Sunless Heresy
Chapter 2: Baselayer
For five cycles they trekked beyond spire’s chilling shade. The land was lifeless, strewn with ancient ruins and modern refuse. Nothing moved in the endless gray red sky. Far afield they beheld a fertile declivity. Smoke drifted above toothy crags, a lone beacon of civilization amid the barbarous wastes. Satian produced a time dulled leather map from his pack and gestured to the aloof plume. “That is the settlement of Eoline.” All present had heard of the industrious town due its fraying commercial dealings with the spire. “Then we have our destination,” Grafan declared. Without delay, all threw themselves against the elements. Mood soured as muscles burned and lungs filled with difficulty. Upon reaching a pale canyon, Ceric slumped against a boulder, panting and bowed. “A moment, please. The air is strange here.
“Heavy, close,” Milz said.
“It will be dark soon, we should keep moving,” Satian replied coldly.
“The man needs to rest,” Grafan replied. “As do we.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Sit.”
Satian, ragged and sweatbeaded, glared at his former superior. It was then Grafan noticed the disdain scribed in his comrade’s furrowed brows. In all their years together he had never beheld such venom save upon the battlefield. Ceric and Milz shared anxious looks. After several moments Satian removed from the group and sat upon a flat stone, eyes to the distance. Grafan and Milz collected kindling from scrappy shrubbery, sparked stone and started a small fire in the sandy soil of a near low outcrop as skylight faded. Throughout the night strange cries ghosted craggy plains to steal the downy draught of slumber.
For five cycles they wandered the slopes of the mountain. By degrees they adjusted to the alien atmosphere and upon reaching a tangled forest in the hilland below the mountain, their somas were scarcely more strained than in the capitol. Dark foliage hissed and rain came thick and stinging. For time beyond counting they forded leafy undergrowth as wood creaked and rattled hideously about them. Arms raised to gird eyes from fiberous assault. Over half a cycle they walked thus and at sky’s darkening came to the edge of a boulder strewn clearing where the land was deformed as from the impact of some archaic and enormous object. Luminous blue strands hung from crowding canopy like lute strings singing stillness. The men stood a moment in awe. Ceric reached forth and a voice echoed. “Beauty can be fatal.” The exiles looked frantically, but could find no speaker. One of the boulders unfurled and a pallid black haired man stood within. That appearing as stone was a great insect and the man within its chittering coils turned violet eyes upon the arrivals. Satian reactively unsheathed his blade and leveled it at the enormous creature which clicked fearsome mandibles in response. The violet eyed man extended a coriaceous arm in entreaty. “No need for that.” Ceric and Milz reached for their own weapons as the beast hissed and reared. The violet eyed man hooked his right arm beneath the creature’s upper body plating and held it fast. Black veins prominenced on his neck and head and muscles bulged beneath his sleek onyx colored suit. “Agitate her further and I can not guarantee your safety.” Satian felt Grafan’s hand upon his shoulder and hesitantly sheathed his blade. Ceric and Milz relented likewise and the chitinous beast relaxed. The violet eyed man released his pet’s shell and gestured strangely over it. The beast’s antennae flared and it turned from the travelers and lowered its body like a scolded dog.
“That thing, what is it?” Satian asked, attempting to hide the tremor in his voice as he trode the clearing beside Grafan, both careful to give man, beast and luminous strands, a wide berth.
The violet eyed man spoke as the creature skittered into the underbrush. “Locals call them crypanwael. They’re diurnal semisubterranean carnivores descended from centipedes.”
“Centiwhat?” Milz mused.
“How come it listens to you?” Ceric asked.
“Pheromones.”
“And those?” Grafan gestured to the blue strands.
“Those are tendrils of creatures the locals call grimspools. They release a potent neurotoxin when touched. Look higher and you can see the translucent cores of their bodies. Four hundred rotations ago, they formed the nexus of a sacred rite by the Siftling tribe. Siftlings believed the creatures’ mind altering toxin afforded direct access to the divine and that the faithful would be safeguarded. Initiates into their priestly order were compelled to ford a conregation much like this one, unclad. Yet success in the ordeal was, in truth, merely a matter of size. The larger the man, the greater the dose of venom required for vital cessation. Those with sufficient intelligence to be averse to participation were exiled or executed. And so after many generations, they made of themselves a race of dim giants.”
“Where are they now?” Grafan asked.
Cruxus gestured to the soil. “Mysticism is far more deleterious than venom.” Ceric opened his mouth but Satian interceded. “Why were you hiding?”
“For observation of a rare species.”
