Chapter 46: Hail To The Thief

"Victor!"

I put down the box of ammo and turned to where I heard my name shouted. I knew it to be Turk's voice, but there was an unfamiliar tension to it, like a forced sternness over mirth. His face seemed to be fighting the same battle. On his left was Goth, tall, thin and angry. On his right was the man who stole a city.

Not tall, not broad, not muscular, but in no way average, Jadus was a man I'll never forget. I would not be surprised if I learned that the word swarthy had been invented purely to describe him. His hair, long and grey, was a tangle of dreadlocks and braids that seemed to change place and count each time I saw him. His skin, not so dark as Turk's but far darker than mine, seemed to produce new scars to match his mood. The face of a hyena nestled in a tangled beard, and he grinned as intently as Goth scowled.

Jadus came straight to me. I was not wearing my armor, and he nearly tore my tunic apart at the collar, then slapped my chest hard.

"Can't kill him anyway," he said, nudging Goth. "I'll need a quart of his blood, though." He fastened my collar back up, then patted me on the shoulder. He was shockingly strong. "Don't worry," he told me, "you'll heal." And then he was gone, ignoring my effort to introduce myself. Turk and Goth followed close behind him, their backs turned to me without a glance back, even from my friend. Then I was turned and moved along, with a strong hand on either shoulder and one at my back. Long shadows stretched out before me in the light of our lamps. In this way I met the Ophidians; mighty saurian warriors who swore their lives to Jadus when they were young.

Escorted outside the bowl where we made our camp, I saw all the Cataphracts boarding an elephant. Another elephant, smaller and less foreboding than the one Turk and his would be riding in, awaited me. It was a white elephant, branded with a trio of red triangles on its flanks. I would learn that such elephants were used as medical steeds, chosen for their unobtrusive appearance and steady gate. I was seated on an air cushioned seat and fed an intravenous line into my arm, and I felt the solution coursing through me, mixing with my blood and swelling my veins. Over my tunic and work pants I wore a leather duster with a fur lined hood. The Ophidian behind me pulled back my hood, but the physician aboard the elephant was disappointed to find my scalp so perfectly bare.

"He's an egg," said the Ophidian behind me, his pebbled hand mockingly gripping my scalp.

"Why are you bald?" the physician asked. He had little hair to boast of himself. He was sweaty, and thin, and his voice embodied these traits. "Your name is Victor? Victor Thirty-Nine?"

I nodded.

"Of the Batch?"

I nodded again.

"Have you always been bald?"

I felt sickly from the solution in my blood, but I managed to lean forward and raise a hairless brow. "What does that matter to you?".

The physician rolled up my sleeve and scoffed.

"Have you pubic hair? Osmium, pull down his trousers."

I had a knife, and I drew it. I managed to get the point to the physician's neck before Osmium took it from my hand. The next largest Ophidian, a thoughtful brute named Goliath, produced a flex cuff and bound my hands.

"I have no hair," I said.

"Do you sweat?"

I'd never before considered the fact that I perspired only minimally, and that my hairlessness occasionally made even that an issue. "Much less than you," was all I told the sweaty physician.

"But you do sweat."

I leaned my head back, having no words to answer him with, nor the interest in searching my many memories to find one.

When I refused to answer any further questions about my physiology, and it was discovered that I was indeed hairless, the physician went to work drawing my blood. Such is my nature that a needle cannot last in me long. So small a wound is almost instantly stitched, so one of the Ophidians was tasked with forcefully holding my intravenous line while another held the needle drawing my blood. It was painful, I suppose, as the solution fed me caused my thinned blood to gush out quickly. I found the subdued experience intriguing, as I could almost sense my new supply of blood welling up from its unknowable spring. I was quite light headed upon dismounting the elephant, likely from the swirling of fluid within my body.

