4

CAVE

TERIAN WALKED THE yard, using a bone-handled cane as a walking stick.

This personality configuration wore the body that had been entitled “Terian-11” before Galaith decimated his ranks. Now, he was simply “Terian-4,” or “Four” to the other Terians. Four was a two-hundred-year-old seer with an alias as a thirty-something human who operated an import-export business out of Bejing. He was unmarried, but had a local girlfriend, an actress named Bai-Ling.

Now, he was far from her, and from his home.

Four surveyed the faces turned towards his.

Unwashed, they seemed to consist only of giant, liquid eyes surrounded by bone-stretched skin. Metal collars of a dull silver ringed filthy necks above protruding collarbones and coarse-spun clothes. The loose-fitting garments looked closer to burlap sacks cut with holes for arms and necks and legs than the shirts and long pants they were meant to approximate. Flies lazily circled and clustered in the yard, settling on eyes and untreated cuts scabbing on arms and legs. Most went unswatted by the owners of the flesh they craved.

The age range in this pen looked to be approximately twelve solar years to twenty. As a result, the seers were small, thin-boned, pale. Most had been separated from their parents at a young age...if they’d ever spent time with parents at all.

Four sniffed, his nose and mouth scrunching together involuntarily.

They could certainly wash the product more often. Feed it occasionally, to ensure it developed well enough to be of some value. Hose off the whole yard, if need be...first with soapy water, then with clean.

Still, he knew the realities of water in India and China well enough. The problem of water had only become worse in recent years, and promised to be worse still in future.

This particular camp had not been run by Rooks...strictly speaking. Even so, the monk he traced through Galaith’s invoices had definitely been paid for through his private funds. While Three dug through paperwork in Bavaria, Four had been tasked with hunting down every bank account accessed directly by Galaith, which meant diving into the endless rattrap of aliases he’d built over the years, along with dead seers whose names he’d borrowed, seers who had “willed” all of their financial holdings to him, etc.

The Rooks, even now, with half of those accounts unaccounted for, had a greater GNP than the majority of first world human nations.

Despite that, Galaith paid this bill with his personal funds, from a secret account, not as a part of regular operations expensing. Whatever these monks had been doing for Galaith, he hadn’t wanted it known by anyone who handled finances in the network. The anomaly had been intriguing enough that Terian thought he should check it out for himself.

He still wasn’t sure what he’d found.

The seer in front of him, an overweight and severely aged monk of East Indian ancestry, perhaps six hundred years old, looked nervous as she shot Terian over-the-shoulder glances. Galaith’s record books and the monks themselves called this a “school,” but Terian recognized a work camp when he saw one. He should—he’d run a number of them in his time with the Rooks, and overseen the science arm of a few others, when Galaith took an interest in the possibilities of hybridization following World War II.

Terian had never been overly fond of the camps himself, but one of his personas had a talent for genetics. The seer camps provided an almost unparalleled playground for conducting experiments utilizing both physical and aleimic structures, as well as creating functioning cross-breeds that might fool human seer detection devices.

Terian followed the woman through a heavy wooden door at the other end of the yard, watching her fumble with an iron key kept on a chain around her neck and inside her robes. He smiled a little at the quaint security system, then followed her into the foyer of an inside chamber, watching somewhat impatiently as she lit a torch from the one hanging on the wall.

“The electricity is not reliable up here,” she explained apologetically, although Terian had been fairly certain his thoughts were shielded. “We have found that traditional methods are less likely to leave us groping in the dark...”

Terian grunted a noncommittal response, motioning for her to continue. She began stepping carefully down the steep stone stairs.

“You are quite sure he told you the full extent of our protocols here?” She glanced back at him, her pale, soft, face appearing ghoul-like against the pitch black beyond the torch’s reach. “He had no other names on his list. In fact, he seemed quite adamant that—”

“Would you like to see the mark in my aleimi again, Sister?” Terian said. His voice was calm, the picture of polite. “I assure you, I was debriefed in full at the time of succession.”

The woman picked up on the edge underlying his words. “No,” she said. “The access was clear enough, sir. My apologies.”