For a moment the wayfarers stood awkwardly, then Grafan stepped forth and extended an arm. “Isles Grafan.” The violet eyed man walked through the blue strands and took his hand without hesitation and squeezed with surprising strength. “Cruxus Kyphos.” Grafan scented rainstorm and astringent.
“You from Eoline?” Milz asked.
Cruxus nodded. “Is that your destination?”
Milz looked to Grafan for permission. Grafan spoke in his stead. “That’s right.”
“I can show the way.”
“An offer most kind. Thank you,” Grafan replied. Satian scowled, eyes to the centipedal giant, which slithered down from its perch as if apprised of the situation.
“W hat of,” Ceric gestured nervously to the multilegged organism.
“Xenos is no threat to you, provided you abstain aggressive display.”
Under Cruxus’ guidance, the party passed from the clearing and forded great tangles of vine strangled growths and piles of tooth pricked bones and man-sized shells long stripped of their original owners. Yellow eyes peered from darkness and vanished at Cruxus’ sure approach. Occassionally Cruxus bade them stop and plucked oddments from some surrounding growth and placed it in a pack fixed about the belly of the insect by way of a strap concealed beneath its midsection plating.
As light faded they stopped before a narrow embowered ravine. As all moved to pass Cruxus raised his hand. “Deorlanza. Be still. Speak soft.”
“A what?”
“The creature I was looking for. See there,” he pointed to a near spot in the vegetal press directly before the entrance to the narrow, foliage covered channel.
“All I see are trees,” Ceric whispered.
“No,” Cruxus said. “Legs.”
One of the ‘trees’ shifted, rising slightly, what appeared as roots, flexing talons. Massive trunklike limb lowered once more and resumed an eerie stillness. As Ceric backed away in preparation of flight Cruxus stayed him. “Should it alight upon your vibrations all would be lost, for it cannot be outrun. I shall handle it.”
“How?”
The thing whose upper body appeared as a tangle of tree limbs shifted, leaning toward them.
Cruxus put a finger to his lips and turned to Grafan, gesturing to the dark sphericuled plating. “Should my gambit fail, I recommend you use that.” Grafan’s face creased with confusion as Cruxus walked from the thicket into the small clearing before the camoflaged predator and raised his arms. His steps were irregular and his head lolled as if intoxicated. “By Eminence, what is he doing?” Milz asked. As Cruxus moved directly beneath the veiled behemoth the green beige flaps of its underside peeled apart, revealing a fleshy maw that extruded a long needlelike protrusion. Mouth spike quivered and retracted as the massive beast keened and retreated up the left side of the ravine and vanished atop it. The exiles tensed in breathless silence until the heavy footfalls of the behemoth were swallowed in woodland’s chorus. Cruxus straightened his neck, arms wide, as if basking in the adulation of some unseen audience. He turned and beckoned with a wave of his hand. The exiles followed Cruxus through the ravine, their eyes darting to the clifftops as Xenos trailed dutifully along the right chasm wall.
“How did you repel it?” Grafan asked.
“There is a local parasite that commandeers its host’s nervous system and forces it into the path of the nearest predator. The infected’s movements are jerky, uncoordinated. Deorlanzas are intelligent enough to realize the symptoms of the parasite and prioritize health over hunger. There ability to parse patterns is inferior to your own, but their memory far exceeds your kin.”
“Why did you not just wait until it passed?” Satian asked. “Like showing off?”
“Once a deorlanza selects its hunting ground it will not move until it consumes its own weight in prey. This sheer rise runs for many leagues without ingress, save this channel.”
The party trekked the ravine until dark where it let out to fog thick moorland and made camp in a stone hollow formed by collapsed dolmens. Cruxus started a fire and sat crossed legged before it as his pet skittered beyond the light. The outsiders warmed rations and ate in silence as strange cries died to rising wind. Ceric shook his head. “It feels like a dream.”
Milz bobbed his head. “Odd place.”
“I don’t just mean the place. I mean everything that’s happened of late.” He paused as Satian shot him a reprimanding look. “If you had told me I’d be facing down a wolcenwight only to then watch a man scare off its landed kin, I’d have called you mad.”
“Facing down? You were quaking lad,” Milz said with a smile.
“We all were,” Grafan said with a smile.
“Clear in our recent trials is the hand of Eminence,” Satian declared. Milz and Ceric bowed their heads. Grafan stared at the fire with furrowed brow. “You have been sent unto us, an instrument of providence,” Satian continued to violet eyes glinting in darkness.
“I did not receive the missive,” Cruxus replied. The exiles laughed save Satian, who scowled and broke a stick and feed it to the fire.
