The Township - Dungeon Crawl Fanfiction

[shackleton]

Many appologies if this is anti-climactic - I just couldn't face writing the escape.

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In the distance, a column of smoke rose over the valley, and a farmer turned white bones into his field, with a critical eye turned to the furrow of the black earth. A lone seagul, eyes sharp and staring for worms exposed in the turn of the ploughshare, floated above them.

Three horses, two with riders, the third carrying packs, moved slowly along a dirt track, great slopes of scree and granite to their left, on their right, a bubbling brook.

"The valley looks better from this side," said Jan.

Dorcas smiled, sitting easily in the saddle, with a book laid across the horn. They had a large portion of Thorsen's library stashed away in one of his saddlebags, a rough leather satchel that gave a stench of sulphur when opened, but seemed to distend endlessly like the stomach of a moray eel when things were put in it, with no change to its external dimensions.

Before long, they were passing through black pine-woods, snapped boughs jutting on either side of the path like lunatic artillery, fat lazy flies taking meandering paths amongst them, dithering into the webs of hungry spiders.

They made their camps deep in the woods, and Jan would lie on his back in the damp needles, watching the squadrons of small black birds flit across the treetops, in thick silence.

They fell in love, or perhaps they had been for some time, and slept curled into eachother against cold nights across fires that smelled of pine resin, and talked about nothing at all while the stars wheeled above.

When they finally arrived in the Capitol, Jan felt like a whole new man, and Dorcas wheeled wide-eyed at the crowds and the stench, the noise and incredible scale, buildings set to belittle mountains against hovels that rose like termite-nests, mashed paper honeycombs rising amongst corinthian columns and godstone spires.

He was home.

[Grimm]

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now that this is over.

[Confidence Interval]

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now that this is over.

Sequel! We must have a sequel!

[shackleton]

It's not over. I have some frankly horrible surprises for my characters coming up, and I think another POV character.

[I want to believe]

Obviously, Jan/Dorcas is under a spell/potion effect. Love does not happen so instantly, and I think there Is more than meets the eye about you not writing the escape. Perhaps paralytic venom from a giant spider? The toxic spit of a fearsome naga? Ancient zymes spreading their cancer and disease? The festering pestilence of a long dead abomination? The world may never know. That is, until shackleton writes more. Then the world will know. Unless shackleton dies. Then the world won't ever know.

[shackleton]

Hey guys, just wondering, aside from my spelling, is there anything I ought to change? Should the pacing be faster, or slower? More action, or less? Anyway, here's the next bit:
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JAN
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"Your problem is you don't have the motivation, the drive to succeed!"

Jan's father had not improved with time. Dorcas smiled with the corner of her mouth, and grabbed Jan's knee under the table.

"Uh, this is fantastic, mother-"

His mother started to reply, her thin and pale face washed out by years of his father's ruddy, ham-handed blustering, but her husband steamed straight over her-

"Your generation! I ask you, where is the get-up-and-go! Where is the gumption! You dress like a bunch of ragamuffins, and expect life to throw everything before you on a platter!"

Jan looked at his clean, almost-brand-new jacket and wondered what his father would have thought of his road rags. He was beginning to get an acute headache - the same he remembered plaguing him for much of his adolescence.

"When I was your age-" men ate rocks instead of bread, and built the Capitol with only the use of their pricks -"we knew what work meant!"-as opposed to nowadays, where you get drunk at mid-day, then nap for the remainder, snoring so loud you can be heard from the corridor outside your 'study'.

"Jan, could you show me to the toilet?" asked Dorcas. Something was up. He'd pointed it out on the way into the house.

He stood, and they edged out of the room, his father still booming forth to a diminished audience.

"Are they always this bad?" she whispered.

"You know, I don't think I ever missed home."

"Screw it, let's just get out of here."

"How? They're guarding the only door."

She grabbed his hand, and he recognized the look of concentration on her face she got when she was about to blink.

"No! No! We can't just disappear!"

Her brow relaxed.

"Why not? They're assholes. Your father's been one hair away from calling me a whore three times now - next time, I'm warping him into the Eber."

Jan paused, weighing up the diplomatic damage of Dorcas losing her temper in the extremely likely circumstance that his father insulted her again, against that of disappearing into thin air.

"Alright, fine. But we go out the front door. You have contractions. Look like you are in pain."

"Bit early for that, isn't it?"

"Got any better ideas? Any port is good anchorage in a storm."

He looked down at Dorcas' growing belly with a weird surge of pride he could frankly say he'd never felt from anything else.

He hoped it was a girl.

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Jan's life was, for the first time in his life, something close to blessed. He and Dorcas were coasting on the weregild Purves & Grimes had paid on the event of his death, which was, as Augurs rarely die in the line of duty, very substantial, and had luckilly fallen into the hands of his mother, who had squirelled it away, then given it to him with a whispered lament that, if she had kept it, it would only serve to redden his father's nose, which was -on his generous civil service pension - very red.

They lived in a flat that had tall sash windows above a busy market square, in a shabby neighborhood populated by artisans, scientists, students and artists, and Dorcas had decorated it with dried flowers, while Jan had developed a talent for baking.

He had contacted his old friends from university, who had been delighted to see him alive, and who were far more interesting and fun than how he remembered them. They were constantly engaging in one or another conspiracy in the lively political sects that filled the Capitol, talking at the top of their voices about revolution and liberation for all, producing pamphlets and holding meetings that turned into dancing before anything much had been decided.

Dorcas spent her days studying Thorsen's old books, or wandering the backstreets of the Capitol, admiring the strange and labyrinthine architecture, or blinking to the tops of tall spires. One night she came back flushed and laughing and told him that she had been chased by a ghoul in the Shudders, but had ported it into a sewer.

Jan felt a strange twin flush of pride and horror - pride that Dorcas was so fearless, fear that anything could threaten her. He had offered to come and walk with her, but he only got on her nerves, worrying about every dark corner and every shifty gang of youths.

Dorcas, with the ability to sidestep danger so casually, was free to explore the city in a way that Jan had never dreamed of. She could wander blithely into the depths of the Shudders - the favela that wound filligree through the depths of Muna's library, houses built into stripped bookshelves, children barefoot in the drifts of dust - and simply blink past any threat.

She was learning a strange city, a city that most tried to ignore, a city of mystery cults and strange music, desperation and multiplicity. The ghettos of the tengu, sprouting from the godstone spines that hung over the Eber, and the gangs of kobolds that haunted the deeps of the Shudders.

The city that woke after darkness, shadowed figures cloaked in mist, shambling ghouls, and strange, disfigured men that stank of sulphur, all living their lives side by side with the ordinary, working wherever would employ them, drifting from quarter to quarter, melting away at the approach of witchunters.

Jan too felt like he was discovering the Capitol. He walked with a new-found confidence, through a place that seemed vibrant with possibilities, exploding at the seams with energy, barely constrained by the dead hand of the Senate. He climbed the spires to the places where strange winds blew through vertical streets of derelicts and squats, and watched St Elmo's fire crown the Spires with gold.

In the South, the war with Genoa was raging, but it barely touched the Capitol. Here, the soldiers were merry and drank with youthful enthusiasm, not traumaticc desperation, and their brawls lacked the hard edge of men accustomed to casual murder.

He wandered down to the bakery to buy fresh loaves of bread, and carried them in the crook of his arm, stepping over gutters and through the street-markets bustling with smells of spice and shouting, past the group of rakes, drunk as shit and boiling out of a bar, past the young Egypta street organist, who was getting really very good, and up the old pine stairs into the flat.

He was going to another meeting tonight. He used to find the meetings boring - the endless rehashing of vitriol like a farmer's dogs barking at nothing, a sound devoid of all meaning. It seemed more interesting, now. Perhaps it was just a more interesting time. Perhaps it was, when they said words like 'war', or 'hunger', he had pictures to put to the words. Different kinds of people, too. The senate was stretched very thin with the war in the South. The Batholith Milner's guild had forced them to ban child labour in the Capitol just two months ago, after weeks of strikes and marches. The instant population of joyful, pinch-faced children brightened the streets.

