Stockade
Halari forced herself to take a very, very deep breath to still her pounding heart. She leaned against the wall next to the door of the detainment building, listening to Callan’s words as he introduced her while she dribbled some more of the paint on to the blade of her knife. What was about to happen in the next few minutes made her nauseous, but she focused on the ember of hate she felt for the gildgrown, the need to get a lead on Jora, and the want to figure out just what the hell they were up to.
“…because she will not,” Callan finished. That was her cue. Halari swung around so that her shadow filled the door frame and bowed her head. This all felt goofy and dramatic to her, but Callan insisted theatrics were often underestimated for how useful they could be.
‘Fear of the pain is often good enough in an interrogation,’ he’d said over a shared bowl of ashbuds a couple nights ago. ‘Especially if they’re convinced you’re gonna follow through.’ That was the ticket question: was she going to follow through? Again, she reached inside herself to stoke that ember of her wrath; it grew especially hot and bright as the sound of her enemy’s existence made itself known.
The gildgrown’s wheezing was harsh and fast, like the panting of a cornered animal.
I’m actually scaring it, Halari realized, stalking towards her target with measured steps. Grease paint dripped off the tip of her knife, adding to the appearance of her approach. She stopped in front of the gildgrown’s cell. It was the only one with a light on but a dim one at that.
“Stay away,” the bound gildgrown gurgled. “I have nothing to say to you, blood-witch.”
“That’s too bad,” Halari growled, unlocking the gate and sliding inside. She wondered she how she looked to this thing cowering on the bench. Was the paint enough? The gildgrown’s body language definitely displayed some fear. “I just got done talking to some of your friends.” She held up her knife for it to see the red on its metal edge and almost smiled when the freak’s fluttering gurgles sped up. “I’m hoping you can be a little more helpful than they were.”
“Leave me be!” it screamed, wiggling away pathetically on defunct legs.
“One of our citizens is missing,” Halari said. She placed the tip of her knife against its clothed shoulder, praying all the while she wouldn’t actually have to push it in. Inside, she begged the gildgrown to blabber everything it knew. “Do you know anything about that?”
“I won’t speak to you!” it shouted, almost flopping off the bench in desperation. “I will speak to no one!”
Halari frowned and deflated inside. She didn’t look to Callan for approval or support; this was going to have to be something she did alone. The tip of her knife pressed deeper into the yellow rags. “Fine, have it your way then.” She cocked her arm back, then drove her blade into the gildgrown’s shoulder, right under where she figured its collarbone should be, although it was hard to tell under the rags.
The gildgrown screeched in pain, a sound like metal colliding under water, and writhed to make space between its body and her edge. Halari stayed on it, all going numb as she pressed down on the hilt, using the knife as a lever against the bone. It was like she saw all of this from a distance, like it wasn’t really her inflicting this pain.
“Do you know anything?” she asked again. Her voice sounded so hollow, so cold. The gildgrown thrashed, its legs unnervingly still. Too still. As if the pitiful creature was trying to keep them from flailing instead of them being assumedly useless.
Halari narrowed her eyes. Shouldn’t they at least be swinging about with all the movement? She slid the knife out, feeling something off about the way the yellow-clothed freak had fallen on its back in its agony.
She was too slow to get away.
The crippled gildgrown kicked her.
Its heavy, booted foot collided with her gut at full force, knocking the wind out of her lungs in a rush. Halari flew back and hit the bars of the cell with a dull ring! The gildgrown scrambled to stand, but its chest-bound arms made it awkward to rise, so she had time to recover.
What the fuck? Halari heaved in a breath, then readied herself to attack as her anger boiled in her blood. She was gonna carve this thing’s spine out vertebrae by vertebrae if that’s what it took!
No need.
Callan exploded into the room like a tempest and slammed the gildgrown into the back wall with his shoulder. He caught its body when it bounced off the stone, lifted it up horizontally and dropped it back-first down onto his knee.
That’s what you get, Halari thought with a gleeful snarl when the sound of snapping vertebrae echoed in the room. The gildgrown’s scream of pain wasn’t even louder than that. It flopped roughly to the ground, groaning like an old machine that’s rust hadn’t been cleaned in a decade.