At lightbreak the party departed the hollow and cut across the lonely moor. Before them what appeared as a white tangle of trees was on closer inspection the corpse of a deorlanza larger than the grove sized beast that had obstructed entry to the ravine. The massive creature’s body had been converted into an abode evident by windchimes of bone hung from the flared rim of the carapace and fur strung over a man sized aperture. Before the structure, a group of girls, the smallest of which surged with tears in her eyes, dark hair stuck with grass, clutching at a scarf the others tossed between them.
“Give it back.”
“Don’t you want everyone to see your pretty face?” A lanky blonde who appeared to be the ringleader jeered.
“Stop!”
Dark haired girl attempted to grab the scarf whereat the blonde pushed her to the ground. The exiles stilled in horror upon seeing the face of the bereaved girl, for her eyes were pure black save flecks of gold and from left ear to jaw, her skin was deformed as from a burn. So extreme was the damage that her teeth and gums lay half exposed and her bones stood out with eerie prominence. Upon seeing the men the scarred girl rushed into the charnel house. The remaining girls laughed until they spied Cruxus among the entrants whereupon they quieted, shifted nervously and starred at the ground. Cruxus walked to the girls with an opaque expression and gingerly seized the scarf from the blonde.
“Why did you take this Lumi?”
“It was just a game,” Lumi mumbled.
With chitinous gauntleted hand he took her slender wrist on which a fine metal bracelet hung. He caressed the shimmering material. “A gift from a boy, yes?”
“From Karsten. For my birthday.”
“Shall we continue the game with it?”
She shook her head, eyes downcast.
“Then you should get back to town.”
“Yes sir.”
Without discernable expression he watched the girls depart and moved inside the strange house. Reluctantly, the exiles followed.
“They always play so rough?” Grafan asked.
“Play is practice for predation,” Cruxus replied.
The exiles looked to each other in bafflement as Cruxus moved from the entry corridor. “Wait here please.” Cruxus strode across the hollow to a cluster of cushions on which the girl sat. Tears streamed from her eyes and she clutched her knees to her chest. He stood a long beat before he spoke and when he did his voice was soft.
“Scealu.”
“Papa.”
He held the scarf to her. She wiped tears from her cheeks before taking the offering and secured it about her face, stiff fabric masking her deformity. She sighed, slumped. “It doesn’t matter what I do. Everyone hates me.”
“One cannot hate what one does not understand. They see only your scar. Your abberance. All else is obscure to them. That you hide your visage emboldens the fantasy on which their disdain rests.”
She listened as a student to an enthralling lecture in a field beyond her ken. Her brows furrowed and she stared at the ground. “Grossus says everyone wears a mask.”
“She is mistaken.”
“You don’t understand. You’re not like other people, Papa. I couldn’t do it.” She pulled the scarf further up her pale visage. “Lumi told me no one could ever love someone with a face like mine. She only says that to be cruel but she’s probably right.”
“There is no love, child. A fumbling assignation for the impulse to breed. Or its byproduct. Lumi obsesses over her people’s value concepts because she is incapable of producing her own.”
“But don’t you... love me?”
“I think more highly of you than that.”
She bowed her head, sniffled and threw her arms about Cruxus’ waist. He caressed her tenebrous trembling mane until she exhausted herself. “Compose yourself. We have guests. Would you like to meet them?” She shook her head without meeting his gaze. He ruffled her hair. “Off with you then.” As she dashed into one of the many apertures in the chamber wall, Cruxus seized a sack hung from implement and drawing laden wall, turned to the entrance and raised his voice. “Come in.”
“What is this place?” Grafan asked as he moved further inside by his entranced fellows.
“Home.” Cruxus removed wraps of dried vittles from the sack as he talked and divided each into two piles upon a shelf like protrusion. “For me, one of many. For the girl, sole refuge.”
“She has no family?” Ceric asked.
