Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Red Cathedral

The staircase was a barren concrete shaft that fed upwards to the base of the Cathedral. Agloff felt his steps punctuated by fleeting awareness, as though he kept passing between the moment and some hazy nightmare.

A chorus of footsteps gathered over them, and Thawn pointed Agloff to his knife. He stayed back, while Thawn and Oxford fired pot-shots from against the railing to the floor above.

What have you done, Ariea, he thought. Perhaps she was already gone, and the coming ascent was mere torment for his failure to get there sooner, or to keep her in sight between the cobbles of Wishbone and the city gate. Or to leave Backwater wish such vigour in the first place. That was his basest failure, was it not? She had followed him, only half-seen by his captive eyes. They might die in this place, and the strength of his feeling might never go spoken.

Eron or Ariea, so it always had been.

Thawn’s shot carried in Agloff’s ears a dozen times. Shots billowed in a volley of noise that seemed ceaseless. There came a wail, and a pilgrim’s body capsized over the railing above, and hit the floor between them.

For a moment, the barrage scattered and Thawn yelled, ‘UP!’

They turned a quarter-floor and Thawn fired off two more shots and two bodies rolled to their feet. How obscene it was that they were bodies only. Obstacles pushed aside with scant regard. They were names and lives, Agloff thought. Silenced as abruptly as a television set.

The staircase fed onto a veranda overlooking the span of the Cathedral. It was a vast and tall place. The floor had been hollowed out and cleaved into walled rows, each lined with hospital beds. Agloff saw the far ends had been bricked up into smaller buildings, accessed by a door at the bottom and a walkway at the top that spanned between them. Its centre jutted off towards an open staircase at the back, twirling into the spire above.

Jask.

The way sloped down and into the first ward. It shimmered. The red brick of the building at large was lost in a maze of glossy whites and metal. Kids were chained to hospital beds. Nurses jerked from their duties; hands raised. And Agloff jabbed at them with his lipped knife to flee.

At once, they scurried behind the beds. Agloff looked up. The ceiling seemed boundless above, as though it touched the sky. Giant banners of Winter’s mark hung stiffly over them, the height of twenty men or more.

‘Key! KEY!’ Thawn barked, shaking his weapon at a nurse. He tossed it and fled the other direction and Thawn ordered Agloff to free the children. The same purpled, bruised marks Pela bore sullied their arms. Agloff did not stop to look in their eyes or answer their questions. Words passed over him. He felt incapable of all thought, only action.

One-by-one, cuffs clicked free and Oxford pointed them in the direction of the veranda and the stairway down to Special Projects. He caught Agloff staring down a line of doorways into the next ward. Glass, within glass, within glass. And he felt the impossibility of their task weigh on his soul.

He recalled what Lore had said: ‘Consider that you fail. How might those children be punished for trying to free themselves? Children whose lives are already in pain.’

But the point of return lay far behind them.

Oxford shook him to alertness by his shoulder. ‘Eyes sharp, soldier.’

Soldier. Soldier. Agloff was no soldier. He was an imposter.

He turned at the trail of children, confusedly hurrying from their beds, and herded them out the ward. Thawn kicked in the next door and so they repeated. If the nurses came with resistance, Thawn discharged his weapon and they faltered to the ground. It had the effect of motivating the children too. Agloff was unsure if they knew they were being rescued or captured, but one day they would be grateful. He wanted to tell them it was okay, but who would believe them invaders.

Thawn hoisted the children from their beds by their gowns, threw them to the floor if they weren’t forthcoming in their obedience. Agloff was reminded of the Underground. And the boys and girls snatched from the descending lines by guards as offerings to Winter. Now they did the same to free them.

The third ward, the staff were prepared. One extended a gun in a tremoring hand. Her mouth wobbled and Agloff saw she lacked the strength to fire it. He reached his blade towards her, but she struck him down by the back of his shin. Before he could resist, she raised an arm to strike.

Agloff felt a chill fizzle over him.

He turned.

The nurse was knocked backwards into a trolley-bed and Oxford then shot her into submission. Agloff looked down at his hands. His body shimmered where her blow had struck, with the faint haze of his guard-shield.

Thawn hauled Agloff to his feet. ‘Has its uses.’

‘Enough to stop a bullet?’

‘Wouldn’t go that far.’

Agloff turned to Oxford. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ He stared down and shook lightly at the sight of her.

‘I see them all the same. One day you will lose everything, and they will take it from you,’ he said. ‘Tell me then, what I don’t have to do, kid. I said I was here for my reasons, not yours.’

Agloff nodded. He supposed he couldn’t understand. Winter hadn’t taken Ariea from him, not yet, not completely. In Eron, it had taken only that which he never had to start with.

The next door fed sideways as the wards folded back on themselves in the other direction. Footsteps and shouts retreated and Agloff was sure the enemy had surrendered these wards, for the sake of victory later. He sensed them lie in wait, baiting Agloff into a false hope. He had no doubt pilgrims were closing on the Cathedral now, dozens or hundreds.

It was ironic. Their only hope was that Jask was alive enough to order them to stand down, lest they harm Agloff. Their momentum was sure to fail.