Our entourage disembarked under the shadow of the massive roof of Thieves' Gate. Due to the blood drawing, I'd been unable to view it as we approached. Our camp had been in view of its looming silhouette, viewable when we stood atop the rim of the bowl we'd pitched our tents in. Now I could scarcely see it, though I wandered beyond the lip of the roof while Jadus's men were rallying around him and the Cataphracts. What I saw was not the vast roof, rather the nearest support pylon, the span of seven pairs of tyfloch wings across, fading into the distance above me, a thin yellow line where consumed by mist. The roof emerged a distance I could not guess above the mist, a disc so broad and large it seemed a straight edge to me, only curving where it began escaping from my sight. We were outside the main hangar where the elephants were being led. We were bathed in the fierce whiteness of floodlights and sentry torches that cut through the growing fog for hundreds of feet. In their light I saw shapes moving, but I could not tell exactly what they were, until one with spread wings came swooping like lightning into view.

Abdiel had blood on his hands. His eyes looked crazed as well, and his muzzle was lifted in a snarl.

"Must you kill my people every time you visit?" Jadus asked, clearly not taking the matter seriously. More shapes emerged, one the man our restless abaddon quarreled with, and those who dragged his limp form. He was such a mess of red I could not discern his wounds, and the others showed more fear than anger in their eyes.

"Until you're the only one left," Abdiel grunted. He took a pack of cleaning gel from a pouch on his cuirass and rubbed it on his hands as he strode past me. Goth and Turk were as unmoved as Jadus, who waved those close to the dead man away, heedless of their urgent pleas for recompense.

Turk caught my eye and gestured for me to form up with a curt nod. I came close to him and we lagged behind the others. I was enamoured with the enormity of the hangar, the ceiling of which was higher even than that of the great hall of Haven. There were many floodlights in there as well, though the size of the room meant it still appeared dark. A memory flashed, of being very young and waiting fearfully in a room very similar, though far drearier and less illuminated. Here the floodlights splashed hot and bright onto the ground, and lamps of all sizes and colors light the distant walls and ceiling, where droves of workers scurried along a veritable city of catwalks. I was startled by the trumpeting of an elephant that nearly backed over my foot. Turk pulled me out of the way and began to speak.

"Why did you kill Danders?"

I turned and gave him a look of surprise.

"I don't hear an answer."

I looked ahead, scoffing in disbelief. "Have you met the man?"

"Many times. Answer my question."

I knew better than to stall the subject any further. "He had a mutant creature kept in some deranged sort of nursery, and he commanded it to attack me. When I woke I was... " Not understanding the conditions of my awakening, I hesitated. Turk stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. His grip was like a vice. We faced each other for a moment, our eyes locked in the critical move before a checkmate.

"Tell me. Don't lie. Tell me exactly how you woke."

"Naked, dripping wet, with a dead man at my feet."

"Dead man?"

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"Well..." I tried to recall the appearance of Dander's servitors. "No. They looked partially mechanized. Golems perhaps. But they looked like men with mechanical parts plugged into their orifices."

"And why did you kill Danders?"

I recall growing livid with Turk, and I grabbed him by the collar, but before I could shout there was a shift in his expression that terrified me, and I realized that I was only slightly safer in service to him than I was to the Dolomites. This may have been the moment where I began to long for solitude. I released his collar and collected myself.

"Are you hearing a word I'm saying, Turk? He held me captive, and tried to experiment with me in a tank full of strange liquid. And his lair was filled with people whom he afflicted horrors on."

"Horrors?"

Again I fought the urge to assault him. Instead, I described the woman who floated in her own tank. Turk gripped my shoulders and spun me around, then put his hand on the back of my head and turned it for me.

"Look around, Victor. See these people? Are those natural eyes? Is that natural skin? See those tyflochs? Look at that lucien. She was a Martyr, caught up in the movement as a young girl. Her name is Emmnia. She can see now, thanks to Doctor Danders's horrors."

He pushed me along to a group of workers making adjustments to a reaver's barding, and I saw instantly that not a one of them had all their organic limbs.

