought when I pulled the trigger and that’s what I thought after. But I was surprised to find that there was still a difference. Something was different. No, Landup wasn’t worth anything to anyone. The opposite, actually - the man was so foul that if you buried him no grass would ever grow on the grave. But that knowledge didn’t stop me from having nightmares about it. And that’s when I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.”
“... You had to do something that gave you nightmares, so your reaction was to... keep doing it?”
He smirks joylessly. “What kind of Watchman would you rather have on the streets? The one that pulls the trigger because the rules have finally let him? Or the one that only does because the rules make him?”
“I’d rewrite the rulebook to make a new Watchman, honestly. But if you make me pick, sure, the second one.”
“I’m glad. Because there are more of the first than you’d think.”
That gets a chuckle out of me. “Uh… I think I’m experienced enough in fuckhead Watch harassment to realize how many bad eggs there are. There is one fucked up chicken slithering around out there somewhere. I can’t walk three blocks in the Inner Circle without getting picked up for suspicious activity. My activity is walking to the candy store in Sector Two I like. That’s as innocent as activities get, pal. But my face is a crime against nature, and I guess the Watch are environmentally conscious.”
“There are some Watchmen for whom supremacy and bullying are more important than maintaining the peace and upholding justice. And those are the guys that rule the roost. Because they’re the ones that get along best with the Brotherhood. I’m not sure how it wound up this way.”
“I’ve got a few fucking ideas. But I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to be an expert on human nature. Frankly, I don’t know how you wear the same badge as some of these vermin. Should shack up with the Surgeons. Lose about a hundred pounds and you’d probably do pretty well with them.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“There are only ever two approaches, Featherlight. Do you stay and try to fix the thing you love from the inside, or do you jump ship and find something else to believe in?”
“In my experience it’s best to not go diving after sunk costs.”
“And in mine it’s best to stand your ground. If I didn’t think I could change the Watch for the better, I wouldn’t have stuck with it for as long as I have. And you can tell your Surgeons that they’d do a lot more good if they put on a uniform and went through the right channels. Like civilized people. Instead of setting a bad example for impressionable young minds. Such as yours.”
“Fuck you, Lieutenant Beergut.”
“Not gonna go all vigilante on me, are ya? Start breaking into medical supply closets and beating up people in alleys to make your points?”
I snort. “I’ve been considering it for the last decade and a half. It can’t pay any worse than what I get now. And I bet I could do more justice with two fists and a shadow than you could with an armory and a whole precinct of goons.”
“We generally prefer to take our suspects alive and undamaged, Featherlight. Due process and whatnot. Ground vatmeat can’t stand trial.”
“Trials. So easily you place shackles on the eager claws of Justice.” I throw a paw dismissively.
Deepwell just shakes his head.
After a while of talking about nothing and looking at nothing, we get to Eleven. It’s the same hive it always is. The road leading up to the Gate is wide, hostile, packed tighter than three bears in a bag, and completely choked with exhaust. Just a smooth charcoal gray wasteland with poison clouds.
Grifters and beggars swarm every car that’s stuck in traffic, with hands out and signs held high. Deepwell flashes his badge. The entire crowd scatters away from the paddy wagon like it shot a tongue of fire at them.
Vagrancy is as illegal as it is vaguely-defined, and begging is only legal if you have a beggar’s permit. Application and processing fees to obtain said permit are in the orbit of thirty thousand credits, so... basically every beggar in Wellspring City is a filthy criminal scum in addition to being completely destitute. He has to do this two more times before we finally reach the end of the line. The van says “WATCH” and has a goddamn all-seeing eye insignia on its sides, are these people too poor to pay attention? I don’t have any money either, but you don’t see me trying to claw some out of the exact same hand that’ll swing a shock baton at me for trying. Go do a crime that pays better, guys.
After about three million years, we finally get to the head of the column of trucks and overland tankers destined for parts unknown. They’ll be exporting cheap vatmeat, expensive manufactured nonsense, and three or four different flavors of oppression to every corner of the known world. Signed, sealed, and delivered safe, or your civilization back.
One of the Gate Watch guards stops us. He looks in the window at me. I smile and wave at him, because I’m nice. I can’t hear everything that’s said between him and Deepwell, but there’s a lot of evasions and vagaries on the Lieutenant’s part, with a healthy amount of rank flashing and “because I said so” for good measure. It’s amazing watching societal constructs work in someone’s favor for once. I wish I could boss people around and get away with stuff just because the symbol on my shoulder is worth more than the other guy’s.
Left with no other choice, the guard just shrugs and lets us through. I get that, buddy. Just close your eyes and think of the paycheck.