Her uneasiness remained, discernible in her voice. Terian glanced at the rough-hewn stone walls, stained by smoke and accumulated mold. They walked on in the dark, tunneling deeper into the mountain. Terian found he was out of breath as they descended yet another flight of steep stairs into near-perfect darkness. The air grew increasingly stale the further down they traveled, reeking of stagnant water and decaying plant life. Terian found himself breathing a little tighter, realized he was having what amounted to the beginnings of a panic attack.

Claustrophobia. That was new. He scanned the space, trying to determine if it was his or something imposed by the Barrier field he’d just entered.

“How much further?” he asked her in Mandarin.

She glanced over her shoulder from a small chamber that served as a landing, her fleshy face once more contorted by the torch’s flickering.

“I apologize for the state of our caves,” she said. “...The Teacher thought it better if it looked like this part of the structure wasn’t in use...so we deliberately let it fall into disrepair.” She began walking again down the next set of steep steps, touching the shining wall with one age-spotted hand. “Almost there now,” she said, panting a little. “Not much longer, sir...”

His interest further piqued, Terian followed her plodding steps.

A few more landings down, a few more turns and walks through stone arched corridors later, Four saw a flickering light ahead of them. It illuminated a medieval-looking door either sheeted with, or made out of iron. A narrow slot stood at head-height, its iron sliding covering closed.

Just outside the door, seated in a wooden chair, sat another monk, this one male, with a long gray beard and dark pits for eyes. Terian studied the wrinkled face as the woman put the torch in a second iron bracket on the opposite side of the door. Four found himself torn with an odd feeling that he almost recognized that sallow face.

The old seer stared back at him. The man’s dark eyes blazed with a dull hatred that only served to irritate Terian.

“You should not be here,” the old man said in heavily accented English. “You should not have brought him,” he told the woman. “He should not be here.”

“He has the mark,” she said.

“I know this one,” the old man sneered. “If he has it, he stole it. He should not be here...”

Terian lost patience. He pulled the gun from the inside of his coat, pointing it first at the old man, then at the woman. The woman gaped at the gun as if she’d never seen one before.

“Open the door,” Terian said.

“You can kill me,” the old man said. “I do not care.”

“That may happen anyway,” Terian said. “Your godawful stink is enough for murder. But for now, I will tell you this. You get in my way...even if you kill this body of mine...I will be back. And next time, I’ll take out every living soul in this complex, not just yours, old man. I’ll take out hers, and all the young pups upstairs. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience now, would you? All those progeny above, when you’re so short for this world?”

The old man chuckled. The malice behind it made Terian stare at him again, trying to place the wasted face. He knew this being. He could feel it...

“Bunch of diseased rats,” the old man said, his voice filled with phlegm. “You’d be doing the world a favor...” He stared at Terian’s face. “Yes, I remember you. They said you would come. One day.”

“‘They’ did, did they?” Terian smiled, but felt anger underlying it somehow. “How nice. Now open the fucking door—”

“You know who I mean. The two that brought him back.”

Terian shot the old man in the hand.

The woman screamed, flattening her back against the iron door. Terian pointed the gun at the old man’s face, glancing at the woman.

“You’re still not opening the door,” he observed. “And you have a lot of body parts left.”

The woman half-walked, half-stumbled into the old man, who bent over, gasping in pain, holding his bleeding hand against filthy robes, his long, wrinkled face pale. The woman fumbled across his clothing with clumsy, frantic hands. Even now, the old man tried feebly to ward her off. She pushed his hands aside, her own eyes white-rimmed with fear.

“It’s too late, Merenje,” she whispered. “He’ll only shoot you for it now...and he’ll still get the key.”

“Let him!” the old man said.

But Terian had stopped breathing, hearing the man’s name.

“Merenje?” He turned, looking at the man’s face in the torchlight.

He had heard the name before...over and over in fact. From the lips of a drugged and beaten captive he’d housed deep in the Caucasus Mountains, he’d heard that name until he’d been irritated enough to silence the voice uttering it. Dehgoies Revik muttered about Merenje and ‘the cave’ for hours at times, hallucinating from lack of water and food. He did it again while begging for the beatings to stop, when Terian pushed him past the point of no longer knowing who he was with or where he was.