Callan was knelt at her side before its golden body even hit the floor. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Halari growled toward the agonized gildgrown, standing with his helpful hand. “How’d it do that? I thought you said it was crippled.”
“It was,” Callan said. He grabbed the gildgrown by the back of its collar and held it up in one hand much like she did with small game she hunted in the wastes. “I turned its spine near the hips into gravel. It should never be able to walk for the rest of its life.”
Through groans of pain, the gildgrown started laughing again. It hacked out its amusement in ragged breaths and wheezed in agony in between them.
“Foolish snake-devil,” the gildgrown gurgled; Halari imagined that there was blood on its lips. “You know nothing of the power of the Giltspore!”
Callan growled, eyes flaring, then flung the freak back onto its cot like a bag of rotten tams.
“How did you heal like that?” Halari asked. “Tell me or I’ll just cut your legs clean off! See if they grow back!”
“My body feeds my Spore,” it hissed from where it lay haphazardly half-leaning on the wall. “My Spore feeds my body. It is beyond you. So long as my cultivated heart beats, it will heal the worst wounds. There is nothing you can do.” It started laughing again, proud of the power in its body.
“Perhaps it would be wise to stop speaking, prisoner,” Callan said. “If you were smarter, you might realize that might be exactlywhat the Blood-witch wants to hear.”
The gildgrown’s laugh cut off abruptly with a choking noise that prompted a dark giggle that Halari only felt a little a bit of shame for making. Its goggles turned to her, and, for the first time, she noticed her own reflection in the translucent, amber glass. She looked manic with grease paint ribboning down her face and a feral grin on her not-actually-bloody lips.
“What do you think?” Callan asked, turning to her.
Halari thought hard, looking at herself in the gildgrown’s lenses. Was this who she was going to be? A torturer? The Quarry’s torturer. The gildgrown’s blood witch. Her darker instincts begged ‘yes,’ and as much as she wanted to turn away from them, this enemy in front of her wanted to hurt her people.
She made a choice.
“So he’s saying we don’t understand the Giltspore?” Halari held her knife back up for the gildgrown to admire. It dripped with real blood this time. “Maybe a little bit of… experimenting could teach us something.”
“I agree,” Callan said slyly. “Research is always best to do when facing a new problem.”
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Halari stumbled queasily from the stockade, then sat onto a nearby bench and put her head between her knees.
That was a lot of fingers, she thought, feeling Callan take a seat next to her. He put a hand on her shoulder while she fought her roiling stomach as it tried very hard to displace her breakfast.
She held firm even against the gross images flashing in her head. Turned out when a gildgrown’s fingers were severed, then held back to the cut that long, thin vines reached out and reconnected the digits to the hand. However, if they were held out a short distance, the tendrils still reached for them, but… wiggled when they weren’t able to touch flesh. It was a revolting sight live, and not at all diminished in her memory.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I still can’t believe we got almost nothing valuable from that,” Halari whispered. She uncoiled on the bench and sidled closer to Callan with a heavy, disgusted sigh.
“We know what they want now,” Callan said.
“Spread,” Halari repeated. The prisoner’s mantra sounded in her ears: ‘We spread, we spread, we spread.’ That was all it said after nearly one hundred minutes of suffering at the hands of the Blood-Witch. Nothing about Jora, or even a place where its friends were located, just a declaration of intent chanted over and over and over. “They won’t stop, will they?”
“Most likely not,” Callan said. “And I don’t believe we’ll get any more out of the prisoner.”
“I’ll have to kill it,” Halari said with a small frown. “It can’t stay here.”
“I’ll take care of that for you,” Callan said. “You’ve already done more than enough.”
“My day’s not over, I still gotta go look for Jora.” She glanced at the sky where the white glare was halfway into its descent. If she left now, she’d have a few hours to search the city for signs of their missing Quarrywoman. “Damn I was really hoping that thing gave us info to work with.”
“If they took her, they’ve probably already killed her,” Callan said glumly. “Otherwise, they’ll have reached out for trade or ransom.”
“And that’s betting they’re reasonable,” Halari huffed. “But their goal doesn’t sound like logic to me.”
“Indeed,” Callan sighed.