"Those prosthetics are linked to their minds, Victor. How do you suppose a pack of rats like them got such expensive treatment? Danders healed them gratis."

I was becoming very weary of how he handled me. He must have sensed my growing rage, as he then let me go and softened his face.

"Also, and it pains me to mention this, but Eris's medicine was made by Danders. Sick people flocked to his compound, and many were saved. Those that couldn't be volunteered themselves to be used in any way they could to help those who still have hope. You ended far more than a single life, Victor."

"What should I have done?" As I asked, my stomach was knotting up. "Stayed locked away in his tank while he did Fates know what to me? The man was mad, Turk. Mad."

"You don't even remember being in the tank, Victor."

I stammered then, wanting to claim that I did, but stopping short each sentence I began. After a long, awkward silence, I managed to tell Turk with an oath that I remembered being in the tank.

"A tank, yes. But Danders's tank? Victor, look."

He turned toward a fusileer, one of Jadus's many siege engines. In the port near the aft turret, I could see our faces clearly; our glowing eyes, uncommonly smooth skin, and the way the world behind seemed to move around us, as if we were fragments of a painting in the midst of a puppet show. Turk, though his eyes are akin, stood in stark contrast.

"You are not without need of healing, my son. You are in desperate need of it."

"I was startled." I recall how my heart sank, and torn between the acute memory of the fear that moment brought me, and the guilt that Turk was fueling, I felt a tear well in my right eye. I wiped it before it could drop, but Turk too looked as if he were just as near.

"You killed a man because you were startled. A man many depended on."

"Turk, what would you have done if you had been attacked as I was? He sicced a monster on me. It shredded my face with its claws."

"Victor, your face grows back. Look at what you did. Whatever Danders planned, he knew he could not hope to hold you for long, and he knew you were too precious a specimen to not study, even if only for a moment."

I'm trying now, as I write this, to see Turk's side of the matter, but I cannot. I only see the horrors (and yes, I call them horrors) hidden in his lair, and refuse to accept that I was somehow at fault. But, in that moment, Turk's approval was paramount, so I offered a false apology. He sensed that while it was false in terms of the deed I'd done, I was sincere in my regret over having disappointed him.

"You've many gifts, Victor, but you've got to learn discipline if they're to be a boon to this world.

I may have looked down then, and hidden another tear, or I may have looked back to the tyflochs painting the tops of a reaver squadron to match the texture of the ground. Their metal wings hummed as they hovered over the armored caterpillars, and their expressions were of sheer delight.

I told Turk that I was very confused, and that I needed his guidance.

"This is a city of thieves, but I see far more hope here than I ever did at Haven. Is there no place in Tarthas devoid of weakness of corruption?"

I recall my stomach turning to lead when Turk shook his head.

"You must learn one vital truth today, Victor. Jadus can call himself the King of Thieves, but I tell you this, all kings are thieves. They rob their subjects of their sovereign will, collect taxes from their hard earned wages, take their wives and daughters to bed in times of peace, and take their sons' and husbands' lives in times of war. And mind you, queens are no better. It takes a certain sort of person to rule, and what is a subject but a king's reflection in a puddle of mud? Will you reflect me as these people do Jadus? Piss trickles downward, Victor. You know of Vos Zurokh?"

I searched my memory of tales from the Bibliotheca, remembering the cosmogeny of the continental steppe kins. "The cosmic bull, whose urine, scat, blood and sperm fell to the ground and caused all life to spring from it."

"There's truth in tales like that, Victor."

"As above, so below." I remember I said those words in the tone of a punished child.

Turk seemed relieved then, and he put his arm around me in a most loving way. I felt relieved as well, having won his affection back.

"Who are we to judge others, Victor? If you don't wish to be detained somewhere, then break free. But I beg you, be slower to kill. Your life will return to you. It is not so for others."

Turk then hurried me along, and I spent the better part of that evening in a long and tiresome briefing. I listened as best I could, noting the parts of the plan that

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