Wafting in from the street, he could hear somebody singing on the square. A man. The market was closed, quiet, and their voice was good. Dorcas had left her clothes scattered through the living room.

He leaned out the window, and saw the singer. A young man with a mane of white hair, perhaps bleached, with a very tanned face, swaddled in grey rags. He was sitting crosslegged on a bench, a flute held in one brown hand. The song was strange, full of atonality and syncopation, but mesmerising.

He turned back to the meal he was preparing, and the music wafted into the room, into his perfect life.

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LUCAS
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"Keep him still." said Gorg. He sounded almost bored. Lucas struggled, but the others were much stronger than he was, and they were holding his blanket tight over him. The unnoficial policy of the Academy was that such practices bred tougher graduates. Maintained discipline. Gorg hit him in the stomach, hard, but not hard enough to do any permanent damage.

"I want you to count to ten. Ten strikes. If you miss a number, we'll start again at the beginning. Do you understand?"

Lucas spat at him.

Gorg's face was blank and impassive as he wiped the spit off. It was bloody from that clip Lucas had got in the mouth.

He hit Lucas in the stomach, and Lucas' gorge ran up his throat.

"Do you understand?"

He hit him again. It felt like he couldn't breathe.

"Do you understand?"

Lucas tried to writhe away, but he was trapped. The fist felt like a hammer in his stomach. He vomited in his mouth, and blood and vomit rand down his cheek.

"Do you understand?"

Lucas spat a gob of saliva, blood and stomach acid in Gorg's face, and Gorg screamed as the sick stung his eyes. He turned away, hands held to his face, then turned back towards Lucas. Gorg Mask, nicknamed so because he never smiled, never frowned, never twitched his black, dead eyes - a face so impassive it was no face at all, no more expressive than the back of his head.

Right now, though, there was a shock of rage, then of joy. Elation. Like the first rays of morning sun on a mountain-range.

His hands closed around Lucas' neck, and suddenly, Lucas couldn't breathe. It hurt, like a grip of ice, like broken glass in his throat. His vision was dimming. He was going to die. Better late than never, thought Lucas. He wished he could die with a smile on his face. That would really piss them off, but his body, ever rebelious, continued to struggle and choke for air. The other boys had let go of the blanket. They didn't want to be part of a murder.

Suddenly, the pressure stopped. Gorg looked down at his hands.

"Just wanted to see the look in your eyes," he said. "I wasn't disappointed."

Gorg the experimentalist. This was the fifth night in the dorm. The first four had been simmilar, although, it seemed tonight Gorg had found whatever it was he had been looking for.

This wasn't bullying. There was no laughter, the humiliation was incidental. This was a test, of some kind. Lucas thought that Gorg was probably mad.

So did some of the others. He could see it by the way they looked at Gorg. But they were also afraid, and the smouldering embers of their sadism were blown into fires by the power of being on the stronger side.

And Gorg would always be the stronger.

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DORCAS
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She didn't realize how late it was, until she climbed the twisting stair that led out of Minos' Gorge. The cave-moss that grew on the gorge walls gave off a deceptive brightness, lulling the passage of time, and illuminating the bank of fog that rose off the Eber then descended between houses of the gorge to give it a false ceiling.

When she had descended, it had felt like the houses at the top of the crevasse were built on clouds. Now, it appeared like they were built on a swirling abyss, a sinister membrane pulsing with gaslight and strange, fogged sounds.

It was late. Jan would be upset. She stopped off by the late night market on Holgastrasse to pick up some flowers, to try and make up for it. Dorcas didn't even know if Jan liked flowers, but she was new to romantic gestures. 'Flowers are romantic,' thought Dorcas. Plus, Jan always seemed to like them, and they were beautiful. Flowers of all different kinds, from all over the old empire - fireblossom, from the Urals, delicate white Slothbane, from the Scanda wastes, blooms shepherded for generations next to flowers plucked from untended fields and hedgerows.

The bunch was wrapped in tissue-paper. She sped her steps. Perhaps, if she hurried, she would catch him just as he left the meeting. She had said she would go, but she found the meetings hard to follow. They made her feel like a yokel.

As she grew closer to the bar, where they had the meetings, she developed a skip in her step. Never in her life had she been so stupid about anything as she was about Jan, she thought to herself, with a wry smile.

Suddenly, a figure burst out of the darkness, to grab her by her lapels. Dorcas almost hit them, but it was Rosalind, the landlady. She also attended the meetings, sometimes. A sweet lady - they often had dinner together, like a familly.

"They've taken them! You can't go!"

"What?" The woman's face was shiny with cold sweat.

"They've taken them all to the tower!"

Dorcas' stomach dropped.

"Who?"

"The ones at the meeting, Fredrich, Hols, all of them … Jan."

Dorcas tried to push past her.

"They'll be watching the bar. You can't go." The woman held on to her lapels.

"Let go of me," said Dorcas.

"Listen, you can't go."

"I'm not going to the meeting-house."

"Where?"

"The Tower," said Dorcas, again trying to strug off the woman's hands, trying to restrain herself from punching her.

"It's suicide," said Rosalind. "They're gone."

"Let go of me," Dorcas ground out.

"You can't go."

"Get the fuck out of my way or I swear I'll make you."

The woman's eyes widened at the look on Dorcas' face, but didn't move.

"No."

Dorcas almost hit her, then caught herself. Rosalind was right. Going off half-cocked would be suicide.

She looked at the flowers in her hand, all squashed and spread in all directions by her clenched hand, and began to weep.

[shackleton]

The street was grey, haunted by the shadows of night-watchmen, beggars shuffling into their hiding places to avoid the wavering torchlight, and the night was silent. Nobody knew anything about the arrest. Not the neighbours, not the barkeep. Their faces closed into a dead blank of fear when she brought it up.

She hadn't washed for three days, nor slept, and greasy swabs of lank hair were falling into her face. And, above, in the distance, sat the Tower. The Tower, haloed by wheeling ravens, called from the Alpbergen mountains generations ago by the stench of human carrion.

Now, they sat, fat and black eyed, distant descendants of their wild ancestors. 'Without the ravens, the tower would fall', went the dark joke - if the ravens lost their diet of human offal, no doubt the crowds would cease to hold the tower in awe, and burn it down for good.

But for now, it stood. The most secure place in the Empire. The stronghold of law, surrounded by an aura of unearthly silence that robbed even the wind of sound.

And Dorcas didn't know where to start. The guards were hard-faced, impossibly disciplined, impeccably trained - the cream of the professional army. There were no weak links there.

She sat, and watched, day after day, still as a statue, and saw the rotations of the guard proceed, regular as the innards of a clock. The tower rested on a pillar of godstone, sheer and forbidding, over a hundred meters tall and blown by silent winds.

To blink, Thorsen had said once, you must walk through the primordial. The other side to the universe - the godless realm of the abyss, is where all warpers travel through, journeying in an instant, but still exposing oneself to that dark and alien place, even if just for a moment.

There were rituals, sufficiently bloody to discourage any but the most ruthless and dedicated, that could complicate this passage. That would scatter travellers, maim them as they travelled, drive them mad or cast them into the Abyss for good.

The Tower sat in the center of the zone of influence for one such ritual, one so dark and strange that it leached the colour from everything within its reach, so much that those who survived their imprisonment left with white shocks of hair.

Dorcas didn't dare to port in. There would be another way.

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"Magic is a contradiction. If something is repeatable, experimentally speaking, then it is simple craft. If a plain set of gestures was enough to evoke it, then it would be as mundane as the work of a blacksmith. Magic is magic insofar as it is not part of mundane reality. But yet, it exists."

Lucas's stomach was a knot of bruises, and his throat hurt when he swallowed. His notes were degenerating into scrawls and doodles, inkblots on reed-paper. He'd read all this material already, but he still had to listen, just in case Proffessor Edgecombe gave some small insight that the books hadn't included.