And with that, we’re out of town. The Wall drops away from us like a cast-off coat, and there’s nothing but the sky, the ground, the road, and us. I look down at the floor plates and try not to think about it too much. Deepwell turns left and then we’re offroad, onto the vague trail around the circumference of the Wall that no one ever really needs to use.
“How far are we going?”
Without looking up, I reply, “Just to the start of the northeast quadrant. I’ll hoof it from there.”
I can hear his smirk. “Man. You really don’t like not having a roof over your head, huh?”
“Yeah, so? Nothing out here but sand pirates and wind anyway.”
“You should get out more. Try traveling. Maybe you’d be happier.”
“I am happy,” I lie, “and if I could afford to hire a rig out of this dump, do you really think I’d play cops and robbers with you as often as I do?”
He shrugs. “Just saying. Could do you some good to broaden your horizons. It’s a big world.”
“Well, I’ll let you know when I find the time in my busy schedule for a vacation. Maybe I’ll spend a week or two at the bottom of the sea. Hear it’s lovely this time of year.”
Deepwell snorts. “I hope you’ve earned all that negativity. Nothing worse than a guy that uses bitterness as a fashion statement.”
“I’ve earned plenty. You just keep your eyes on the road there, tough guy.”
He shrugs again and pipes down. Still smiling. He’s not mad, he’s mostly just amused by my childishness. I can’t help it. All this empty space is crowding in on my skull. And I’m nervous. I’m a coward, see, and a big part of being a coward is doing the same exact thing every single day because doing anything different would be uncomfortable and risky. This sucks. But I keep my whining internalized to spare the Lieutenant two bleeding ears and a free room at the insane asylum.
The desert slides past us. There aren’t any windows in the back, but I can see the passenger’s side window through the security grille. It goes on forever. I don’t know the exact number of miles the Everwind Desert is across, but I do know that it’s so many it might as well actually be forever. There’s a reason why rig drivers are some of the most respected and occasionally feared people in working class society - no one in their right mind would willingly choose a job that has you helming a 50 ton land ship across thousands of miles of nothing for months on end with nothing but sand pirate attacks to break up the monotony. You’d have to have the mental fortitude of a Zhalsiran frost monk to withstand more than one deployment.
By the time we get around to the spot where I think the door might be, the sun is about halfway down the far side of its daily hill. I tell Deepwell to stop more or less at random, because I have no actual idea where I’m going, and he does, before letting me out of the wagon.
I hesitate for a fragment of a second before exiting the metal shell of the truck. The infinite blue sky above presses down on me, hard, and suddenly I’m very thankful for the blank metal expanse of the Wall to the left. It’s something to mentally lean on. Once I get over myself, I stretch a bit. Deepwell’s just looking at me. I know he saw me inch a bit closer toward panic, but he didn’t say anything - not poking fun at my fear, but not patronizing me by saying anything comforting. It’d be hollow support coming from him anyway, and both of us know it.
Instead, he takes out a pair of small circular sunglasses, puts them on, and says, “I don’t see anything.”
Looking through all the wind and sand and heat, I don’t see anything either. Other than the Wall and a fat lot of nothing.
I nod. “Good. If I’d walked you right up to the entrance I’m pretty sure I’d be assassinated. They’re very serious about informational control.”
“I guess that’s a plus. You’re gonna be good from here?”
“Think so.” I shuffle my backpack at him. “Got water, some snacks. I can make it back into the city myself if things don’t go my way. Even though my knees will probably stage a revolt.”
“Hmm. Well, alright.”
And here it is. That momentary silence.
Y’know, there are lots of different kinds of silence in the world. This is the silence that comes between two men who respect and may actually like one another, who are about to part ways, possibly for a long time. In another life, they probably would have been good friends, but circumstance and the modern world have thrown too many barriers. This silence is clumsy, and confused, and full to bursting with things that could be said but probably won’t be, for simple human reasons that are going to seem pretty silly in about 70 years once it’s too late for them to mean anything. There’s a sigh from one. A glance down at the dirt from another. The things we fill the time with while we flail around in our heads for the right thing to say.
Deepwell breaks first. I figured he would. He’s a man of action - the paralysis of indecision makes him feel shameful, so he’s just going to default to whatever path seems least stupid and go from there. It might not be the best path, though - just the safest.
He takes a couple of big man strides over to me. This probably works like hell on everyone he meets, but I’m literally twice his size. Deepwell doesn’t care. He just holds his hand out. My own eclipses his completely, but I shake anyway, respectfully. Our eyes meet. I have to close my inner eyes because his vitae is fucking blinding. Then he lets go.
