Kyle is alone, the last of his kind. Were his people slaughtered by vampires, or were they the victims of something even more sinister? To find out the truth, he will have to rescue a mysterious prisoner from the heart of an ancient, crumbling labyrinth.
I took my shiv and tore open one of the bodies, from crotch to sternum. There was only just enough light to see, so I had to do most of my work by touch, using the almost useless taloned hands I was cursed with.
I dug around in the torso until I found the end of the intestine, then plunged my other hand in and carved through the intestine with the shiv, which I had fashioned from a sharpened piece of stone and carried for protection. The gut came loose and I yanked it free but it was slick with blood and flew from my hand. It flicked against my face, leaving me smeared and degraded.
This offal was my only chance of finding my way back out of the maze, I kept reminding myself. I had to find the man at the centre if I wanted to discover the truth. Without something to guide my way, I could be lost forever.
The presence of death didn’t trouble me much. Death has been my shadow. The stench of it, the dread of it. It has taken so many people from me, and I know it will come for me soon. Somehow, I don’t think that the Exalted will be waiting for me. They say that He does not admit Baneful, that our disfigurements are signs of spiritual corruption.
I repeated the process with all the other corpses, tearing and cutting and yanking on slippery reeking guts for hours. Most released foul gasses when I opened them. One man smelled strongly of sour milk and asparagus.
My name is Kyle Payton. I am a Baneful. My arms are twisted, elongated and lack flexibility. Instead of hair, I have tiny, almost invisible whiskers. They are very sensitive, but not in any useful way. They just make me prone to itching, like an extremely bad case of sensitive skin. One of my eyes is much larger than the other, and my jaw is distended. My mother was the same, and she claimed that this was normal for our kind of Baneful, the Chlethargan. I wouldn’t know. They’re all gone.
I crawled over the mound of naked dead in almost total darkness, hauling bodies into convenient positions for their ‘procedure’. A couple of times, I put my hand on a breast or a scrotum, snatched it away and shuddered from redundant squeamishness.
I’d considered other solutions. If there had been more light, I could have marked the walls with my blade. The walls were jagged stone and concrete and my shiv wasn’t sharp enough to make a mark that could be found by touch. Believe me, I tried.
I could have torn strips of cloth, but I had very little to wear as it was, the tattered rags on my back being my only possessions in the world, and the corpses had all been stripped. I’d tried sprinkling strands of hair to mark my route, but had only gone past a couple of turnings before I’d realised it was being blown away by a gentle flow of air through the passages.
Blood would have been less messy — there was certainly enough of it available — but too fast drying and hard to control to be of use. I had discovered this the hard way, on my second attempt to traverse the maze. I had taken a handful of blood. Most of it had spilled. The marks I managed to make were hard to see in the available light. Eventually, what was left of it had dried in my hand.
Even using severed body parts, fingers or toes, would have been less grisly than what I was attempting. But my blade was not sharp enough or strong enough to cut through bone, and I had nothing to carry the digits in. How long had I paced around this charnel house before arriving at a solution? Far too long. Hunger carved at my guts as I carved through the guts of the dead, placated only by the overwhelming revulsion. My bile rose over and over again, from the smell, from the feel of the innards slipping through my hands, or just from the hideousness of what I was doing.
***
There are many stories of what happened to my people. Once we lived peacefully alongside humans. Except we didn’t, we had our own land and kept to ourselves, rarely interacting with others. Except we’d never had our own land, we’d always been outcasts, and when there were enough of us to call ourselves a ‘race’ we were segregated in labour camps.
Our people foolishly opposed the Realm, started a war with them. They lost and were wiped out. That’s what my mother used to say. The Realm claims that most died of a disease, and those who survived were slaughtered by extremists.
What I remember is the Fallen coming for us. There were a lot of us together one night, I don’t remember why, and the Fallen arrived without warning. There were screams in the distance, others of our kind being murdered, but screams in the night are a common thing in the city of Caldair.
The Fallen broke down the door with their unnatural strength and forced their way in to the room. It had been a large room with yellow walls and white tiles. Some kind of hall.
My mother had no memory of the place, or so she claimed. I suspect she was trying to dispel my hatred of the Fallen. She’d noticed my anger towards them, I hadn’t tried to hide it. Part of me admired the Purifiers. Even though they were sometimes a threat to Baneful too, even though they would never accept someone like me as a member, they got to fight the Fallen, eradicate the undead pricks with silver and flames.
Chlethargan people (my family? I no longer knew) had been pounced on and drained by the invading Fallen. Men and women in dark coloured rags, with blotchy skin and glowing red eyes had buried their teeth in people’s necks. Blood had spurted everywhere. People had tried to run, but the Fallen were too fast. One man had sprinted for the exit, but slipped on the floor, already slick with blood. He had fallen forward and his face had impacted the tiled floor, hard, and exploded.
Those Fallen who had finished their first course sprung on him, some feeding from his arms, from the inside of his legs, others lapping up the blood pooling on the floor. That was when my mother and I had escaped.
My mother had later tried to convince me that this was a bad dream, that it had never happened. I knew what I remembered, I knew that it tallied with what the Realm claimed, but there had always been a flutter of doubt within me.
