Page 31

They Just Vanished

M irzaii 2. The ballroom. A chamber of refined luxury stained by ongoing debauchery. The air inside was thick with a miasma of smoke, alcohol, and a rainbow of fumes from drugs of all kinds, covering the full spectrum from the natural to the synthetic. The number of guests was nearly equal to the number of entertainers, and in turn, to the number of guards. A band of nervous musicians played an eclectic set of their greatest hits, songs that hadn’t done so well, and hastily prepared covers, all picked out by their employer. They had, of course, not known ahead of time that this employer was Semzar Hashem, but the enormous paycheck and equally generous tips had sufficed to encourage them. It wasn’t as if they could run at this point.

At the other side of the ballroom, a woman clad in naught but translucent silks and jewelry danced on a hexagonal stage that was slick with blood and viscera. The intermingling of human and Saurian blood colored her bare feet a strange shade of purplish scarlet, effectively concealing the talismans that safeguarded her from slipping.

“The patrols are gone, sir. All of them. The same is true for the men we sent out to assess what happened to the patrols.”

The man speaking was an abnormally large baneworm hidden inside a mountain of muscle, which in turn was hidden by a mountain of fat; such bodies made it easier to conceal his possession of them, and his preference had earned him such names as, Strongman, Big Guy, Fatman, and so on. He, the baneworm, didn’t actually have a personal name, simply making one up each time he took a new body. Even as he was riding in a two-meter meat mountain, he was in the submissive position here. He looked up from where he knelt to see the disdainful facade of Semzar Hashem, the heir’s irritation distorting his meatsuit’s handsome features.

“Gone? The fuck you mean gone?!” Semzar barked, throwing a glass of atrociously expensive liquor. Instantaneously, a nearby manservant cleaned it up, tendrils of azure magic extending from the jewels on his glove’s knuckles to lift the mess into a trash chute.

Semzar proceeded with a multi-minute rant which involved drinking and spilling three more glasses of that liquor. While this went on, Strongman tuned out most of the heir’s inane tirade and carefully took in his surroundings.

To Semzar’s left and right, a small harem of women had been gathered. In Strongman’s experience, such groups were usually made up of three sorts: self-employed women of the night, those with more ambition than reason, and those who had no choice in the matter—illegally owned or otherwise coerced by a third party. He wondered what the ratios were in this case. They didn’t seem particularly dead in the eyes, at least. He supposed Semzar’s choice of skinsuit must’ve helped.

Behind Semzar’s opulent seat, there towered an enormous, two-and-a-half meter tall Evoy. He exuded a stoic threat of violence at any perceived aggression, his compound eyes perpetually twitching in place as he observed his surroundings. He looked unlike any other Evoy, unlike even the rare war-morphs; in short, he looked wrong . His left arm particularly stood out, being so engorged that its chitin plates bulged apart, revealing the musculature underneath. Its base shape even diverged from the Evoy’s other arm. To the giant’s sides, four further guards were posted. Their forms were mostly Evoy-like, but twisted and misshapen, each more heavily grafted than the next. These graft-beast abominations were scattered all throughout the mansion.

Finally, after calming down somewhat, Semzar leaned forward and asked, “Explain what you mean by ’gone.’ As I recall, I spent a great deal on communications specifically to prevent this. ”

With each word, the mask of calm cracked, tendrils and veins showing through as anger crept into his voice again. “We haven’t received any calls, good or bad, in the last twenty minutes. Somehow, all of them seem to have just disappeared into the astral. The same thing happened to those we sent to check, and…” Strongman said, partially repeating himself.

Before Semzar could speak again, explosions sounded in the distance.

A wave of tension swept over the ballroom. Even that giant Evoy turned his head in that direction, ever so subtly. He leaned down to Semzar, uttering something in his ear. The heir listened with rapt attention, then barked out a series of commands, some of which pertained to Strongman himself. In effect, he was calling for the mansion’s security contingent to go on high alert. It made sense, but Strongman instinctively filtered out the brat’s actual words, coming away only with the general meaning.

However, before Strongman could actually get to doing his job, one of the ballroom’s doors swung open, and a shell of a man stumbled through. His hair was burnt off in places, one of his eyes had burst open, and fist-sized chunks were missing from his left side.