"The Golobrian scholars believed that the world was an illusion, a single facet of the real reality, which is the Abyss. Unending Chaos. A lawless land of horror and madness. Modern thinkers are less likely to credit this, but there is one thing we know for sure."

In the staggered seats of the lecture hall, students scratched their notes. Gorg was sitting, staring blankly, on the other side of the room. Gorg never wrote any notes.

"Magic defies universal law because like the Abyss, it is older than law. It belongs to the land of chaos, and madness. It is something from a place prior to good, or evil, prior to any notion of order, space, or time."

The weak light of an overcast day lit clouds of swirling dust, shining weakly from a room of windows, high in the auditorium.

"All creatures with free will are capable of defying law, for the same reason they are capable of magic. Our will exists prior to order. We can create the effects of madness, because we are its agents. Each of us have a seed of the Abyss within us, and that is what allows us to defy sense. To defy reason. To defy law."

Lucas's doodle was turning into a spiral, black lines arcing into eachother. Something like one of the Old Gers ritual marks. He wondered what would happen if you spilled a little blood on it, gave it a little juice. Probably nothing. Experimentation like that was frequently boring, sometimes a risk to sanity, and occasionally fatal. It almost never produced results that were in any way positive. He looked over at Olivia, a girl who had given herself a thick coat of fur that sprouted everywhere except her face and the palms of her hands while doing some ill-advised experimentation last year. Still quite pretty, despite looking a little like an orangutan.

Mutations were fairly common in the older years. Small horns, or a progressive wasting that required a steady diet of health potions, or scales. One of the professors had a set of barbed tentacles where his hands should have been, another, jag-toothed mouths instead of eyes.

It was thought to be partially caused by the thin sheen of Abyssal dust that often coated the hands of anybody casting an incantation less than flawlessly. Wizards were, as a result, obsessive hand-washers. The canteen also served food laced with ioedic salt, which gave everyone a mild, constant headache, but prevented the glands on your neck from swelling into tumours.

"Lucas!"

His lecturer's voice cut into his thoughts.

"Yes sir?"

"What is the Abyssal rune of Hesh used for?"

A hard question. They hadn't covered that. Edgecombe was punishing him for daydreaming. That or the professor simply didn't like him. Probably both.

Lucas had read about it in The Gloss of Unknowing Darkness. He paused to remember the relevant section. "It's used for some rituals of human transformation, specifically those that require one to harness chaotic ether." Better luck next time, shithead.

"Well, since you're apparently such an expert, I expect you won't mind helping me and my doctoral candidates, this evening, seven o-clock? You'll need your leather apron."

Lucas sank in his seat. The leather apron meant whatever experiment the proffessor was performing was messy. He'd probably find himself elbow-deep in sheep carcasses for half the night.

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The bump on her stomach was scraping against the stone. "Like being a lardarse," muttered Dorcas, but the words faded as soon as they left her mouth.

She reached just a little further, and got her fingers wedged firmly in the crack. This was a lot harder than she remembered it being as a girl. She looked down, very glad she had never been afraid of heights, because it was a sheer drop, the wall textured only by the finger-width cracks that spidered up the godstone.

Her hands had grown soft, and she was paying for it now. A scrape on her knuckle was freely bleeding. She wondered if she might be simply too weak to make it to the stone shute of the outhouse, up thirty meters of foul, spattered pipe, then into the guard's latrine. She wondered what she would find when she got there. All in all, not a good plan. She didn't even know where they were keeping Jan.

She got her foot into another crack, and pushed herself up. There was shit smeared all down the godstone wall, and it had rubbed off on her face, and down her front. The Tower took away sound, but not smell, sadly.

Just a little bit further, she told herself. It really was a lot further. She couldn't check the stopwatch for time. If she was too slow, the aerostat that was lazilly circling the tower would spot her.

She was sweating freely, and her bones felt like they were being torn apart at the joints, but the end of the shute was becoming steadilly closer. She would catch her breath once she got inside, check how she was doing for time.

She got to the opening of the shute, its walls slick with efluent, and pulled herself inside. It was tight. Dorcas did not like tight spaces. She checked the stopwatch. That wall had taken a little longer than she had planned for. She suppressed her claustrophobia, and started to worm her way up. The stench was so bad that she felt she might pass out.

Dorcas slipped, gasped, threw out a hand to catch herself. She ripped out a fingernail before she caught a handhold, and gasped in pain. Only a few meters now. The short, flatbladed sword was getting in her way as she climbed, but she expected she would be glad of it, once she was in the prison itself.

At least she wouldn't have to worry about keeping quiet. The silence was disorienting, claustrophobic in a way that just compounded being trapped in a shute that stank of hell. It pressed on her ears.

The wooden toilet-seat was bolted down. She fumbled for the pry bar. Wedging her feet on either side of the shute, she wrenched, and felt the board give. Again. The wood split, and she almost fell.

This should have been noisy, thought Dorcas, and had a brief moment of paranoia that, perhaps, the cone of silence didn't effect the guards.

She wrenched herself through the splintered toilet seat, and into the latrine. It was depressingly ordinary, four circular holes in a row. No graffitti. Too much discipline for toilet humour, thought Dorcas.

She turned out of the door, and down the corridor. Dorcas was in.

[shackleton]

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LUCAS
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Pigs. Not sheep. Lucas hated experiments involving pigs. Their skin felt too human.

"Get those bathylabes right in there. I don't want any of them coming loose," said Edgecombe. He was handing Lucas strange glass-and-wire nodules, like complex, mishapen baubles hung on thick cable, each of which had to be strategically placed within the carcasses of some twenty pigs.

The cables all led to a row of vaccuum tubes, and an anabaric capacitor that was crawling with sparks, and the pigs (really very heavy) had to be lugged into points around a giant and extremely complex design drawn onto the floor. He had taken his apron off, it was hot work and the heavy leather got in the way.

Then propped up, in a sitting position, so they sat, facing the center like pissheads watching a cockfight. Their tongues were lolling, and rigor mortis was beginning to give them disturbingly jolly smiles.

Lucas was literally covered up to his shoulder in every fluid a pig contains. Mostly blood, but no shortage of pigshit. The best years of your life, said father. Areshole. Lucas wiped his sweaty forehead, then realized he had got gore all over his face.

And the stench of blood, sometimes it felt like he worked in a slaughterhouse. He wouldn't be able to get this stink out of his nose for days. Before he'd enrolled, he had no idea magic involved so many corpses. Just a string of dissections, vivisections, hack-job butchery.

Frogs, chickens, cows, pigs, even convicts. He knew more about the insides of other things and the practical uses of them than he knew about music, or beauty, or any number of other things that he would prefer to be intimately familiar with than the innards of a corpse.

His arm was freezing, numbed by the cold, clammy surround of the carcass he was up to his shoulder in. It was making it increasingly difficult to place the 'bathylathes', whatever that meant.

A loop of broken intestine slumped out of the pig he was wrestling with and left a long brown stain down his trousers. He stood up, disgusted. It now looked like he'd had a particularly explosive accident.

He finally managed to get the last pig into sitting position, when the Professor impatiently pushed him aside, and he skulked off to a darkened corner of the room, hidden between the sharp shadows of the arc-lamps that hung from cables around the ritual circle.

The doctoral candidates took their positions, and began to chant. It started as a stream of nonsense words, but as the chanting progressed, Lucas could see it was working. The nonsense sylables grew fangs, and started to draw shivvers from his spine, then to draw gravelly notes from the air, as if a choir of demons had joined in the chorus. Strange lights cast terrible shadows that interlinked with the harsh beams of the arc-light, and the air above the circle began to waver as if it was terribly hot, and all Lucas could smell was brimstone.

There was a snapping sound, and the chanting increased in intensity. He could hear a babble of devilish laughter, a snatch of conversation, a man whistling.

Another snap, and voices babbling and screaming rang loud in the chamber, and the walls took a bloodstained appearance, bubbling and red. The screaming became louder, and louder, until Lucas had to hold his hands over his ears against the cacaphony, but the doctoral candidates didn't stop chanting. Perhaps they couldn't stop.