The Lieutenant says, “I’m still not sure if what you’re doing is the right thing, but you seem to think so. And I guess if anyone I know had to do it, you’d be the one. So good luck. Don’t let any asshole wizards shove you around.” He jabs a finger at me. “And don’t fuck it up. If I don’t see you on my streets doing my dirty work again within the next couple days, I’m putting out a search team. Neither of us wants that headache, huh?”
No one at his precinct would willingly join a search party to find me, and he probably wouldn’t be able to get authorization for it in the first place. He knows that as well as I do. He’d be out here by himself, searching in between shifts, until time came to give up. And with Deepwell, I don’t know how long that would be. This realization doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, but it is… something.
I just snort. “No one shoves me around. I might fuck it up, who knows, but I can guarantee I’ll be stinking up your office again sooner rather than later. God knows I just can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet Watch blood money.”
It’s stupid that we have to bury the message under all this macho posturing and sarcasm.
I care about you more than I would a casual acquaintance. It would be good if I saw you again. I would like it if there were more opportunities for us to interact and potentially become actual friends, if it’s possible. In retrospect, both of us could have tried harder, and it’s dumb that we didn’t.
He nods, smiling. “Later, Featherlight. Take care of yourself. And be good.”
“You too, Deepwell.”
And in the space of three blinks he’s in the car and off back down the trail, leaving my poor unfortunate ass standing in the middle of a fat lot of nothing.
I just start walking. There’s no sense thinking about it more than I have to. The Wall on my left seems like it’s barely going by at all as I take step after step through the sloshing sand, pounding a slow drum beat on the hard earth.
This far away from the Gate up along the Wall, there really isn’t anything to see. Right outside the Gate for a decent bit of space all around you get a whole area of city spilling out of its shell - tents, shacks, and camps for a mile or so at the mouth. Mostly traders attempting to fleece people on their way in or out of the city, or people waiting for some paperwork to clear so they can get in. It’s messy, and occasionally violent. Well, messier and violent-er than inside the city, usually. Also way more wind.
The fucking wind. I’m really, really glad that I don’t have real eyes right now. Or long hair. Or an air filter of any kind. We didn’t land on the name Everwind Desert for nothing. It just never stops. Ever. This place is so punishing that even rocks don’t last long against the incessant assault of air and flying grit. The only reason the city’s even livable is because the Wall does a good job of interrupting the current, and hasn’t shown any sign of erosion even after, uh… thousands of years, I guess.
I really hope I find the way into this place soon. I don’t really have a great idea what I’m supposed to be looking for, other than “the way will be dug down into the sand, against the Wall of the city”. One would think it would be less than obvious, if they don’t want people wandering in. Then again, no one really has any reason to circumnavigate the Wall like this. Unless they’re… some kind of Wall enthusiast. Maybe those exist. They sound perverse and I do not want to meet one.
Time passes. The sun crawls closer to the ground I’m walking on. Both of us are probably going to be pretty tired by the end of this.
Y’know, depending on how this entrance looks, it might be easy to miss. And all I’ve got is the sun to orient myself - the Wall doesn’t have features. How the fuck long do I walk before I turn around again? How many times do I turn around before I give up?
I pull a plastic bottle out of my bag and take a sip. Fuck it. We’ll leave it in fate’s capable hands. I wish this was beer. Fuck it.
At least it isn’t insanely hot outside. It’s hot, sure, because this is the hottest place in the world, but Winter is coming on and the sun is getting long in the tooth. The heat lines on the horizon aren’t quite the writhing field of translucent snakes that they usually are. And it helps that I’m in the shadow of the Wall.
Hm. It’ll be my birthday soon. I’m turning thirty. Gods below, I’m gonna be fucking old. When I was a kid I never thought I would get to be old. People from Sector Nineteen don’t often get the privilege. That counts triple for slabs, and quintuple for mages. Then a bunch of shit happened and now it looks like I don’t even have a say in the matter. I guess people have been cursed with worse things than unnaturally good health. Honestly, I should submit myself to the University for study - I’m probably some kind of freak statistical anomaly on top of everything else.
Speaking of freak anomalies… there’s something in my head.
Let me be more specific. There’s a lot of crap in my head - some of which is better understood than the rest. This thing just showed up. It feels like the cold slimy slug of a telepath’s probe, wriggling through the jelly folds of my brain, but… warmer. Older, somehow, and less clumsy or invasive. Like a signal fire on the horizon rather than an insistent knock at the door.
It has directionality, too. That’s promising. Or possibly incredibly dangerous. Could be some kind of trap, I guess, but who’s out here up against the edge of nothing laying traps for mages? Outside the wall is where most people want mages to be. Hmm.