Time seemed to catch in a loop, and Agloff felt his body pattern through familiar motions. Unlock the cuffs, instruct the kids, move on. They slipped into a rhythm and their resistance waned further still. The nurses had abandoned their patients. Each ward, the children sat anxiously in their beds with pointed backs. Perhaps Jask had no need of them anymore, now Agloff was here. It would make sense. Unless they served another purpose, and the doctors were too valuable to spare. Or perhaps Jask simply didn’t care. There would always be more children, of course.

On the ninth or tenth ward, Agloff ducked to a child’s bedside. He tried to smile but it wouldn’t come, and the boy of ten or so watched him through piercing eyes, black beads in perfect white rings. Agloff looked down. Ridged scars criss-crossed over the boy’s chest in disturbing regularity, as if he had been opened up and sewn back together. Then, the cuffs clacked and Agloff reached to the boy’s wrist.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

But he grabbed onto Agloff first.

Agloff yelled. He felt his wrist contort under the unearthly grip of the boy’s fingers. He held on with the strength of ten men. His purpled arm bulged. Veins and tendons popped as though he were twice his age. Oxford threw a punch, but the kid knocked him backwards into a gurney. Thawn stepped between them and raised the boy by his neck.

At once, his grip gave way and the look in the kid’s eyes traded for fear. The corners of his eyes stooped, and he clawed beggingly at Thawn’s hand. Agloff watched his father’s fingers close.

‘That’s enough,’ Oxford said. ‘HEY!’

The child spasmed on hoarse puffs of air.

‘Thawn!’ Agloff yelled.

The stranger obeyed. The boy thudded against the ground dully and Thawn barked at him to flee.

‘The hell is wrong with you?’ said Agloff, cradling his wrist in his fingers.

‘It was you or him, and you’re more important than he is, I think. You didn’t complain so far.’

Agloff panted, lowered his hands to his thighs and hunched over. ‘He’s a kid dammit.’

‘Enemy’s the enemy, no? Doesn’t matter what they look like. I’ve done worse in war to younger, boy.’

‘You don’t need to patronise me.’ He flexed his fingers around his knife and pointed towards the next door. ‘He was scared, he wasn’t the enemy!’

‘Is that not the same thing? If they stand in your way, they’re the enemy. If they compromise the objective, they’re the enemy. I know you wish this was black and white but get over yourself. You want that girl?’ Thawn laughed. ‘This is how you do it. You don’t get to win, be all peachy and not feel guilty.’

‘Is that how you see us all? Objectives and compromises, tangents?’ Agloff paused. ‘I feel sorry for you, Thawn.’ He meant it too. The more Agloff saw of him, the more he pitied Thawn. He was not quite a man, more a routine, a series of operations, played out in logic and cold understanding. If A, then B, else X then Y. It was a grim, cold way to see the world, Agloff was sure. He wasn’t so trite as to call him a machine. But Agloff could see Thawn’s brain had sunk into a trough of ordered patterns, too deep to escape from.

He surmised Thawn had lived a long time. This must be a symptom of it.

‘I see you fine,’ the stranger said after a long silence.

‘Why the hell was he so strong? Is that what they did to Pela, to all of them?’ Oxford growled. He raked his fingers through his mane angrily.

Thawn growled. ‘This ain’t a time for questions.’ He pushed the next door open. ‘Get,’ he said. But Agloff sensed Thawn suspected more about the children than he was willing to say.

They crossed the line of the banners above them into the far side of the hall. Agloff could see now where the wall cut away into a tower, punctuated by windows that spiralled up beyond the roof of the main hall, to Jask and Ariea and Eron. He imagined the red bricks were stained by the blood of Winter’s many conquests. How many had died in the name of where they stood. The name was appropriate, he reckoned.

Thawn opened the door to the next ward, and they saw that it was empty. Crumpled duvets were left to taunt them and Agloff sensed that everything had been left exactly as it was. Now, he thought, their luck had surely run out.

This was not victory. This was the certainty of death, laid out for him to follow.

The next ward split at a T-bend and Agloff saw that it followed all the way to the staircase in a long, blinking passage. Any retreating footsteps had been ordered into silence, and the children of I.T. had long since been freed on the floors below. Agloff was their only protection now. If he strayed a foot too far from Oxford, a bullet could end him as immediately as he had the nurses.

He pressed a look through the glass of the door down towards the spire. The feeling that they were being watched was inescapable. Surrender tempted him as it had at Wishbone. But he knew Thawn wouldn’t allow it. And to surrender was to give up all semblance of control they had, though Agloff was sure that was an illusion in any case. Whatever waited for them beyond the door was more prepared than they were. Doctor, nurse, child, or pilgrim. They had to assume the worst of all of them.

He supposed they would do it Thawn’s way then.

The stranger reached a hand to a panel beside the door and it slid open into the wide corridor. A siren blared once, then the blinking lights sank into a heavy darkness. The corridor paved the way to a lone doorway some hundred feet down. Trolleys and stacked chairs watched their approach from slanted shadows that hid the edges of their surroundings.