“T-the basement, it’s… it’s Blackhand’s big brother…”

***

Initially, Yazata wasn’t particularly fond of these “Red Hoods.” Battle-automata that they were, they mimicked human behavior far too closely, without the cognitive capacity to be held accountable. They lacked the token animalism of graft-beasts and bore no esoteric spark to imply the presence of an eidolon intelligence; they were animated wholly by artifice and were just as unsettlingly cold as that implied. Faceless things, yet at once their steel-silver bodies had the shapes of young girls, and each possessed hair of a subtly different color, hidden under the titular hooded cloak of scarlet fabric.

On the way to the Mirzaii Subdistrict, Yazata and her force of freakish silver maidens encountered some expected resistance. Even spread out as they were, Yazata was still obviously an inquisitor, and the Red Hoods were an even more immediate bogeyman to the city’s miscreants than her. As they moved towards their goal, they identified and subdued nearly twenty patrolling Hashem Family foot soldiers.

And so, it came to be that she found herself bombarded with a rapid-fire barrage of Red Reapers from a first-floor window. It was inevitable, fully expected. This was no ambush—it was the path of least resistance.

She simply stepped to the side of one red comet, drawing her bar-mace with her right hand and holding out her left. Her eyes burned with purple light as she poured power into both the bar-mace and the Black Bindings that enveloped her body. Five reams of Black Binding sprung forth from her sleeve, capturing an encroaching reaper, and with a simple gesture, she sent it flying back. She hopped between two further reapers that had reached her in the intervening second, which appeared to be pushed away from her onto wildly divergent trajectories, debris and crimson energy coloring the space behind her as she calmly walked towards her adversaries.

All it took was a glance; she merely had to meet their eyes to get them in her snare. Sheer mental focus, honed to a razor point, set loose as a torpedo just beneath the skin of reality. A petty hex, but enough to make the trio freeze up on the spot. It lasted all of a second and a half, but that was more than enough.

Finally, she felt her mace come alive, and she chanted under her breath, “Oh, Black Trapezohedron, sound forth from the spires of Zor’Aguhastra…”

The black metal of its blade began thrumming with an unearthly sound, a thick distortion dripping from it, only upwards; it was like a heat-haze, if a heat-haze was as thick as pouring blood, and if it twisted the world itself rather than the air.

With a simple horizontal swing, an invisible force carved a gash across the wall, its existence only betrayed by a wake of the same distortion that enveloped Yazata’s bar mace. The windows exploded out of their frames, and the brickwork crumbled. One of the men had his skull cleaved open, while the two others were sent flying back like ragdolls.

Two steps forward and a moment later, the light finally reached the ends of Yazata’s Black Bindings. They shot out as if alive and mercilessly dragged the trio out of the building, slamming the one with a cleft-open face into the cobbles while restraining the other two. Yazata let out a sigh through her nose as she willed her bindings to envelop the survivors’ heads, the bindings’ sigils forming complex curse-seals in the process. In this manner, she sealed their awareness, rendering them into vegetables for the next several hours. Yazata honestly wished it were always this easy to place mental restraints.

Following this negligible obstacle, Yazata regrouped with her contingent of Red Hoods and directly approached the Gate of Mirzaii which was the main entrance to the gated slice of decadence that included the target building. The address numbers only went up to five, yet it took up an enormous swath of land, with anything and everything the owners could want on their properties. It made perfect sense; Audunpoint had never lacked for space, and according to intel, this place had been well outside the living city’s bounds at the time of its original construction. In short, the city’s expansion had only caught up to this location in recent years. The walls were like those of a small fortress, ten meters tall and shimmering with reinforcing runes and translucent barriers extending further upwards. The Mirzaii Subdistrict was, by all means, excessively well-defended. Yazata decided to investigate the owners of these properties after this was over and done with.

Gathering in front of the Gate of Mirzaii, they found it closed with a guard in well-wrought silver Mamon Armor standing in front, contrary to their intel. It was clear he had been stationed here specifically as another layer of defense.

Covered in fluting and elaborate inlays from head to toe, the wide-shouldered man possessed a truly baroque countenance befitting of the place he guarded. A large sword of equally complex design floated behind him. He lacked a typical belt; instead, attached to his left arm was an enormous tower shield which incorporated the Mamon Coupler into itself, constantly projecting a barrier and its surface shimmering with the implication of warding. Despite the thickly layered imagery, Yazata could identify no outward sign of the guard’s affiliation to an agency.

“Halt. What is your purpose here?” he asked in a stern monotone.