I stop walking and scatter my vitae outward, scratching my chin idly. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Where and what are you, little presence? Reveal yourself to me. Or uh, make a smell or something. They say it’s a bad idea to spook a twitchy biomancer. Well, they don’t, but I do. And it’s true! Anyone with common sense would know better than to make a sudden move around an eight-hundred pound animal with magic powers and a lot on his plate right now, okay?
It’s coming from somewhere up ahead of me, not far. I don’t see anything in the general direction of where it feels like it’s coming from. And I guess that makes sense - this doesn’t feel like a person, really, or an animal. Something even simpler, somehow. As I get closer the feeling gets… not more intense, but larger, in my head. Not painfully or anything, just in the same way that nearby objects look bigger than far away ones.
The brown-white-gray brick-wood-paper sensation pulls me about a hundred or so yards along the side of the Wall. Then I find where it’s coming from.
It’s just a fucking hole.
It doesn’t look particularly new, and there’s no adornment or anything. Just a slightly rounded, packed-earth descent into the ground, maybe… forty feet long? Following the non-curve of the wall. It looks like the ground is custard and someone just shoved their thumb in it. There’s no piles of cast-off earth nearby. Not even any footprints - not that they would last for longer than about thirty minutes out here anyway.
I look around me. I don’t see anyone, and I don’t feel anyone either. There’s just that… feeling. Radiating from the hole. The sense of a place.
My feet take me closer to it, cautiously. In my chest I know this is exactly what I was looking for, but in my brain I’m ready to get attacked by a pack of cyborg zombie wolves. With laser teeth. My brain is ready for this specific scenario pretty often, which I always found kind of strange considering that this eventually has literally never once befallen me, nor to anyone else, ever. Don’t tell it I said so, but I think my brain might be an idiot. A paranoid idiot.
I look over the edge of the hole.
It’s just stairs, going down alongside the Wall, out of the sunlight. They’re stairs only if you apply a very loose definition - more like regularly carved dirt ridges in the shape of stairs. Not sloppy work per se, but efficient, like whoever did this is used to doing it all the time and very quickly. They go down about the same distance as they are long, and end in a flattened, hard earth landing.
The landing holds a door, on the left. It’s made of reddish wood, with an old engraved-brass handle. Dark frame. Fancy. The kind of thing that might lead to a closet in a Sector Two manor.
That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that the door is flush against the Wall. Whatever space it leads to would have to be dug into the Wall for the door to make sense at all.
And that doesn’t make sense.
You can’t dig into the Wall. Shovels can’t get through the Wall, blowtorches can’t get through the Wall, thousands of years can’t get through the Wall. Nothing gets through the Wall.
I guess the Librarian knows something that the rest of us don’t.
And that feeling is still there. It’s coming from the door, has to be. Shining off it. It’s like candlelight, and wax, and shadows older than nations. Don’t ask how I know that. I’ve got just as much idea of what’s going on here as you do at this point.
I descend the dirt steps before I even realize that I’m moving. You ever feel like Destiny has her hand planted firmly in the middle of your back and is gently pushing you toward something? She’s bossy. And hard to ignore. The earth rises up around my ears and the smell of ancient desert soil piles up in my nostrils like sandbags. It’s probably been thousands of years since this stuff saw sunlight.
And then I’m standing in front of the door.
It’s a big door, but still not built for someone my size. I’ll have to hunch down to fit, but that’s not new. What’s new is the circumstances. What’s new are the possibilities. I’ve been pretending like I have at least some kind of idea what’s going to be on the other side, but I don’t. Not really. And my gut tells me that this is one of those doors that a person can only ever walk through once. Whatever’s behind it will either kill you or change you into someone else.
I take the cool brass knob between my thumb and forefinger, but I don’t turn it.
I’m sure as sugar not gonna die. I suck at dying and I’m not in the mood to take up a new hobby.
But am I ready to change?
To stop being the person I am, and turn into one with new ideas, new powers, and new responsibilities? Am I ready to climb back onto the table and be mutated some more? Am I prepared to shoulder all that again, after the last time hurt so bad? There’s no way of knowing how this will end. It’s outside postulation, and it’s just laughing at conjecture. I won’t have any control - I won’t even be able to act like I do. I step through, and everything I know is thrown into the wind. Is this right? Is this even smart?
… Wait. What am I saying? I’m Baulric Vaxmord Alamantus Featherlight. Cyborg wizard mutant by accident and professional lazy fuckup on purpose.
I’ve never been smart, baby.
I wrench the knob, throw the door wide, and charge through into the dark.
Come what may.
END OF PART ONE