Terian glanced around the walls of dungeon-like space.

The cave...how many times he’d wondered what the hell that meant.

“What is your clan name?” Terian demanded, pointing the gun at the old man. “Where do you come from? Are you from here?”

The man laughed, a sound like he’d first filled his mouth with broken glass. Terian saw his hard, black eyes shine in the light of the torch’s fire, filled with a bitter meanness, like an attack dog after it’s been kicked too many times. It struck Terian that the man hadn’t always been so old and feeble...and then something else reached his awareness as well.

“You’re human.” Four lowered the gun. He stared at the emaciated form in front of him, realizing in a kind of shock that he wasn’t looking at a seven hundred year old seer, but a human being who had seen ninety plus years...possibly more.

The woman retrieved the key, and Terian motioned at her with the gun, still staring at the ancient human.

“Open the door,” he said.

Turning her back to him, she hastily complied.

The lock made a squealing sound as if it hadn’t been turned in months.

When the door swung wide, Terian had to fight to keep from gagging at the smell that flooded the hallway from the light-less hole. Bile rushed to his throat; he covered his mouth and nose with the hand holding the gun. He swore profusely, fighting the impulse to shoot the two people close enough to blame for this abomination.

“Not so pleasant is it?” the old man sneered. “Hiding the sins of the past? Not so neat and clean...”

Terian raised the gun, pointing it at him, then thought better of it and stepped around him instead, snatching one of the torches from an iron bracket and entering the small chamber, the sleeve of his forearm firmly over his nose and mouth. He swung the torch in a wide arc, taking in the small stone space. The ceiling rose higher than he would have expected, at least twice the height of the corridor outside, but the floor space stood only at about eight by eight feet.

Terian turned around twice in the small cell, then stopped, startled when he saw a gleam of eyes reflect light back from his torch. He’d missed the creature in his first turn around the room. Even now, it stood as still as a posed corpse.

Four lowered the torch, blinking as his eyes adjusted.

The boy stood with every muscle in his small frame relaxed. Yet his demeanor wasn’t one of subjugation or defeat, like the boys aboveground. On the contrary, his expression was calm, even politely interested. His shoulders sloped down below his neck, his arms below them, all the way to his hands, open at his sides, with delicate fingers. In appearance he was adolescent, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old for a human, twenty to twenty-five for a seer.

He stood so motionless and his skin shone with such a dull gray sheen he appeared to be made of wax. His eyes followed Terian’s every movement as if gliding on smooth rails, not once jerking or showing a reaction.

After a few seconds, Terian realized he himself had tensed. He felt as though he were being hunted, watched the way a giant cat might watch the motions of an antlered buck.

Behind the boy, a palate of rags and what might have been an ancient mattress stood near one wall of the cell, all the same dark gray with black streaks. The smell concentrated from there, and moreso from a bucket that stood near enough to the “bed” that Terian wanted to shove it further away with the toe of his boot, if only to get the image of this creature sleeping next to its own excrement forever out of his mind.

“What is your name, boy?” Terian said. He found himself fascinated by the black eyes, the utter lack of expression. “Can you speak?”

The boy’s expression changed.

Terian saw a dense hatred concentrate in those pupils, so fathomless it actually caused him to flinch back. Hearing noise behind him, he turned. The woman stood in the doorway, as did the old man. The boy’s look of murder aimed precisely at the man with the hole shot through his hand.

“You did that?” The boy turned to Terian.

He spoke Prexci of such an ancient dialect that Terian had to concentrate to make out the words. He slid into the Barrier, tried to look at the boy from there. Once he had, he focused and refocused his sight, not believing what he saw.

Above the filthy creature’s head spiraled a collection of structures that nearly gave Terian an erection. A kind of fascinated awe fell over him as he stared at those spiraling shapes.

The boy said again. “You did that? You shot him?”

“Yes,” Terian told him, clicking out. “I did.”