Suddenly, a bulb broke, and the rest seemed to brighten under the extra strain, then popped like a fusillade of musket shot, and the room was dark. The screaming and babbling was gone, replaced by a thick, heavy atmosphere, hot, sultry and opressive, and the sound of a gigantic heartbeat, raw and thumping.

"Damn," said Professor Edgecombe. "Get some light in here!" Lucas could hear the muttering of the doctoral students, and somebody stubbed their toe on something. "I really thought we had it there," said Edgecombe.

"Some light, some light, always some light, eh Faustus?" a voice, croaking harsh and alien, as if ripped out of unwilling vocal chords never designed to make such sounds, emerged from the darkness.

"Always some light, and never a care for the source," came another, as horrible and inhuman as the first. There was a snap like breaking bone, and the room was flooded with blood-red light.

The pigs that had been arranged around the ritual circle were picking themselves up, wires trailing from the holes rent in their abdomens. Bones creaked and joints cracked as whatever foul animating force stood without care for the limitations of the bodies. One pig slumped as a shard of bone ruptured and burst from its side, then with a grinding noise of bone against bone, straightened.

"Never the thought," said one pig, "that some things are best left," its face stretched into a disturbingly human smile, "in darkness."

"Always tinkering with things they don't understand," said another, advancing on Professor Edgecombe.

"Careless, of course, eh Faustus?" its neck swivelled alarmingly, and Lucas could hear vertebrae creaking as they slid over eachother.

"Careless of what attention they might catch," said the pig the other had called Faustus, "What might be watching them struggle through the shallows," he walked towards the Proffesor, "in the deep dark."

"Who, and what, eyes that watch from below," said another, blood flying from a porkine mouth as it spoke.

Proffessor Edgecomb brought a potion out of his pocket and shouted, "I banish thee!" smashing it on the floor, and the room was flooded in white light. For a moment Lucas was blinded.

As sight returned to his eyes, he could see the swine had been horribly burned, flesh shrivelled under the attentions of a voracious flame. But they still stood.

One of them gave a very human sigh, then dark shadows writhed around the proffessor, and he was dragged into the circle, screaming and begging. The pigs began to eat.

"Nothing tastes quite like it," said one, with a very human burp. There was a crunching sound as one fastened its jaws on his face, and his skull collapsed.

Behind him, Lucas was dimly aware of the doctoral students trying to escape, but the door was stuck, somehow.

Finally, the pigs finished bloating themselves on Edgecombe's body, of which a small pile of offal was left, then turned to the doctoral students.

"This isn't, exactly, a social call," said the one called Faustus.

Another stepped forward, wiping blood off its maw with a trotter, "we're actually here to talk to someone."

"-one of you, has caught our eye."

The doctoral candidates shied back.

"In a good way!" said Faustus, jovially. "Not like this one," the pig gestured airilly with a trotter at the bloodstained floor. "or should I be gesturing to my stomach? Does a man really have identity once he is just… food?" he looked to the pig to his right, who shrugged. "Ah well, a problem for the philosophers, eh, Sophistoi?" He grinned at the students, now hammering at the door.

"Where was I?" he looked expectantly at the pig on his left, "ah yes, not a social call! Business, not pleasure!" his grin stretched wider, and Lucas could see the muscles of the pig's face.

"Which one of you is young Lucas?"

Lucas's heart dropped to his stomach. One of the doctoral candidates spoke up,

"the skivvy, uh, the undergrad, his name was Lucas, right? If you have Lucas, you'll let us go, right?"

The pig's gaze swivelled to rest on the student who had spoken.

"point him out."

Without even the barest shrug of apology, the student pointed to Lucas.

The pig jabbed a trotter at the student who had spoken, then wrenched it back. A pile of bloody offal spurted out of his mouth, as if pulled by a rope.

"No honour amongst academics, eh? The closest behavioural analogy to a cage-full of starving rats I've ever seen, that's for damn sure. You all should be ashamed of yourselves. You have no idea what my intentions are." The doctoral candidates just looked terrified.

"And, frankly, judging from my actions in the last," the pig looked at one raised trotter, as if checking a wristwatch, "fifteen minutes, you could take a reasonable stab that my intentions are," he paused, burned-out eye-sockets resting on Lucas, "not friendly."

[shackleton]

Think I'm going to start adding chapter-headings. I've realised the formatting is getting pretty confusing.
------------------------
DORCAS
------------------------
The man in front of her snapped out a series of hand-signals, and she turned to find she was surrounded. Seven guards. Their weapons looked well-used, their stances practiced. She bared her teeth, and sprang forward. If she got past the one in front, she could run back to the latrine. She had got barely fifteen paces before she was surrounded - something must have tipped them off. Maybe they saw her climbing.

She feinted right, then slashed left, but the man caught it with careless ease. She was wide open, but he just stepped back, grinning. She attacked again, and again it was brushed off. She whirled around, just in time to catch a weighted net as it was thrown at her, but it tangled her hands, and she tried to struggle free, but suddenly her arms were held in an iron grip by the man behind her. He smashed her hand hard against the stone wall, and the shortsword fell from her grasp. She kicked hard, behind, and felt her heel connect with something soft, but the iron grip didn't slacken.

The men in front of her were grinning. They had unholstered batons. Dorcas snarled and writhed, but she couldn't escape the grip of the man behind her. Then, she was pushed to the hard floor, her hands still tangled in the net. She tried to get up, but a baton thudded into her back with a stunning burst of pain. Another hit the back of her thigh, sending her entire leg into agony. A rough hand grabbed her shoulder, pulled her over. She stared up at a circle of grinning faces, and spat saliva laced with blood from where she had bitten her tongue. It spattered down her cheek.

One slowly, casually, tapped her in the chest with a baton, and suddenly Dorcas was convulsing with agony, as if all her nerves were on fire. She screamed, but no sound came out.

Then they all started hitting her, and it was all she could do to avoid blacking out from agony.

'Great plan, Dorcas', she muttered through broken lips, as a wave of blackness carried her into unconsciousness.

[shackleton]

LUCAS

"What do you want?" said Lucas, with a bravado he didn't feel.

"What do I want? A difficult question, that. Another one for the sophists, eh? Did I really want, say, to eat our dear professor here? Or was I simply in a state of desire, and then, the professor presented itself as a reasonable object of that state? If I had simply wanted to eat an academic," Faustus paused, "my appetite would have been sated by the accomplishment of that desire."

He reached for the floor, and picked up a scrap of hairy scalp in one trotter.

"I have lived for a very long time, and if there's one thing that time has taught me, it is that I..." he turned back to Lucas, "am never sated. So can I really say I desire anything? Or is the truth simply that... I desire."

"What do I want?" Faustus trotted forward, playing with the piece of scalp.

"I truly don't know. That used to trouble me."

"I would walk, aimlessly, wishing for a direction. Wishing I knew what it was I was missing. What would complete me. What is my purpose?"

"I am still as am unclear about that as ever."

He flipped the piece of scalp in the air like a floppy coin, then caught it on one trotter.

One of the pigs cleared its throat.

"Of course, of course, that's not what you were asking, was it?"

The pigs had grabbed a doctoral candidate and were dragging him screaming into the circle.

"Now, I've heard that people are more likely to do what you want if they like you. My experience, and in this, my experience is considerable, demonstrates the opposite."

One of the pigs slumped, and two others wrenched open the doctoral candidate's jaws as an insectoid, chitinous thing the size of a cat crawled out of its mouth, and onto his face.

"People who hate you. People who fear you. Those are the ones who will do what you want."

The thing crawled into the screaming student's throat, and he started to convulse.

"Or perhaps I've just always been more frightening than likeable," he continued with a pensive air. The other pigs began to drag another student into the circle, kicking and screaming.

"Anyway, needs must, eh Lucas? We must do what we can for what we need. And what I need out of you, is very simple."

