Chapter 34: Grave Dance

The Bibliotheca was burned. I might have wept, but somehow this seemed to make sense to me. Maybe I felt safer with its knowledge destroyed. There is much one can learn from an unburied corpse, such as how not to die. Turk sighed at the site of the corpse, but he kept moving further downward. But at the start of our foraging we went to my silo. My few possessions had been completely removed. Turk lamented the squalor of my dwelling, and I assured him that I spent very little time there.

"I came here only to sleep. My life was lived where my duties took me."

"Your current abode is far grander," he said, his voice conveying the irony of a tomb being made into a home for the living. The inverse had occurred where we stood. Everywhere we went was death. The turmoil that followed the coup de tat had far exceded any of my darkest musings. Where lights flickered, my ghost sight kindled, and I saw a world of dried bones and ragged strips of flesh, mobilized by a constant scuttling of roaches and vermin. I learned of Turk's ability to see the heat of living bodies, and together we managed to avoid many encounters with wild scavengers, and I discovered that a fabled rat, nearly the size of a man, did in fact exist.

I was not particularly attentive to much beyond the potential dangers at first, but when we made our way into the deeper levels, I took in every detail, as I had never before been allowed to the privileged parts of the city. At first I was surprised by the squalor, seeing little difference between these quarters and those I was used to, but as we descended further, the opulence of lower Haven began to manifest. Sparsely decorated walls and small rooms gave way to large chambers whose walls bore many scars from hangings being torn free, and the hallways and audience chambers were spacious enough for hundreds to gather at once. When we passed between decks, I would peek over the railings to look at the expanse between deck and hull where golden skies had been painted with light. The lights flickered on and off, leaving the expanse mostly black and void, but when it flickered on, I saw what Turk called a true Sunset, over a vast plain littered with acacia trees. There are no such trees growing within our prison world, so let me tell you of them. They are each a spread of pillar rising like fingers to the perfect height, spreading between them a canopy that gives shade in a warm land where wild things roam free. Here, the wild things do roam, but they are not free, and the trees are mostly spores of death far overgrown.

I found the excursion less intriguing that I thought it would be. Turk fawned over ever surface and went into every room, and soon I grew weary. Abdiel sensed this, as he was too, though he seemed to know what Turk was searching for and assisted him. In one room, a long hall coated in dried blood, Turk spent an inordinate amount of time, and Abdiel and I conversed.

"Devils," he said plainly. I was mortified to think they'd been so close to Eris and I. I saw one in the flesh (a disturbing statement, if you know their kind) when I was a boy, and it was the stuff of nightmares.

"Nothing for you to worry about," Abdiel said, reading accurately the subtle look on my face. Tyflochs have fantastic eyes, when they are not afflicted by rot.

"Why would they assault Haven?" I asked. I remember my hands fidgeting.

He nodded down the corridor, and I followed him. He grunted to Turk that we were going to the Great Hall. Turk made no reply, but compulsively rubbed a piece of a tattered garment between his thumb and forefinger. I stood and watched him for a moment. In one hand, his sword was held, limply resting its scabbard on the ground. In the other was the torn silk gown. The room was long, narrow and tall, and wrapped around the circular extremity of the city for quite some distance, its gleaming tables and sleek chairs disappearing into darkness, breached now and then by shafts of cold blue light that came from I know not where. Turk looked like a man out of time, with blue beams shining on his burgundy cloak that looked like it had been drenched in well aged wine.

The Great Hall could have held Belial's entire domain in its palm. The room was deep in Haven's interior, and beneath it hummed what was once a powerful engineering plant. That chamber, Belial told me, was once the Boardroom, where the deepest councils were held. I asked if he would lead me there, but he hesitated, stretching his hand out in a sweeping gesture at the vast, octagonal hall we were in.

"Haven was built to be a self contained world," he said, "to house entire generations of people within its walls. But its denizens paid no heed to its potential, and they have paid the price."

Abdiel was always verbose when attempting to manipulate others. I allowed myself to be briefly influenced, and took in the massive, empty room. What had once been lavish furnishings for many a grand occasion was now a pile of charred wood and melted polymer in the center of the hall. Other than that it was as bare as a tomb. On the fringes of the Abdiel's lantern light I could see the ghosts of great banners, wisping slow and spectral with the gusts that came down from distant air shafts.

"I'd like to see the Boardroom," I said at length. I can only imagine what Abdiel saw when he looked at me then. As all of us do, I see an image of myself internally that bears little resemblance to the tall figure presented to others. A hand's breadth over six feet high, broad shouldered and sinewy, with long limbs and strong hands, I am an imposing figure to many. Coupled with my staring, luminous eyes that never blink and see in deep gloom, my hairless, colorless skin that withstands even bitter cold, I am an unnatural creature in the sight of most people. An alien man of an enigmatic and formidable breed wanting to look upon the grisliest of graves, I made Abdiel uneasy. I think it was his nervousness that swayed him, though he did not hold back a warning.

"What we have not yet found lies in there," he said. He was not wrong.

There was a series of mirrored hallways that crossed between partitions, removed from the Great Hall through a series of offset doorways that led into each other. We passed through them in a particular route (Abdiel said nothing when I asked how he knew it so well), and stood on a disc of glass as hard as steel that portaled us silently downward. The Boardroom was nearly a third the size of the Great Hall, but was cramped with the mounds of thousands dead.

The bodies were like none I'd ever seen. Their flesh was grey and glossy, as if they had all been vitrified in a massive kiln. Some did look burned, and some had been catastrophically maimed, but most were burst open by some powerful force. One torso emerged from the mound nearest me, bent backwards with arms spread like wings in mid flight. Its ghastly head was looking up at me, jaw dislocated and opened nearly sideways. There were dark discolorations around its empty eye sockets like blackened starbursts, and a large rent over its splayed rib cage. The tatters of its ruptured organs still showed, and I felt a sickness that could cure a man of eating for life.

A hard realization formed in me then, and I made myself stare at each body in that nearby mound as Turk had in the rooms above us. I stared at them until I became almost bored with the horror, and occupied myself by taking note of their unique injuries; a fat man whose stomach had turned outward, a voluptuous girl whose breasts had exploded, a muscular man who's probably handsome face was melted into slag. Even the children and infants became subjects for my study, so well did I force myself to take them in, and I was numbing myself to bits of a fetus that clung to the walls of its mother's open belly when I heard Turk's voice. He tried then to recruit me into his war on the Devils, and nodded knowingly when I reminded him that my place was at Eris's side.

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