For a long moment, the boy only looked at the wasted human. Finally, he turned to Four.

“Yes. I will go with you.”

Without fully turning his head, Terian spoke to the other two. “What the fuck is this precious bundle of joy?” He glanced over his shoulder.

The woman turned sheet white. “You said you knew. You said he entrusted you...”

The old man gave another of those sick, grating chuckles. “I told you. He likely killed your precious Teacher with his own hands...”

“You wouldn’t be far off with that, old man,” Terian said, raising the gun. “But you still haven’t answered my question...”

The woman raised her hands to Terian in a kind of pleading supplication, her eyes darting nervously between him and the boy on the cot. “You must understand. It was for his own protection...for all of our protection. We feed him well...”

Terian gave a harsh laugh. “Yes. This is practically the Ritz. But I’m not here to spank you for your housekeeping skills, Fraulein...” Even so, he realized in some surprise that he was angry. Beyond angry...he was furious. His hand shook as he pointed it at the two “monks.” That they would keep any seer in such a place, much less a seer like this, with structures like he had...it was inconceivable. That Galaith could have been part of such a travesty...

“Unchain him,” Terian said, motioning towards the boy with the gun. “Now.”

The woman’s face drained further of blood. “Sir?”

“You heard him. He’s coming with me. Now unchain him.”

“Sir! You don’t understand! His collar...the restraint wire on his sight is attached to his chain! It was a safeguard, so no one could ever leave with him...”

She trailed when Terian raised the gun to point at her face. Terian cocked his head, staring at her. The woman stared at the boy, then back at Terian.

“You can’t possibly understand what you are doing!” she cried. “He cannot be allowed to leave this place!”

“The boy won’t hurt me. Will you, lad?”

“No. I won’t hurt.” He paused. “...You.”

Terian smiled. “See? We’re going to be pals, me and this handsome devil...”

The old man with the bleeding hand laughed, stopping only when he broke into a paroxysm of thick coughs. He spat a gob of phlegm in the direction of the boy. Wiping his mouth on his dirt-encrusted robe, he spoke up.

“I’ll unchain him.” His voice had a note of finality to it. “I’ll do it...I’ll let the little bastard go. It’s mine to do...”

“Merenje, no!” the woman cried, but Terian swung the gun back on her, stopping her from going after him.

“Stay,” he said, smiling when she pulled up short. “That’s a good girl...”

The old man stumbled across the room, still holding his hand to his robes.

The boy stood perfectly still as Merenje reached him. He didn’t move as the old man fumbled with the metal collar around his neck. Terian hadn’t seen it until then, as it blended so perfectly with the color of the grimy neck.

Now that he saw it, however, Terian realized the thing was an antique. Instead of the light, thin organic hybrid metals used on the seers in the pens upstairs, the boy’s collar weighted his neck with several inches of what appeared to be iron. The organic skin on the outside looked like it came from some kind of reptile. The back end, instead of having a thumbnail release valve triggered with retinal or other scanner, consisted of an iron ring that connected to a thick chain bolted into the wall above the palate of rags where the boy slept. The chain didn’t even give him the range of the small cell. No wonder the bucket remained by the bed.

Feeling his anger return, Terian watched the old man grasp the chain, which was also coated in organic skin.

“Use the key,” the old man said. His pitted eyes stared at the boy’s. “Use the key now...I’ve triggered the lock!”

“No!” the woman screamed.

But Terian already understood. Chuckling, he entered the Barrier space, and found himself facing an elaborate structure that had Dehgoies’ and Galaith’s aleimic fingerprints all over it. A golden weaving of light, it configured in a kind of delicate beauty around the boy, strangling his aleimi through the organic components of the collar.

Recalling the symbol he’d found in Dehgoies Revik’s journal, the same one he’d used to fool the woman into thinking Galaith had sent him, Terian imprinted it on the Barrier structure. It fit perfectly into the missing piece woven into the restraint collar around the boy’s neck and its organic tissue.

As he withdrew from the Barrier space, Four heard an audible click.

His vision cleared, leaving him back in the pitch-black dungeon.

The boy met his gaze, and smiled.