The pigs shoved another insectoid creature, seemingly too large to fit through the students lips, into their second victim. The last, barbed black leg disappeared into his mouth, and he stood blankly, and walked forward like a marionette.

"In Genoa, there is a man named Mr. Kolhass. Your task is to kill him. In exchange, I shall spare you from... " he waved an airy trotter, "the most horrendous barbarity."

Soon Faustus was the only pig left standing, the carcasses of the others were being dragged into the center of the circle with insectile, malcoordinated movements by the doctoral candidates.

"Now, you might be asking yourself - why should you strike a bargain with a literal fiend of hell? Especially one who offers you nothing you don't have already."

"Well, first, because you are very afraid of me."

That was true. Lucas was shitting himself. Wasn't going to let the bastard see it, though.

"Second, to make the whole thing more exciting, I have decided to make this something of a contest. I have made the same proposal to several other intrepid contestants. He who succeeds in killing Mr. Kolhass, he I shall not come for. For the rest? You would not wish to imagine what I shall do to the rest."

The pig put a trotter to its chin, as if mulling over a thought.

"Now, I'm reasonably certain that Mr. Kolhass will die no matter what you do, but you're something of a … personal favourite. I don't want to see you fail me."

"All the same, whether you do it or somebody else does makes little difference. But, it will make a big difference to you." He cast a trotter airily around the room. "These people did nothing to offend me. You can't imagine what might have happened to them if they had. If you succeed, you will never have to find out."

With that, the pig tottered for a second, then fell over, lifeless.

[shackleton]

Lucas sat on the bleachers, looking out at an empty sports field. A small group of young men were jogging on, for the morning group attack drills. The war drums were beating. The University was becoming more militaristic as the war in Genoa stepped up, the drills designed to train you for the fast brutalities of casting in combat took up more of the schedule.

He watched them form into teams, then fight for objectives, casting brilliant darts that stained their targets, diving behind cover, blinking to objectives, ducking and weaving. All enthusiasm and laughter, all boys preparing for the slaughterhouse, with smiles on their faces.

Someone sat down next to him. Olivia, the girl with the thick coat of fur.

"Penny for your thoughts?" she asked. She had set on the idea that he needed a friend.

"Have you ever seen a battle?" he asked.

Olivia shook her head.

"It doesn't look like that."

They sat in silence, for a few minutes.

"You're from Genoa, right?"

"Yes. Although I expect I'll never return there."

Out in the field, one team finally got the upper hand over the other, and the sides were re-drawn, stains vanishing with the bell.

"Really? Don't you miss it?"

"No place like home? No, I don't miss it. It was complete hell."

"Is that why you're so serious?" asked Olivia.

Lucas didn't know what to say to that. He didn't think of himself as a serious person.

"I actually know several jokes,"

Olivia laughed, "Really? Tell me one."

Lucas slackened the muscles on his face, and said in a dead, monotone, "My dog has no nose. What does it smell?"

She laughed louder, "did you read that in a book?"

"I was inspired by Xom, actually. Don't you want to hear the ending?"

"Not in any way."

He idly fished his hands through the air, and a flight of butterflies burst out of the air above his palm.

"Show off," said Olivia. "Show me how."

He walked her through the incantation. Last time he'd tried that, the girl he'd been sitting with had turned out to have a pathological fear of butterflies, moths, and flying insects. He wasn't sure if he liked them himself, after his experience in the summoning lab.

The incident that had been smoothed over, to a disturbing degree. He had been made out as a hero, even. The PHD students had told the Dean he had been the one to cut the summoning link. The PHD students with bugs in their brains.

He drifted his hand around, and a torrent of butterflies surrounded them completely, making it seem like they were at the bottom of a well.

Olivia laughed, and started making some of the butterflies glow with bright lights. Hatfield's corona, by the look of the gestures. She leaned against him, and they both looked up at the small circle of blue sky above them, above the swirling torrent of beautiful wings.

-----------------------------------

Dorcas crawled over to the other side of the cell, to snatch the bowl of slop that had been pushed through the flap in the door. She didn't know how long she had been here. The little light that fell through the tiny window was from some kind of phosphorescent moss, and gave no indication to the passing of the days.

She thought weeks, maybe a month at the most. The absence of sound was beginning to play tricks with her brain. She was having auditory halucinations - a crying baby, a laughing woman, Jan's voice murmuring in the next room.

Maybe he was next door.

That was what was killing her. She had no way of telling. She had seen nobody, nothing except the polished boot-toe of a foot pushing in bowls of slop through a slot in the door, since she had been captured.

She felt a rush of air behind her, and whirled around, just in time to catch the tip of a baton in her hands. Three guards boiled into the room, and without any hesitation, started laying into her. She didn't catch the next one, or the one after that, and she gritted her teeth against the wave of pain that bloomed from every impact.

Dorcas tried to throw a punch, but it was weakened by her spasming nerves, and glanced off the guard's arm. One of the batons caught her in the back of the head, and she saw a flash of light, and her ears started ringing. She grappled with the guard in front of her, but her grip was weak and shaky, and suddenly her arms were being twisted behind her back.

She struggled, but she couldn't escape, and before long her struggles turned to simple spasms and flinches as the batons fell again, and again, until her head hung limp, and blackness loomed from the corners of her vision.

She was dimly aware of the ground scraping under her limp, hanging feet as she was carried out of the cell, her vision blurred and greasy from nausea.

Dorcas blacked out, and when she came to, she was chained to a chair, in an unbelievably foul-smelling room, daubed liberally with every kind of excrement - and no shortage of dull maroon-brown blood.

It was hot, body-warm, and the foetid stench of offal hung languid on the humid air, making it hard to breathe.

A small man, with a pudgy, unassuming face poked around in a brazier of hot coals with a poker.

The man fanned his face with an exaggerated wave of one fat hand, then turned to Dorcas. "Hot, eh? Of course, nowhere near as hot for me as it soon will be for you."

Dorcas's vision was fading in and out. He pulled the iron out of the brazier. It was spitting sparks, then brought it over. She flinched.

He brought it closer to her face. She could feel the heat radiating from the metal.

"Wait, wait, aren't you going to ask me some questions?" She struggled against the chair, trying to get away from that burning point.

"Why? You don't know anything." then he pressed the brand into her face.

[shackleton]

LUCAS


Lucas and Olivia were in the library, ostensibly studying, but really chatting - hidden behind the giant stacks of unsorted loose-leaf manuscripts that were piled six feet deep. It took no small amount of ingenuity to pull one out without bringing the whole edifice tottering down.

"Why not bees, instead of butterflies? It couldn't be that difficult to alter the incantation, then you have a pretty viable defensive spell-"

"How would you stop the bees from going for you?"

"Same as any other summoning spell - work a loyalty compulsion into the gestures."

"I think that would push up the spirit-drain. Also, it would make the incantation dangerously unstable."

He sketched a diagram of the spell on a scrap of paper.

"It's a Musgrave triad. If you add in a loyalty compulsion, you lose that, and the whole thing will become pretty hard to cast."

"Fine. Nerd. New idea - we don't bother with the loyalty compulsion - instead, we just use it with a weak shield charm. Something like a Golubrian shroud."

"That would work." Lucas pulled out one of his reference books - the Almanac of Dreamless Beasts, and flicked through its well-thumbed pages.

"Shit. No bees here. Scorpions, butterflies, even spiders - but nobody has worked out the Valduc diagram for calling a bee."

"Guess we'll have to work it out ourselves, then."

Lucas gave her a level look.

"You're joking."

"What? We're wizards. Wizards experiment."

"Because that's always turned out so great in the past."

"You have no idea how warm and comfortable this is," said Olivia, stroking the fur on one arm.

"Really? I kind've thought-"

"That I'd be self-conscious? Sure, at first I was. But honestly? It's fantastic. Have you ever seen a hairless cat?"

"No?"

"Well, I've seen one, and I can tell you, fur looks better."

"Well, when a killer bee the size of a cider barrel crawls out of the ritual circle and tries to kill us,"

"I'm sure you'll look very smug for a man with shit in his drawers."

