“Blood.
Blood is all.
The blood of beasts belongs to the gods.
The Smoking Mirror belongs to the gods.
The blood of beasts belongs to those who bear the Smoking Mirror.
Let not the beast deny the god his due.”
—The General Principles of Gens Nxtlu
----
Last Era Libraratory
Tumbling Seeding 20, 1885 CE
Tvorh couldn’t believe his eyes. His mother floated in the pustule before him, and all he could think was, “She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.” And then, as the refrain died out in the front of his mind, a new one took its place: “Hrega was right. Hrega was right. Hrega was right.”
How could Mother have survived in this place for two long years? That would mean someone else had been here. But if she hadn’t been trapped, then how did she find it and get in? The same way that Hrega had found it?
That thought was almost as disturbing as the knowledge that Hrega had tracked their mother here.
“Mother,” he whispered again when he found his voice, and discovered that he had nothing else to say to her. “Mother” was all that she had ever been to him. Indeed, it was all she could ever be. Everything else fled from the presence of that one simple fact. “Mother,” he said, more loudly, but she didn’t stir. “Mother!” he yelled, but it was no use; her eyes remain closed, and her body in a state of repose within the fluid.
Distant pops sounded, and her eyes fluttered open. “Gunshots detected in primary boulevard. Please cease all gunplay in central corridor,” she murmured, her voice emanating from chordal units placed within the writhing mass of nerves. Her eyes began to fall shut again.
“Mother!” Tvorh screamed. “Wake up!”
She blinked, and a soporific gaze fell on Tvorh. Furrows of confusion creased her brow. “Tvorh? Where…”
“Don’t worry, mother. I’m going to get you out.” Tvorh stepped forward into the chamber, then looked about at a loss. There were no obvious controls to the Tool that had assimilated his mother. He was right in front of her, and he was as far away from freeing her here as anywhere else.
Anywhere else. That was it! In one of these rooms, there had to be some mechanism for releasing her. “I’m going to take care of you,” he said as her eyes fluttered and began to fall shut. “I’ll be right back.”
Tvorh ducked out the door and collided immediately with a body. “Senrii—” he began, but when he looked up, all he saw was the grinning skull mask of a Nxtlu warrior. Tvorh’s hand went for his knife, but the man’s arms embraced him, crushing the life out of him.
An echoing shot rang out, and the man went limp, slumping to the ground past Tvorh. Senrii raced down the hallway from the direction of the central concourse. Her arms and legs pumped with inhuman speed as she approached; within seconds she had covered the hundred yards. “Come on, kid,” she gasped, grabbing his hand.
“My mother’s in there,” he protested.
“They followed us here. Beasts have bloodvision goggles. I must’ve bled on the way down. Or else it was your stupid bleeding feet.” She gestured at the blood-covered rags that passed for his shoes. “Kid, we’re gonna die if we don’t go right now.”
“Not without my mother.”
“Close up the cell, then.”
Tvorh struggled, but Senrii grasped his wrist like iron. “They’ll still be able to get in!”
“No, they won’t! Trust me!”
“Stop yelling!”
“Fine! Close the lab!”
“I won’t!”
Then Senrii’s hand was on Tvorh’s face, and something sickly-sweet was wafting into his nose and mouth.
…
His hand pressing a button…
…
Bouncing up and down… stomach so uncomfortable…
…
The crack-crack-crack of gunplay…
…
Swaying side to side, over and over, a sensation of being so close to falling…
…
Heavy minerals scraping together… pressure on the palm releasing…
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…
Motion… stillness.
“What… what happened?” Tvorh moaned. Darkness surrounded him, and his temples pounded with a splitting headache. He was sitting in an upright position, his back pressed against a cold stone wall. “Where are we?”
He began to hum away the pain.
Senrii crouched opposite him. “Not far from the Libraratory door,” she whispered. “Not too loud. There might be more of them.”
“You… you drugged me.”
“I had to get you out.”
There was something wrong with Tvorh’s mind. It was all gooey, like a slop of offal slipping through his fingers as dug in the garbage. “You left my mother in there to die,” he croaked at last.
“Wrong again, kiddo.”
Tvorh slumped down the wall. “Why don’t you believe me that she’s there?”
“I do believe you. It fits. And because it fits, you’re wrong that I left her to die.”
“What? You… got her out? Where is she?”
“No. But she’s safe.”
“What did you do with her?”
Senrii scoffed a laugh, like there was something obvious that Tvorh was missing. “Nothing. It was what you did.”
He sat up straighter. His memory was still kind of fuzzy. It was an unusual sensation. “What? What did I do?”
“You closed the door to her cell.”
Tvorh slumped back against the wall. “They’ll just open it up,” he whispered.
“No, they won’t, Tvorh. They can’t open the doors because they don’t have your genes. Face it, kid. You’re a Key.”
Tvorh’s genes held the code to the functions of some long lost Tool? “That’s crazy.”
“Not really. I can’t push any of those buttons in there and get them to do anything. You can. Prime giveaway that they’re Keyed to you.”
“How is it possible?”