“No blood relations. Her father abandoned her mother before her birth. Her mother, despairing of raising a child alone, procured an abortive concoction from a charlatan posing as a medicine man. The abortion failed and the mother could not bring herself to try again. So Scealu was born. Her body affected by the ostensible medicine meant to be her doom. Her eyes, black as pitch and thin flecked with gold. The people of Eoline are a superstitious sort, so instead of inducing reasons for the peculiar pigmentation of the babe’s irises, they decreed the child cursed. Curses are a staple of their legends. God’s punishment for ancestral transgression. Among such tales, the most well known is of Katharos the Half Dead, who, upon attempting to steal from the gods, falls into a pool in the netherworld, which leaves half her body corpselike and causes the children she later bears to rapidly decay. After Scaelu was old enough to walk she was caught fiddling at the foundry and lashed for it. One of the blows knocked her onto a heated mold, which left her disfigured. This branding further solidified the notion of some providential intercession. Eoline’s people reasoned a cursed child meant a cursed womb, and so turned their ire upon Scaelu’s mother and drove her from their midst. Shattered, the mother cast herself from the local quarry, leaving Scaelu a bereft outcast. When I came to this place I found the girl curled in a cave, grim covered and sickly. The resourceful little creature had survived many rotations on insects and had secured for herself the hide of a large canid she herself had trapped. To this day she still prefers to wear furs as a consequence. I took her with me and built this house as her haven.” The exiles listened with horrified fascination as Cruxus took arrayed preserves in a bowl and poured the material in a kettle set over a fire kindled in a clay bricked inset and gestured for his guests to sit upon the cushioned section of the floor. He removed five cups of clay and filled them with a thick faintly sweet smelling liquid. Ceric sniffed at his cup like a wary child while Milz rubbed his hands in anticipation of satiation. Their host explained the brew was made of fermented fruit, diluted and spiced, from the woods whence they came. They drank and partook of fired stew with clay spoons. As all sat in satiation Grafan turned to his host. “Is construction your trade?”
“In a sense.”
After several moments of unelaboration, Satian leaned forward. “If you contract in Eoline perhaps you’ve heard. Barrowers are supposedly on the move.”
Cruxus’ eyes clicked to Satian’s face. “Not long ago Barrowers tried to establish a trade agreement with Eoline but were rebuffed. Though they never stated so publically, The Feower considered such a relationship too destructive to their arrangements with The Order.”
“Feower?” Ceric asked.
“The four families of Eoline.”
“Ah.”
“Eoline supplies the bulk of The Orders metals. If that resource were jeprodized, especially given their desired reconstruction of the lower sectors of The Spire, The Order may go so far as to forcibly secure it.”
“You mean invasion? The Order wouldn’t do something like that,” Satian protested.
“Why are you sure of that? Are you from The Spire yourselves?”
“No. Wakes,” Satian stated.
“Commotion there of late. Barrowers rescued a number of rogue scholars set for execution. Or so I was told.”
“Rescue? More like a slaugher.”
Cruxus’ eyes widened with interest. “You speak as if you were there, Mr. Milz.”
Milz exchanged glances with his comrades whereupon Satian intervened. “We were. Was a ghastly sight.”
“The man who told me of it said the Barrower’s held the upper hand but were dispensed by sudden and inexplicable arcs of light. They must have used one of their fabled relics. Much like the one you possess.” Cruxus pointed to Grafan’s plated arm.
“You mentioned it before, when we were threatened by the deorlanza. How did you come to know of it?”
“Study. Do you know what it is?”
“A consecrated armament from before The Order’s founding.”
“And you believe that?”
“Can it really make things explode?”
The exiles turned to find Scaelu leaning against the nearest of the chambers three aperatures.
“That’s what Kajin said. But he’s a liar.”
“Aren’t we all,” Ceric said.
“No. Papa doesn’t lie.”
Cruxus gestured to each of the guests in turn and introduced them to the girl. “Satian, Milz, Ceric, Grafan, this is Scealu.”
“Are they staying the night?”
“You will soon be a lady. It is up to you.”
She froze, blinking as if a bird had landed on her head. “Hm. Ok. You can stay. Long as you don’t do anything weird. And,” she pointed at Ceric. “Help with breakfast.”
“Wha? Why me?”
“Cause you’re funny lookin.”
He put on a theatrical pout prompting a veiled smile from the girl. She moved to the stew pot over the hearth, inhaled and poured herself a bowl and sat between Ceric and Cruxus. “So what are you here for?”
“Business,” Satian answered.
“You don’t look like businessmen.”
“What do we look like?”
The girl raised the veil about her face enough to expose her mouth and took a spoonful of stew before answering. “Mm. Bandits.”
Milz looked genuinely hurt.
“Ah cheer up. She’s saying we’re charming rogues,” Ceric said.
“Did you make those,” Grafan asked the girl, gesturing to the numerous sketches that decorated the walls. Many were studies of local flora and fauna but the one that commanded his attention depicted a girl metamorphosizing into an elegant insectal creature.
Scaelu nodded and fidgeted. “I like to draw but I’m not very good at it.”
“They’re quite soulful,” Satian said.
“My mother told me I don’t have a soul.”
Satian looked to the girl with concern. “That’s horrible.”
She shrugged. “Not having a soul isn’t so bad, cause I have more room inside for precious things.” The men looked on with troubled expressions but none spoke further. The conversation turned and after the meal all save Cruxus settled to fur mats the girl prepared for them and sunk to ominous dreams. Outside Cruxus stood weathered stone and studied the whispering dark.