[shackleton]

DORCAS


"If you keep this up, soon you're going to have no toes left."

"Keep what up?" Dorcas screamed. "You haven't asked me anything!"

The torturer smiled his bland, unassuming smile, then picked up his cleaver.

"Please, look, please - just tell me what you want to know!"

He turned to her, and brought his face close to hers. He had limpid, watery eyes. They eyes of a coward, soft, like a cows'.

"I've never been that inquisitive."

He pulled her foot forward, and placed it on the block, already stained with blood. Two toes left on that foot.

"I just really enjoy hurting people."

He brought the cleaver down. Dorcas blacked out for a second, then again, as he cauterized the wound with a hot knife.

The torturer crouched down, to examine his work.

"You know, actually, out of personal curiosity, there is one question I'd like to ask you."

He started re-sharpening the cleaver with a whetstone.

"Who was it you came for?"

Dorcas' heart sunk.

"That's what I want to know, Dorcas."

He finished deburring the edge, then looked down the edge.

"But I'm all tired out. We'll do that tommorow, eh?"

--------------------------------------

LUCAS

"Test seventeen of two, no reaction," muttered Olivia as she scrawled the variation down on her notepad.

Jan scraped the sand smooth, then prepared the next variation. They were using a underpowered, ritual form of the butterfly summoning incantation as the base.

The problem with engineering a new spell was simple - there are no general laws to magic. A principle that might be iron-cast when it came to transmutations could be completely void, or worse, dangerous when applied to summonings. Further, a theory that was central in the summoning of, say, arachnids, might be completely misleading when summoning canines.

The professors told every undergraduate a cautionary tale of the man who tried to summon a hyena, using a commonly available 'canine familiar' spell, assuming the hyena was a species of dog. He performed the summoning successfully, only to find himself locked in a ritual testing chamber with several hungry hyenas who turned out to be immune to the loyalty hex the spell involved.

If there was a general theory of magic, it was one that was mad, and only the mad seemed to be able to get the loosest hold upon it. Or perhaps, grasping magic 'by the handle' made one mad.

To avoid this kind of pitfall, most researchers tended to use the 'anti-appoline' model - instead of working from theory, to practice, they would use a technique called Hobson's Iteration.

"Shit on Hobson and shit on his shitting method!" shouted Olivia, having been given an electric shock for the third time, powering the ritual with a spray of blood.

Hobson's method, in short, was to produce large sets of minor variations of a similar incantation, then to select the most successful candidate from this set, and to produce another 'generation' of minor variations based on this partial success, repeatedly, generation after generation, until the desired effect was achieved.

Lucas scraped the sand smooth, then copied the twenty-third variation onto the tray with a brush. This series all seemed to produce electric shocks, but no insects. Possibly something to do with the air affinity of flying creatures.

"I'll do this one," said Lucas. He jabbed a needle into his calloused fingertip, and cast it into the circle.

"Damn, that's painful," he said, wincing as the variation, like the previous five, produced a rather nasty spark.

"You're telling me. What generation are we on?"

"Third gen."

Olivia groaned. "On average, I'd say about thirty more generations will have us in the ballpark of bees."

"Ballpark of bees." Lucas shuddered.

He was having real difficulty controlling his nerves. Ever since the incident with the pigs, he had found experimentation terrifying. Lucas would find it impossible to sleep the night before even the most prosaic ritual, and as he walked towards one of the warded, concrete academy chambers, he could feel the fear almost as if it was a physical force - a magnetic repulsion, pushing on his diaphram.

But Lucas doesn't scare, not ever, thought Lucas, and prepared another variation. As his father told him- you give in to fear once, you'll give in again. Best to never give in. Advice which his father had spectacularly failed to live by, but still sound.

On the fiftieth variation, they produced a faint buzzing sound, and a block of wax, and after finishing the set, they decided this was the best base for the next generation.

Unfortunately, this generation seemed to produce a lot of small barbs that flung themselves from the ritual chamber with frenetic velocity, and even with the full leathers they were wearing, Lucas still managed to get stung, several times.

Sweaty, exhausted, and sick from mild poison, they decided to call it a day.

[shackleton]

"Just the first name."

Dorcas spat at him.

He drew back the hammer, and she started thrashing madly, then brought it down on one toeless foot.

"Go on, you can tell me."

Dorcas hissed at him, and thrashed in the restraints.

"You know, I've realized something about you."

He walked over to his table of instruments, and picked up one, before putting it down again.

"You don't mind pain. I mean, I don't think you like it or anything, don't get me wrong."

He walked up the the brazier, poked the coals.

"But you don't fear it. Some people hate it. Hate it worse than death. You barely have to turn the screws before they'd give you anything. Anything at all."

"Other people don't like dismemberment. The fear of spending the rest of their life without -" he brought out a long scalpel, and Dorcas flinched away as he touched it to her scalp -"an ear, for instance."

"But," he gestured to her toeless, smashed feet, "I don't think you're one of those."

"Now, in these cases I usually go with one of two techniques. The first, is anabaric shock. The second, is using water to stimulate the gag reflex. I honestly have no idea why either seem to work so much better than pain on its own. A problem for the philosopher, I think, not the humble civil servant."

Dorcas passed out from the pain, and was brought around by the torturer slapping her, his eyes dull and runny in the red light of the brazier. He had dragged her onto a flat bench, her head slightly lower than her chest.

"Now, when you're ready to tell me the name, you just say, alright?" He placed a rag over her face.

He began to pour. Dorcas tried to breathe, but choked, and her body went into spasms. However hard she tried to just swallow the water, just breathe it in and die, she was unable to surpass the reflexes that forced her lungs into paryxoisms of pain. The effect was like a wave of terror, an instant panic attack, gasping and terrible, claustrophobic and agonizing. After what felt like a lifetime, the wet rag was pulled off her face, and she was choking, gasping for air.

"Truly, the torture technique of the future." He stared down at the rag in his hands, "you know, up until recently, nobody had even thought to try this - but boy does it work! Progress eh?"

He shoved the rag over her face once more, and started to pour again, until the jug ran dry.

"I honestly have no idea why this works so well," he said, a jolly jingle in his voice.

"Please," croaked Dorcas.

"Please can I have some more? Yes certainly, milady, just one second while I refill the jug."

"Please," she croaked.

He whirled around, and fixed his limpid eyes on hers, "the name. Tell me the name."

She choked and fell silent.

He refilled the jug, and shoved the rag back over her face, and began to pour. Dorcas tried to scream, but her lungs were spasming too hard, her gorge rising in her throat.

"Tell me the name!"

"Jan," choked Dorcas, "the name is Jan."

The torturer smiled, then put down the jug.

-------------------------------------

"A bee!"

"What?"

"It's a fucking bee! Look!" Lucas pointed at a small, hovering insect, hidden behind inky clouds of black smoke.

Olivia literally jumped for joy.

"What generation is this?"

"Thirty seven? I lost track after I passed out from all the poison." Lucas kneaded his swollen arm, gingerly, feeling real jealousy for Olivia's fur coat.

He gingerly snared the bee with a whiplash of apportation, then pulled it into a specimen jar.

"Looks pretty normal. Standard bee."

"That's the most beautiful bee I've ever seen," said Olivia, holding the jar close to her eye, while the bee ineffectually stung at the glass.

The door to the laboratory flew open, and one of Olivia's friends burst in.

"Hey dungeon-dwellers, we're going to the pub, want to join?"

Olivia turned to Lucas, "I think celebrations are in order."

Lucas smiled, and agreed.
--------------------------------------

"I regret to inform you- I really do, regret, that is. I regret to inform you that Jan's already dead."

Dorcas looked up at the torturer, through locks of soaking, greasy hair.

"I was planning on doing a two-for-one sort of deal. I'm not even lying about this. I wish I was, it'd be a pretty uninspired lie, but I really wish it was." He put both hands to his cheeks and affected a look of horror "Oh no, your husband is dead! See? Pathetic. Boring."