They sat together on the bench in a pleasant, unwinding silence and Halari found some comfort in that warm static charge Callan generated around him, allowing herself to relax in it like a weighted blanket. Soon enough, far too soon, she forced herself to stand and stretched. It was time to go.
“You said the city was the best place to focus on?” she asked.
“According to something Telero hinted at,” Callan said, “it might be worth it to look.”
That filled her with a cold worry. Her brother was a locked door right now, but the idea that he had something to do with Jora’s disappearance pricked at her like a splinter in her thumb. Part of her deep down knew for certain that he absolutely had something to do with it, but she wasn’t ready to admit that to her conscience.
“I’ll go in deeper today,” Halari said. “Somewhere only I have the experience to navigate.”
“Will you be mad if I say—”
“‘Be careful?’” Halari finished for him, shooting him a a mock glare as she did so. “What do you think?”
Callan chuckled softly. “How about, ‘come back soon?’”
“Close to the line.” Halari kicked him lightly on the shin. “But acceptable. Barely. I’ll probably be back a bit after dark, so don’t wait up too long. And for all my hard work today, I want some kind of reward.”
“Such as?” Callan asked, looking curious.
“Midnight bowl of buds?” she asked with a shrug.
“Very doable.” He grinned at her. “Be careful out there.”
Halari slapped him on the shoulder, then mock stormed off, shooting a wave and real smile back at him once she was a distance away.
After briefing her team abroad on the area she planned to search over short-range comms, Halari was in the ruins of Atlanta before the next hour ended. The trawler rumbled along the broken streets, jolting every so often whenever it passed over a big pothole. Her pace was slower so she could keep an eye out for signs of Jora or wandering gildgrown, but nothing unusual from the standard display of desolation showed itself for blocks on blocks into the city. She footed the brakes to a squealing halt on reaching one of her own markers that designated the end of their currently surveyed zone.
A new frontier past this flag, she thought, studying the buildings ahead with a wary eye. They didn’t look too different than the ones next to her, but without knowledge to work off of, she might turn a corner and find herself plummeting into a sinkhole or a hive of mantiles. Deep breath, Halari, it’s not really any different than your first time inside.
She rolled past the flag into streets unknown, going even slower to check for signs of previous travel while trying to dismiss the thought that if Jora went this deep into the city for some Visionary-forsaken reason, she was definitely dead.
“Come on Jora where are you?” she asked the city. The empty buildings, different now than the ones she was used after a few blocks, watched her angrily. She was a trespasser in these streets; an interloper who’d crossed boundaries into a new world in just a matter of minutes. Here, the standard building was around three stories and pocketed with circular windows. Most had wide yards in front of them which were bordered with the bones of wrecked fences.
They slipped away once she turned a corner, giving way to the courtyard of the remains of the strangest looking building she’d ever seen.
What the hell is that? she wondered, stopping to take it in. It was the tallest building in the region by far, rising three times taller than the buildings nearby, and was also pyramidal in shape. Its top point was towards its front and its edges swooped away from that tip to give the whole building a look like that of a fin or ship sail rising from the ground. And that sail or fin was entirely made of glass. At least, she guessed it had been as there were plenty of panels intact near the bottom while a ton of shattered ones lined the top.
“Good enough place to look, I guess,” Halari muttered. Jora wasn’t by any means a navigator, so if she went this way she might have holed up to gain some vantage.
The courtyard itself was also weird. Its walking path winded downwards back and forth like a coiled serpent to the front door of the building. Rifle looped to her torso, Halari hopped the natural steps it made on her way to the door.
She flicked on her shoulder-light once she was near the entrance, but once she got inside there wasn’t any reason to keep it on.
Because the building came to life.
The lobby that she stood in lit up and illuminated her surroundings with crisp, flickering, white light. The whole place clearly didn’t have enough power to sustain anything, but there was enough to activate the room.
“Wowww…” Halari breathed. Like everything else, the interior was a ruined, dilapidated mess, but it was plastered with screens showing broken images of strange, colorful creatures moving about in water. People reached out to them, smiling and happy as they stood with their children. “What was this place?”
She shot to attention with her rifle when a voice bellowed from the ceiling.