Yazata simply poured a wisp of thauma into her pendant. The golden, seven-spoked wheel floated a hand’s length from her chest, shining with golden flame. The wheel then shrunk inward, transforming the symbol into a spiky, seven-pointed star with the wheel in the innermost third.

“I am Yazata Heptaxia, Inquisitor of the Inner Wheel. By the authority vested in me by the Seven Spokes, I demand you allow my contingent and I to pass unimpeded. Our purpose in the Mirzaii Subdistrict is the detainment of Semzar Hashem, son of the mafioso Damrus Hashem, whom I have good reason to believe currently resides within the mansion on Mirzaii Two.”

The gate guardian stared her down, motionless, faceless, for a solid five seconds.

“Unfortunate. I was not aware,” he stated, retrieving a large key and touching it to the gate. As its enormous wings swung open, the guard walked off to the side. “I will see to it that my handler conveys my contract to the church. I would request that I be compensated for the loss of income from any goods confiscated as a result of your investigation. I am sure the Seven Spokes will understand.”

Yazata very nearly raised her eyebrows at the man’s temerity, but she let it go. It was not her problem. She led the Red Hoods into the Mirzaii Subdistrict, quickly approaching the mansion. They encountered no great resistance on the approach, easily subduing enemy patrols before they could use their glorified consumer-grade communication artifacts. Yazata continually observed the maidens’ behavior as they followed her commands, noting that, unlike most automata, their adaptability was just as good as the technical documents suggested. With each encounter, the Red Hoods grew less stiff, requiring fewer direct instructions.

Before the final approach, she took a moment to look over each of them, adjusting the Black Bindings she had attached beneath their shells.

No erosion, good… Sympathetic transfer efficiency will be quite poor, but I will accept what is given freely, she thought.

It was time. The Red Hoods encircled the mansion, forming an enormous heptagram. At this point, the mansion’s windows swung open, and its protective barrier flared, being tightly contoured to its walls. A deluge of hostile magic and gunfire poured out, but at this range, it posed little danger. Yazata captured the occasional would-be hits with her Black Bindings and sent them flying right back at the source.

The ritual proceeded without delay. She uttered a word, and it rang with the sound of a hollow, bronze bell.

The eye-like glyphs covering her hair vanished in a burst of purple light, reappearing suspended before the face of each Red Hood.

A second word, and she outstretched her arms. Black Bindings once more sprang forth from her sleeves, joining her with the Red Hoods and surrounding the mansion.

A third word, and the Red Hoods mimicked it, her bindings flaring with power and strain as these unliving things conducted such a profound force.

“The strain is too great; it shan’t work at this rate.”

The base cost was already enormous. With the added resistance of using these dolls as the other participants, Yazata had no way to power the ritual under her own strength.

With some remorse, she sent out several more Black Bindings, connecting them back to fourteen restrained foot-soldiers in the general vicinity. Onerous though it was, she crossed one of her many lines and used them to power the ritual, hijacking their Soul Furnaces for the moment. Like the supplicants of an unkind god, the small crowd rose up and stumbled towards her, but she had gotten what she needed long before they could reach her.

The final, fourth word rang out, and the world ruptured. There came a ceaseless scream of unearthly pitch. The Red Hoods were consumed by Black Bindings, growing out from inside their shells, liquid distortion spilling out as their silhouettes twisted, overlaid by something else, yet undeniably under their control. At the same moment, all of her extended Black Bindings were drawn back towards Yazata, gathering into a sphere before her. The sphere of empowered bindings exploded, instantaneously filled by the shape of a chthonic monstrosity visible to the naked eye only as distortion.

HIGH THAUMATURGY

SIGN OF THE PRETENDER-ARCHON

WITCHCRAFT HEPTAGRAM: DREDGING THE DEEP GULF

The screaming ceased. From beneath Yazata’s stoic mask, a cackling laugh escaped.

Seven seals undone, seven beasts from the deep astral called forth and bound to the material, dragged along like caught fish just beneath the surface.

“In accordance with the Third Tower’s ancient accords, heed my shining words, o children of the fathomless deep! Go forth and eat your fill, o hounds of the Nameless Roaring One!” she invoked, still cackling as she drew the Black Trapezohedron.

This was Yazata’s personal definition of witchcraft. Understanding and wielding the truly esoteric and forgotten in order to gain strength far beyond one’s raw talent, using knowledge and craft to subvert the limits of nature. The method had a dozen restrictions, and all of them, she had solved.

***