"Did I say husband?" He paused, one finger to his mouth. "Bit of a slip there. You see, I knew who he was all along. He told us about you. We were coming for you, but then you came to us instead."

"But, the Mayor wanted a big hanging, so they scraped the most useless shit out of the cells, and your hubby fell into that category. Weak as butter, not like you at all. Do you know, he gave you up before I'd even started chopping bits off?"

"Anyway, our tough-on-crime asshole mayor took him away from me. I'd love to have him in here, see what he's really got inside. Just at the wrong moment, you see, it's not often we get couples in here. Certainly not couples that actually like eachother. Certainly not anybody who would break into the Grey tower itself to save their imprisoned love. That's the stuff of romances, eh? The heroism! But then, I put you in here... and look," he grabbed her face, and lifted her head up to look in her eyes. "It all turns to shit, in a couple of days of questions. Our beloved heroes are selling eachother out for the flimsiest of promises, begging, like dogs, like vermin."

"I'd always thought I'd make a great marriage counsellor. Repair the trust that had been broken, eh?" His weak, pale eyes looked sad for a moment. "It seems that all I do in here is turn beauty into shit. I would have liked to see," he put a scalpel down on the tray, "if I could have made something... good, for once."

"Alas, the rich and powerful sweep us small people and our dreams away like... dust."

"So now it's just you, and me."

-----------------------------------------------------------------

"This story has got way too dark for me to enjoy," said Olivia.

"You asked for a real Genoan folk tale," Lucas replied, "what do you expect?"

"Why did the baron eat his wife? And, honestly, hanging children? That's absolutely vile. Don't you have any stories with happy endings?"

"He ate his wife because he was mad and bad and hungry. And, don't you see, it is a happy ending? The hero still loves the heroine, even after everything they've been through."

"When I say 'happy ending', I think cornfields blowing in the sunshine, peaceful retirement, not... torture chambers and executions. Why would anybody tell such a story?"

"It's to make you feel better."

"How the hell would it make me feel better?" cried Olivia.

"Well, whatever bad stuff you might have done, however bad things might be, you listen to a story like this, and you remember that it could be worse. You remember that, compared to some, you're one of life's small villains. If you're not one of the righteous, you're not that awful either."

"Can't I just be one of the righteous?"

"Not in Genoa, you can't. Maybe not anywhere." He put one hand around his pint of lager, and took a drink. "Maybe one day. Maybe this Republic thing will work out." He idly spun a finger around the slick rim, "but I won't hold my breath."

-------------------------------------------------------

Lucas woke up the next morning with a splitting hangover and a smile on his face. Light was shining brilliant through the dorm windows, and he could see that it was going to be a brilliant day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, not a single shadow named 'doubt'.

He walked to the bathroom with a skip in his step, humming under his breath, and brushed his teeth. Damn, he looked handsome.

"You're up early, my friend," he said to Gorg. Let him chew on that. Somehow, in the morning light, the boy didn't even look that threatening.

Gorg just stared at him.

First lecture - Advanced Formal Theory I. A good one. A cracker. A great lecture course, with an inspiring lecturer. It's been said he knew Immanuel Thorsen in his youth.

He grabbed a piece of toast from the canteen, and wolfed it down as he went, pulling the preparatory reading and notes out of his bag.

"Dean wants you."

It was Gorg.

"Right now? I've got a lecture."

Gorg shrugged. "Now."

Suddenly, the day seemed a little less diamond-edged. He followed Gorg to the Dean's office. He'd never been there before. He'd never even met the Dean.

The office was spacious, a mammoth desk, resplendent with a formaldehyde-infused cadaver that stood like a gargoyle on one end. It never sat well with Lucas that such anatomy props were… real, people. With family, and loved ones.

"Thank you Gorg," said the Dean, then motioned Jan to sit down. He seemed a mild-mannered, kindly man- glass eyelenses drooping on his nose, clean shaven, brows fixed in a permanent state of quizzical deference. Gorg closed the door behind him.

"You are, a native of Genoa, correct?"

"Correct," said Lucas, frowning."

"I'd hoped you'd say otherwise." He paused, tapping his lip with a pen. "You see, I'm in a rather poor position. With the war, there's been a great deal of talk about a 'fifth collumn'. The danger from within." He held his hand up as Lucas started to protest.

"I don't for a minute believe you are such an insurrectionary. Your grades, your reports, I've looked over them, and you have every indication of accademic excellence. If it were up to me..." He shrugged.

"But, it doesn't look good. It doesn't look good at all, the Empire's premier accademic institution, training a possible infiltrator in its most powerful arts."

"What are you saying?" asked Lucas.

"What I am saying, my boy, is I can't afford - I'm under a lot of pressure, you see. If I'm seen as soft on the Genoan swine, even as a harbourer- it doesn't bear thinking about." He gave a theatrical little shudder.

"I'm being expelled?" asked Lucas.

"Yes, that's it!" The Dean smiled, then the smile slipped off his face. "Terrible thing. I've notified the Head Porter, all your things are waiting for you in the main gatehouse."

The Dean turned back to his paperwork, and Lucas stared at him. The Dean looked up.

"You may leave."

Lucas stood up, shaking with fury, and walked out the door.

[shackleton]

-----------------------------------------------------------

He should have seen it coming. That was the end of it, really. He had been so enamoured with his life, that he hadn't seen that it was… real life. Where dreams go to be crushed. Same here as in Genoa.

Some people, like Lucas' sister, some time buried now, kept their dreams alive by never trying to grasp them. A dream can stay beautiful if it is never attained, it's as soon as it comes into the real world, and has to struggle in the mud with the rest, that it becomes dirty. Her dream had been to be a hat maker.

The shabby grey-bleached wooden houses of the Genoan quarter seemed smaller than he remembered them. The streets were quieter, and behind windows, worried eyes darted across the street.

A little old woman crabbed her way across the street to empty a chamber pot in one of the open sewers. She flinched away as Lucas approached. He smiled with a shock of recognition.

"Auntie Rosmerta!" She wasn't really his auntie. All women above a certain age in the ghetto became aunties.

She turned her withered neck to stare at him, face cowled in a shawl.

"Luke? Is that really you?"

"Yes, yes, it's me - how have you, how is?"

"I thought you'd got out."

"And now I'm back home." Lucas could feel the bubble of enthusiasm at seeing a figure from his childhood sliding.

"Home," she said, wistfully, and spat a gobbet of phelgm on the cobbles.

All the windows of Mr Eckhart's store had been smashed in, and 'Goony scum' had been daubed in white paint. Goony. Slang for Genoan.

His father lived on the very edge of the ghetto, in one of the few single-storey buildings in the quarter. There was always talk about building another level on it, but every time somebody got the money together to fund the construction, the Prefecture authority find some reason to deny the application to build.

Home. A squat, grey dwelling, wooden laths showing through the cracked plaster. There was no light shining inside, but there was the flickering light of a fire.

Lucas pushed open the door. It wasn't even on the latch. Dad must be drinking again.

"Dad?"

Silence.

He was probably asleep, or passed out, one hand around a bottle.

Lucas cast a corona on the ceiling, to light the room, and staggered back with a gasp.

On one wall, there was a spray of thick, still-wet blood, and the table had been smashed so hard it had collapsed, and a sticky patch of blood and hair was matted onto its edge. There were drag marks into the next room, blood staining the straw matting. Lucas followed the bloody trail into the next room.

In the hearth, lit by the flickering lights of embers, sat the head of his father. On the wall above the fireplace, painted in blood, were the words:

'Kindest regards, Faustus.'

[shackleton]

Dorcas sat, slumped, on her cot.

The weeks had degenerated into a stream of nonsense images and blurry half-recollections, broken by momentary points of deceptive semi-lucidity that vanished as quickly as they arrived. Today, she knew she was Dorcas, but she didn't know where she was, only that it was the worst place imaginable. Tommorow, perhaps, she wouldn't know who she was.

Sometimes, she played at being Alia. Thought she was Alia, even. Alia was dead, she thought, she wouldn't mind Dorcas pretending to be her. They were sisters, after all.