“HELL—… WELCO—…THE… OBSID—… QIUM…” it echoed in the room. “PLEASE ENJOY—… JOUR—… SEA…” The voice went quiet.
“Hello?” she called, aiming down the nearby hallway. It was dark, but the second she crossed from the lobby into the passage, it also lit up, but the power left the room behind her. “Hello?! Anybody there? Jora? It’s Halari!” She kept her rifle up as she cleared the hallway. It was also decorated with screens, but they showed nothing different than the previous areas.
“Jora, are you here?” Halari called, moving into the next section. The hallway went dark, and when the area before her was given light, it shown on a vast cavern of a room stretching to her left and right. A staircase in front of her led up into darkness, but the dim light allowed to this part of the building was more than enough to see that she was in the middle of some kind of ancient gallery. Destroyed glass panels were set into divots in the walls that were empty, but clearly held something a long time ago.
Her next step caught something on the floor, sending her sprawling. Halari twisted on her back on the ground, pointing her gun in the direction she’d come from in case it was a trap. Nobody approached her, so Halari sat up and looked for the thing she tripped on.
The floor was clear. Almost perfectly empty except for some usual debris and trash that she easily should’ve been able to kick aside.
Tripping on your own feet? She rose and brushed herself off, then grabbed her rifle from where it fell. That’s not like you.
Halari searched the massive room of displays for indications of life or camping, but found nothing except for an incredible tunnel made of glass. Outside the glass was an astounding amount of murky water. She couldn’t see very far into it, but there were dark shapes in there that she prayed wouldn’t move. The glass tunnel led to a chamber with a stunningly large window into more murk. Rows of seats were set before it like that room in the Temple where they’d presented the past to her.
This place is huge, Halari thought, moving to a metal door next to the window. It opened to a lightless staircase leading down into a sublevel of the building. She reactivated her light, held her gun up, then proceeded down the stairs slowly with a fluttering heart. A small splash sounded when she hit the bottom and her boot sunk up to its toe welt.
“Of course it’s flooded,” Halari muttered, kicking some of the water up while she walked farther in. She doubted Jora was down here, but she felt obligated to finish checking the place out anyways being so far in already. Maybe there was some kind of boon in the building's guts, something she could trade to the Scrag Fort for a big return. Her shoulder-light revealed little except for the brackish water she walked in and arrays of pipes on the walls and ceiling. She followed the water to a hole in the wall which she easily slid through.
The lights returned in the next room. What it showed sent chills down her spine.
It illuminated a large square room, entirely flooded. On the far side was another hole, this one round and reaching floor-to-ceiling, and led back outside to an old street. If she wasn’t already petrified, she’d curse her stupidity for not doing a perimeter check for the integrity of the building.
What the fuck happened here? Halari checked her rifle’s chamber while keeping her eyes glued to the half-dozen or so mantile carcasses that ringed a wide, deep pit at the center of the flooded floor. The water was just clear enough that she could make out its edge, but too dirty to see the bottom.
The dead bugs were all missing their heads along with the meat in their abdomens. They’d been hollowed out. Halari carefully paced the square perimeter of the room with her gun trained on the pit. The water was still except for her own ripples, so whatever was down there was either not at home or—
“Oh shit!” Halari tripped on something again, this time rebalancing herself with a mighty splash instead of falling flat on her face into the water. She looked down, determined to find whatever she kept falling over, but saw nothing like last time. Slowly, she drug her foot back over the spot.
Her toe stopped abruptly, blocked on something invisible protruding from the watery floor. Halari knelt, drawing her knife, and poked at the spot gently. The tip of her blade dug into something tough and rubbery about two inches above the water, but exactly the same color. She poked around it and realized it was some kind of thick tube that extended from the wall…
Towards the pit.
Go for that hole. Get out of here. Halari straightened up with the utmost of careful movements and tensed to bolt for the opening.
The camouflaged tentacle below her, which had been the same color of the water, suddenly turned pitch black.
As did a dozen others that webbed the walls, shot up through holes in the ceiling, and reached back into the hallway she’d come from. In an instant, Halari stood trapped in an inky net of dark tendrils that all led to the center of the submerged floor.
Then something in the briny depths of the pit moved.