Nobody knew the truth. Those who claimed to would be branded ‘conspiracy theorists’, which was a dangerous thing to be. It meant you were making up lies to antagonise people against the Realm, inspire riots or other violent action, and that made you a terrorist.
So imagine my eagerness when I heard of a woman who supposedly knew the truth.
Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the last.
***
I set about joining the lengths of gut together. It was like tying knots in pasta. Thick soft reeking tubes of flesh, slick with bodily fluids, leaked nauseating waste matter as I clutched and squeezed them, trying desperately to form them into one length. Several times, I felt like I was about to pass out, but forced myself to stay conscious.
I gave up the thankless task, realising I needed to keep the lengths separate anyway, and draped the individual strands over my shoulders. They were surprisingly heavy. The fluids seeped through my thin, threadbare shirt, made the guts stick to the back of my neck.
The path through the maze was narrow, and my shoulders brushed the rough stone walls as I moved. I laid one length of entrails, then another, leaving gaps between each to ensure that they would not run out before I reached my destination, but made sure each could be seen from the location of the next. They were heavy enough not to be moved by the faint flow of cold air.
The draft was incredibly cold and made me shiver whenever it flowed past or crept under my ragged clothing. I had been in there so long already, sitting on the cold slate floor, dissecting the cold bodies, breathing in their filth. There was an ache in my ribs. Breathing became a chore. My chest burned when I breathed in, rattled and slurped when I breathed out.
The darkness became absolute as I moved deeper into the maze. I had to feel my way along, and extending my arms to do this meant I had to turn sideways a little and walk at an angle to fit between the walls. Why had they made this place so small? For that matter, why had they made it at all? The Realm didn’t normally go to so much trouble to imprison people when they could easily kill them.
I came to open doors, but all led to empty rooms with bare stone and walls, slate tile floors. I learned this only through touch. Some contained metal benches or shackles. Some of these were still bound to long-since deceased inmates. My hands and arms accumulated scrapes, scratches and bruises from stone, wood, metal, bone. I cut a deep gouge in my palm on some shackles, smelt the gritty pang of rust, and fears of tetanus came to mind.
Several times, I reached dead ends and had to double back, gathering up trails of gut, coiling it around my arm. It might have been better to cut it into smaller pieces and lay lengths only at junctions, to show the direction turned.
After many hours spent like this, the coldness in my chest got so bad that I was actually glad of the innards draped around my body, an extra layer of insulation for my lungs. I grew reluctant to take them off, laid fewer and fewer.
I took turning after turning, and each corridor was practically identical, as far as I could tell, except for the occasional doors and the shapes of the junctions at either end. The only change was internal; the gnawing in my stomach and the torment in my chest.
By the time I was down to one strand of digestive tract, the motivation to lay it had fled. It was no longer a priority compared to the warring needs I was experiencing. This piece of human offal, this length of distended gut, was now far more appealing as a potential source of warmth.
Or food.
***
My mother had been dead for two weeks, and I was now alone. No wife, no children. Who would have me? There was no other freak in the world like me.
I had nothing to do but sleep and try to find food. This wasn’t an unusual way for any Baneful to live their life, if that life took place in a Realm city. Community, leisure, purpose, interaction: these things are for people with money. These things distract from the basic need to survive.
Wake, eat if you can, go out, forage for food, search for animals, search the bins, steal if you need to, fight if you have to, return home, eat if you can, sit and think (or try not think), go to sleep, repeat.
A normal routine.
But these typical struggles and indignities were further tainted by the knowledge that I would never again see a face anything like my own. When I returned to the flat each evening, and lay among the other kinds of Baneful squatting there, I was alone. I rarely spoke to anyone, they rarely spoke to me. I was lucky to be allowed to stay there, instead of being booted out onto the street.
Eventually, I tried to connect with other people. I spent nights out at Caldair’s few nightspots and pubs, sober.
There were whispers of a man named Andreas, who was saving Caldair residents from Purifiers. I first heard of him from a stall owner at Caldair market — a round, childlike man, who said Andreas had rescued his brother. Some said Andreas was Fallen, no one knew for sure. A woman from my squat said she’d seen him in the town one day, shouting to a crowd about the rights of the Baneful, and the crimes of the Purifiers. A friend of my mother once talked about him at the bar in Factor V, said he had seen Andreas running from a street littered with bodies. They could have been Purifiers, or a cannibal gang, or complete innocents — there wasn’t enough of them left to identify.
Some said he was terrifying, some said inspiring. Some thought he was a myth, others thought he might be the person to save Caldair. Many said he was just a total bastard.
I had a feeling he was exactly the sort of person who might know what happened. Or possibly the type of person who might be responsible for it. Either way, I wanted to meet him.
I met an excitable young woman out at Factor V one night, who couldn’t stop bopping and couldn’t hear a damn thing over the music, who kept shouting “what? What?” and would sometimes just nod and grin inanely, pretending to hear.
But after a lot of drinking and dancing, we left the club together and I started asking about her. I’d already learned her name, Italy Webster, but I wanted to know where she was from, what she did with her time.