She would lie, absolutely still and think of nothing. That was what Alia was doing, in a pit near the keep.

A guard came in. Only one, this time, but she recognized his face. That seemed strange, but Alia didn't know why. She couldn't move her eyes. Moving her eyes would mean she wasn't Alia.

The guard ran over, and started shaking her by the shoulder. That was also strange. But Alia was limp and unresponsive. The guard cursed silently, and grabbed Alia, and hoisted her over one shoulder.

It hurt where his shoulder dug into her stomach, but Alia couldn't feel pain. In the corridor, there were scorch-marks and bits of people, completely obliterated guards, savaged by stone splinters, limp or crawling. The aftermath of an explosion.

The guard carrying her kept running. There was another man waiting by the wall, where the explosion had torn a hole. He was holding a rope.

Something gigantic and leathery hurtled past, and a jet of white-hot flame lanced into a group of guards huddling together on one of the Tower's bastions. It rolled past a beam of fulminating ice with contemptuous ease, then dived out of sight.

The guard carrying her clipped the rope to his belt, and something gigantic moved in the sky, and both he and Alia were lifted into the air.

---------------------------------------------------------------

"Do you think we got the wrong person?"

"It's definitely Dorcas von Seronsa. Just mad as a bag of shit."

"She keeps on saying she's Alia."

"Alia's her sister's name. She's definitely not Alia, Alia's been dead for over a year."

"Have we lost them?"

"Yeah, they couldn't follow the Golgotha through the rift."

They sat on a basketwork cabin built on one of the spiraled shell nodules that clustered on the giant's back, and it overlooked the godthing's rippling sides, all the way down to where its tentacles swung and writhed, rippling with translocational energy. Far, far below, there were the tops of mountains piercing a blanket of brilliant white clouds.

A batwinged form did a lesiurely loop and roll below them.

"Flashy bastard," said one of the men who sat by her bedside. White hair, a tanned face.

It jacknifed, then began to climb towards them. It was really very large, with wings that stretched at least forty feet in complex deltoid forms.

A dragon, Dorcas realized. It was coming towards them extremely fast. Somebody should do something. It was going to crash into them.

In mid-air, it began to flux and shrink, until it was just a man, hurtling through the air with a grin on his face. He flipped through the air like an acrobat, then landed on the balls of his feet.

"God-damn I love to fly!" His grin looked very white against his midnight black skin. "How's Dorcas doing?"

"Still thinks she's Alia, boss," said the man with the shock of white hair.

His brilliant white grin slipped. "Wish we'd got more of those bastards when we were busting her out."

"I wish we'd been able to get more of the prisoners out, myself."

The man looked sad, again. "That too, Origen. Being the chair certainly isn't condusive to a featherweight conscience."

"No, but seeing somebody else in charge certainly lightens your own burdens. As far as I'm concerned, you didn't make a call wrong," Origen replied, putting a hand through his white hair.

"He's right, Hamsun. Take it easy on yourself, it was about as clean an op as we ever do," said the second man. He had a lean face, ragged black hair, and was missing one ear.

"Thanks Friedrich. A vote of confidence from skeptics like you arseholes certainly augments the spirit."

"Glad to oblige," said Origen.

"How's our bearing?" asked Hamsun, suddenly back to business.

"Twenty degrees right of north - we're going to hit the next rift in fifteen minutes."

"I want Dorcas sedated before we cross into the abyss. No need to put her mind under any more strain than it is already. How's the progress with her feet?"

"Bad, boss. They're a complete mess. Hardly a piece of bone bigger than a needle in them. Potions would just make them fuse into unusable lumps of flesh. I think we're going to have to reshape them."

"Well, no point waiting around if that's what's got to be done. Get it finished before we cross over into the rift. How about the others?"

"One of the poor bastards died - he was pretty much on death's door when we got him out. The rest are pretty simmilar to Dorcas here, really, if a little less beat up. Most are going to need some serious reshaping to get them fully mobile again, and all are going to need time to get their heads together."

"Damn." He turned to shout at a man pulling on one of the great chains that swung down to goads lodged in the Golgotha's flesh. "Bergson! Get the wounded below-deck, we're crossing over in 15 minutes!"

The man turned around and started bellowing orders at the crew, who swung down from ropes and boiled out from hatches to make ready for the realm of madness.

[shackleton]

The Golgotha crossed over into the skies of the Abyss in a thundering maelstrom of translocational energy, through a portal a mile high, and six hundred feet wide, swirling and rippling with strange radiation and otherworldly voices.

The crew hunkered down behind spinnerets of shell, as blast-waves of rain and sulphurous dust swelled out of the storm, lines tied to their belts to prevent them from falling overboard.

For a moment, Origen could see the sharp line of the portal, where the Golgotha had cut the fabric of the universe into a ragged edge. On one side, there was the blue sky of earth. On the other, there was the sick, bleached infinity of the abyss.

Flocks of strange creatures rose up to greet them from a blasted landscape, shifting and strange, pierced by giant spires and extrusions, weathered by fierce winds and horrible storms.

In the distance, he could see a battlefield, where armies of demons fought in never-ending strife, the dull thumps and rapid flashes of explosions lighting trenches and bunkers and hordes of small figures running across the mire.

They were making their way past a Baroque, one of the gigantic extrusions that dominated the landscape of the Abyss. This one was shaped a little like a massive conch shell, standing with its point thrust into the ground askew. Inside, he knew, there would be a labyrinth of passageways, traps, the realms of small kingdoms and abyssal warlords, the lairs of beasts and worse, woven into the swooping flutes of its shellwork.

The crew began to fire at the flights of creatures that rose, driven by an alien curiosity, but it wasn't necessary. The Golgotha was a native. Something akin to the whale, a monster that ate meals of millions. Its tentacles whipped out and snared each flying creature out of the air, fast as a lizard.

The sky of the abyss was an unbroken ceiling of black, poisonous miasma that boiled in perpetual storms, lancing down in pillars to blight the floor.

Almost as if driven by a malicious intelligence, one finger of whirling storm lashed towards the Golgotha, and Origen struggled on his gasmask.

"Masks!" came the shout, from Hamsun. He was standing on the crow's nest, eye fixed to a telescope. The Golgotha was deceptively fast, and the cloud came boiling towards them.

One of the crew fumbled his mask, dropped it. Origen vaulted over the side of the walkway, and snatched at it as it fell, but missed. It bounced once off the side of the Golgotha, then fell into nothing.

The man was watching it fall, frozen in the indecision of horror.

Origen threw himself towards him. If he didn't get to a sealed room within the next few seconds, the man was going to die.

A tendril of black mist whipped past him, and the man must have inhaled some, because he doubled over, choking. Origen lifted him bodily, threw him over one shoulder, and charged towards the airlock. Only a few meters. Something wet was falling onto his back.

He got into the chamber, and slammed the door shut behind him, throwing the man down on the floor. He was coughing black blood, his eyes veined and feral as he fought the influence of the miasma.

A man with a mask burst into the airlock, his armband signifying he was a chirurgeon. He must have seen what happened. He ripped the mask off, and put two fingers to the patient's pulse.

"How much did he breathe?"

"Can't have been more than a lungful."

"Hold his shoulders. His lungs are filling up with blood - we're going to need to put this tube down his throat so he can breathe."

The man struggled, but Origen held him steady as the doctor pushed the tube into his mouth, and into his trachea.

"Is he going to make it?"

The chirurgeon looked at him, steadilly pumping the rubber bulb that was fixed onto the end of the tube with his hand.

"Probably. Have you got a weapon?"

"Why?"

"Well, if he doesn't, we're going to want one."

Origen morphed one hand into a vicious, taloned claw. It hurt, just like always. Those who fell to the black clouds of the abyss did not stay dead.

———————————————————————————————————————————

[shackleton]

Sorry haven't updated in a while, tend to write this in the twilight zone between normal human and shitfaced-depressed. I'm in the latter band, so obvs can't muster the will to do much past breathing. Hope to return to it soon.