Thawn and Oxford guarded Agloff with their weapons outstretched.

Their steps folded lightly over the floor. Every other second, Agloff threw a glance to check behind. Empty.

Then, Agloff heard something, a rhythm. The dull patter of a hundred footsteps outside the hull of the corridor. His pulse throbbed at his temple and he ducked a look sideways. Through the glass of the corridor, tens or more of grey-clad knights swept in lockstep to meet them at the windows, struck in half-shadow.

Thawn paused and reached an arm to guard Agloff and Oxford behind him.

As one, the enemy’s weapons trained towards them but made no movement of aggression. Their dead-glazed faces stood as statues, peering in through the glass.

It was a guard of honour.

‘What are they doing?’ Oxford said.

Thawn scoffed. ‘Making sure we don’t turn around.’

Agloff looked at Oxford. He saw thoughts rattle through his head. His teeth rolled over his lip in ceaseless animation. Then he stopped. Oxford jerked sideways and his gun fired off towards the window. On instinct, Agloff pushed into him and they were tipped towards the concrete floor.

They heard the shattering of glass, but no retaliation came.

Thawn dragged Agloff back to his feet. A hole now stood where Oxford had fired. The shattered glass circled empty space and they heard a faint wheezing. The knights on either side were unmoved in their stances.

A downed pilgrim hauled himself up to look at them, his hands clutching over the ridge of razored glass. His peer turned to consider this mewling creature, wheezing blood. Drops pitter-pattered onto concrete. The wounded one begged mercy, but his colleague was not obliging.

A second shot thrashed down the corridor and the wounded man collapsed across the edge of sheared glass that finished Oxford’s work. The pilgrim beside calmly returned her weapon to the intruders, unburdened by her action.

Oxford stopped, then turned and made a testing motion back towards the wards. The knights tightened their stances, and a flurry of warning shots scuffed the concrete by Oxford’s feet. He raised his hands and returned to the way ahead.

‘You see?’ Thawn said as they walked. ‘They don’t care what you do. So long as we keep going.’

Oxford then strode to the window where their escorts stood and stared at one of them. He breathed raggedly, then held out his gun. The crack of its barrel snapped through the Cathedral. The pilgrim paled under its force, collapsed into empty space behind, but its colleagues remained in their motionlessness.

Again.

Another pilgrim fell, and still the enemy yielded no resistance, no catharsis for Oxford. He screamed at them, begged them to fire back. He squeezed the grip of his firearm across his forehead and roared. But there was no winning.

The hall carried his screams to the spire and back again and Agloff thought about reaching out a hand to him. The moment seemed to pass through Agloff, as though he were detached from that world, beyond the scope of Oxford’s pain.

‘You don’t beat them… unless they want beating,’ Thawn surmised. ‘Kill all of them, or it only takes one of them to kill you back, Blue.’

Oxford hurled his gun and it skittled down the corridor. Thawn stepped to gather it tenderly, then summoned them. They followed the parade in silence. Oxford’s neck sank into stooped shoulders.

Stains and smears decorated the passage. Signs warned staff to sanitise and sterilise, interspersed with posters reminding them of Winter’s dominance, strap-lined with colourful captions. Agloff noted the absence of Jask in each. He seemed some formless thing, known but not seen. Less of a dictator, more of a deity.

They followed the way to its end. A grime-licked door slid open on approach and into a narrow staircase spiralling upwards. Agloff looked up and a heady sickness rose inside him. They climbed, and he felt all direction lost from him, in space and time. The world beyond and before felt absent. He rose in identical loops towards no apparent end. His grip on his lipped knife slackened as shots of pain passed through him, but he could not trace it to its source. He had no injuries.

This was the end he supposed, with all its inevitability. This was the place Eron had lived so long. Perhaps Thawn was right, and Eron had found himself transported to another state of being. The boy was form only, and all thought had long since left him. It would make it easier if it were true.

Agloff took a deep breath and began to count away his ascent. He hoped Ariea was still alive. To any god who would listen, he prayed. If the universe owed him any hope, he deserved that at least. Hours or seconds later, the way flattened and he fell over the top step, as if his legs expected the spiral to continue. He tumbled; his limbs spread across the floor.

He saw the passage was black and narrow, adorned in flecks of gold and wood. There was no other way out. A single corridor ran to an open doorway at the far end, and closed doors stood to watch them.

As Agloff pushed his shoulders up, he felt arms drag him to his knees. But it wasn’t Oxford or Thawn. He saw their bodies recede from him in the corner of his eye, carried away in ripples of grey uniform. They shouted and wrestled under the weight of their captors. But their yells were in vain. There were too many of them.

Agloff let his body fall limp. He wasn’t in control of it anyway. He hadn’t been in control of any of this. He heard orders to stun them, and a prick jabbed Agloff’s arm. He felt a strange feeling reach into him, like sleep.

He was going to do it, his last thought commanded. He was going to put an end to Malvo Jask. Surely, he was the only one who could.

Then, he let the alien feeling swallow him, and his mind was pulled into some other place.