“Oh, I help out a friend with some important things,” she said, as she reeled off towards the corrugated metal wall of Factor V. “You’ve probably . . . oop.” Her legs crossed over each other, she put a hand out to steady herself against the wall. “Probably heard of him . . .” she sighed, leaned back on the wall, then laughed up at the grim clouds.
“Why?” I asked, amused and curious, and charmed by this girl. “Why’s that? Who is he? Someone important?”
She swayed back and forth, head still tilted up and resting against the wall, mouth clenched shut in a cheeky I shouldn’t tell face. After a moment she sprung forward, eyes and mouth wide, and whispered, “He’s Andreas!” Then she clamped a hand to her mouth and giggled hysterically.
I was vaguely aware that I shouldn’t take advantage of her drunken state to steal information, but curiosity got the better of me.
“Oh, okay, what’s he like then? As bad as they say?”
“Oh no no no, he’s . . . great! He just wants to help people . . .” she sighed hazily, attention wavering.
“Smart fellow, is he? I bet . . . bet he’s smart. Bet he knows interesting things.”
“Oh, he does. Say, why you asking all these questions?” She exaggeratedly narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips and pointed an accusing finger. “You’re not going to grass him up are you?”
“I lost my people,” I said, “They were all killed and I want to find out why. And I heard Andreas is very knowledgeable about political matters.”
She folded her arms and shook her head sadly. “He won’t speak to you. But I know a woman who might.”
*
I met the woman behind a collapsing hab-block on the West side of town, within view of the mountains that separated us from Dezkary, the nearest region still free from the Realm. There, people still had a right to freedom of speech. I wondered if the fate of my people would be more widely known, if people in Caldair weren’t so afraid to speak of such things. One day, I would go there, start a new life. But not until I had solved my mystery.
It had taken me all day to walk to the meet point, and I was tired, impatient for answers. For an hour, I stood in the shadow of the monstrous building, shuffling my feet, blowing on my hands, hiding from passersby. The sprawling hab-block had lost its top floor, and claws of stone and tusks of metal tore at the night above.
The woman arrived, moving swiftly and quietly. She wore a black hood and black, form-fitting clothes. She stood with her back to the sunset, and I couldn’t make out much of her face, only her chin and lower lip. She was dark skinned and probably quite beautiful, though she had a broad jaw and her lip moved stiffly. She looked young, but then how could she know about my people?
I tried to get a better look at her, in the dark, under her concealment, but even a brief glance told me she was not one of my kind. My most fanciful hopes were abandoned.
“You wanted to speak to me?” she asked. “Wanted to know what I know?”
“Yes.”
“I know nothing. Nothing of value to you. There’s only one man left who knows the truth, if he still remembers. He was arrested for concocting a conspiracy theory. He is trapped in a very special prison, and he would be very, very old by now.”
She emphasised those last words — “very, very old . . .” — as if to imply something. “Is he . . . Fallen?” I asked. I bit down hard on the end of the sentence, to stop my voice turning into a growl of hate.
“Hell no.”
“How can I break him out?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
“Then at least tell me what’s so special about the place.”
“I can’t tell you that either. You have to learn your limitations and potential. Discover what talents you have. If you fail, you fail yourself. It is of no consequence to us.”
“Us? Who’s us? Do you work with Andreas?”
She raised a finger to her lips. “Do not mention that name. If you speak of him again, I will leave. To find your answers, find this man and release him. His name is Krada. He has a tattoo of a cross on his face. He will tell you what you want to know. Then return to me here, tomorrow night. Bring your new friend.”
“Where can I find this prison? How in the World can I get in?”
She passed me a piece of paper. I unfurled it and saw a map of Llangour, Caldair’s neighbouring city. The mountains were marked to the east of it, with a trail leading through them, ending at a red dot.
“You would be better off going directly there, instead of returning home first,” my informant said. “It is closer to here than there, and there is a time limit. The guards have been . . . dealt with. For now.”
“I thought you said you wouldn’t help me.”
“There’s always an exception.” She allowed herself a smile, and it was surprisingly friendly. But as she parted her lips I caught a glimpse of sharp points protruding from her upper teeth.
As I backed off, preparing to run, she grabbed my arm, urgently. “We are not responsible for what happened to your people!”
I pulled away from her, turned, and caught a glimpse of a figure, no more than a shadow, standing in one of the windows of the hab-block, watching through a shattered pane of glass. No telling who, or even what, the figure was, no telling if it was man or woman, but somehow I knew it was Andreas. Observing me. Studying me.
I looked back and saw the woman was leaving, feet splashing in the freshly pooling rain, splintering the reflections of orange light and grey hab-blocks.
Continued in "Facade of Evil", available FREE from Smashwords.
Grab those side-irons, saddle up and join former Civil War sharpshooter Luther Henry for a ride into pure terror, western-style…think ‘Wild Wild West’ meets ‘The X-Files’.
I took my shiv and tore open one of the bodies, from crotch to sternum. There was only just enough light to see, so I had to do most of my work by touch, using the almost useless taloned hands I was cursed with.