“Lots of genes survived the Pandemic, kid, and it’s been nearly two thousand years. They were bound to turn up sooner or later. Come on. We have to get going. It’s not safe here.”
Tvorh pushed up from the wall, staggered to his feet. Paused, feeling his face turn to wet ice, as a dark realization overtook him. “Wait. Hrega. My sister.”
“What about her?”
“She knew. She knew that my mother was in there.” Tvorh racked his brain, seeking some sort of explanation. “She brought me down here because she knew. Is that even possible?”
“Can’t say. Quit that humming. It’s hurting my ears.”
“Sorry. I —” His words cut off as his thoughts raced ahead of them.
“What?”
“If they followed you here, then they might have traced you back to my sisters.”
“Blood and bile. Come on, kid. We’ve gotta move.”
And move they did. Tvorh forged ahead through the darkness. Normally his memory was prodigious, but with the pounding headache and the lingering effects of the knockout gas disorienting him, it was difficult to remember and invert the twists and turns of the Labyrinth.
They traveled without light, and Tvorh hummed so loudly that Senrii had to quiet him several times. After the third time attracted the attention of a Nxtlu patrol, which Senrii dispatched with admirable efficiency — so she was right; they were swarming down here — he forced himself to pay better attention to the noise he was making.
It took an hour and a half and several wrong turns, but at last they emerged back into the Chasm among the disenfranchised. They moved into the flow of the people, and Tvorh breathed a sight of relief. They were almost home now.
Home. It was amazing how he could love someplace so horrible when its sanctity was finally threatened.
They topped the ladder that led to the fourth layer of the Chasm. Immediately Tvorh put out his hand to stop Senrii.
“What is it?” she whispered.
He held a hand to his lips and strained his hearing. “Something’s happening nearby,” he whispered.
“Thanks for the clarification.”
He shook his head urgently. “No. It’s…” He glanced up. “We have to move. Now.”
“Didn’t need to tell me twice.”
They sneaked through a small tunnel and wound their way across a cliff ledge. After shuffling around it, they emerged into a larger chamber. A throng of men, women, and children, all ragged, all frightened, huddled in a large cavern. The Chasm itself cracked through the far end of the chamber, and twenty yards beyond the open cliff, the far wall of the room rose up, a rocky obsidian barrier grasping fruitlessly for a distant blue sky.
Nxtlu Eagle Warriors walked among the crowd, displaying their weapons prominently. Senrii whistled at the sight. “Gotta get up there and blend in. They see me here, we’re done for. You heard them from all the way back there?”
Tvorh shook his head as they sneaked into the crowd. His acute hearing had certainly picked out the sound of the peoples’ frightened murmurs, but it was the conversation that was going on beyond them that had caught his interest. “There,” he said, pointing through the gathering to the lungboat parked at the edge of the cliff.
Around the boat, a dozen muscular men wearing the bare-chested uniform of Nxtlu Blooddrinkers stood guard around a small cadre of men and women. At the center of the circle, a bald, similarly bare-chested, dark-skinned man wearing a feathered headdress held conversation with a smartly-dressed black-haired beauty of similar complexion. This made for seeing in one day two women more beautiful than any he had seen in ages.
It was true that Tvorh’s standards were low, but it was still disconcerting.
Senrii let out a low whistle. “Not good,” she murmured. “Ilhicamina and Eztli.”
“Who?”
“Magus Dux Ilhicamina Generosus Ortus Nxtlu and Maga Comes Eztli Generosus Ortus Nxtlu. Brother and sister. He pretends at being the Dux of Acerbia.”
“He’s a blue-blood?”
“He is. And he’s good. You don’t get to his position without being good. What are they saying?”
Tvorh strained his ears and relayed the conversation as he heard it.
“This is everybody, then,” Eztli said.
One of the Blooddrinkers put a hand to his ear, nodded, and then said, “Every commoner in a two-kilometer radius, my Dux.”
“Good. Then let us not delay any further.”
“Ilhicamina,” Eztli said, placing a hand on her brother’s arm, “I don’t believe this is necessary.”
“Necessity must bow before efficiency, my sister. You keep to your skills, and I shall keep to mine. Have we any records of the ruins?”
“None that I have been able to find, my lord,” Eztli replied. “If your mens’ reports are true, they are pristine. And dangerous. And I must remind you, my brother, that the Nethress infiltrator and her Key are still at large.”
Senrii hissed. “How do they —”
Ilhicamina waved a hand to silence Eztli. “It is of little matter. If he has family, we will find them, and you, dearest sister, may finally have the chance to indulge in your…” He waved a hand. “Archaeological obsessions.”
That was Tvorh’s signal to move. He grabbed Senrii’s shoulders and pulled her close. “It doesn’t matter how they know. We have to find Hrega and Bilr.”
Senrii wasn’t done brooding. “Bastards must’ve planted an aural unit down there. Every word we said, transmitted over shortsphere.” Suddenly, she grinned wolfishly at Tvorh, and he realized how glad he was that she was on his side. “All right. I’m with you, kid. Let’s do this.”