Chapter 52. Screaming

  Jeremiah took a deep breath, tasting the dust in the air. Every step he took away from the stone building and the wrong-space inside helped restore some of himself. Gradually, he came to feel more anchored, less adrift.

  Taking his leave of Lyle had been as easy as truthfully saying he needed to rest. The other man had seemed to understand without reservation, waving him towards the door with a promise to find him later to begin teaching him about the enchantment.

  The city was bustling with more activity than earlier. It seemed people were returning after a day of topside life. Jeremiah’s feet carried him smoothly past the market crowds, nodding automatically in response to the friendly greetings people offered upon seeing his clean, white mask.

  “Dimensions, Gus,” he muttered. “Defensive structures, weapons, militia organization. We’re going to note anything of note, and then we're going to leave.”

  Gus didn't respond. He had remained huddled and still since Jeremiah had glimpsed the Abyss. Or was it for longer?

  Jeremiah walked the city, but his mind was back in that room, the adamantine diagram under his feet.

  “You are perfection,” said the call of the Abyss.

  Jeremiah shook his head and realized he had no idea where he was. He had taken no note of his surroundings or their defensive capabilities. His heart was racing, and all he could think about was the enchantment and what was coming.

  He had to get out of here before Lyle showed him the Abyss again. The prospect evoked dread and longing in equal measure. What would happen if he listened to that voice once more? What would he be capable of? The question tantalized and terrified him.

  “You’re on edge,” said Delilah. “Focus on the mission.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” said Allison. “Follow the plan. Follow the orders.”

  Yeah, they would take care of it. His friends, or the empress, or anyone else at all. He wouldn’t need to enter that room ever again.

  “You are perfection.”

  “I am human,” said Jeremiah out loud. “I am fallible. I can’t forget that or people die.” A passerby nodded sympathetically.

  The desire-fear still burned like a small ember in his heart, but Jeremiah forced himself to continue walking. He tried to put the question of how his friends would deal with an ancient, nearly-indestructible adamantine enchantment out of his head to focus on the task at hand.

  “Just gather information,” said Delilah. “ Just enough to convince the empress we’ve fulfilled our side of the deal, and you can be done.”

  That did sound nice. Jeremiah imagined shrugging off the mantle of deceit and returning to his old life—a burgeoning enchanter, surrounded by friends who cared about him. That wouldn’t be so bad, right? That could be good enough.

  Jeremiah noted that in a city of absolute freedom, nobody seemed interested in guard duty. Many denizens carried weapons, but few wore armor, and each was focused on their own immediate surroundings. Nobody was keeping an eye out for trouble generally, the way a patrolling city guard might.

  “All this freedom may leave them vulnerable ,” thought Jeremiah. As he assessed the intersection of organized defense and total freedom, he noticed bells were hung high on the street corners, with long hanging ropes. Nobody paid them any mind. Jeremiah surmised they may be part of an alarm system, although it wasn’t clear who would respond to the alert. Disabling all of them would be quite an effort, possibly worth it? Jeremiah filed the information away.

  He used his newcomer privilege to learn where the other entrances were—nobody used the staircase at the bottom of the Pit, if they could help it. Three more popular ones were accessible from Elminia proper, converging underground to form a main entrance tunnel, meaning access points were relatively limited. The main entrance landed in the underground city with a grand doorway, framed with huge chains carved directly into the stone, depicted with the links cracked and broken.

  Jeremiah rolled his eyes at the cliche symbolism. He was tempted to follow the tunnels back up and learn where they emerged, but he worried he would not be able to bring himself to return if he did.

  Structurally, the city gave cult members an advantage. The hodgepodge of buildings in various states of repair meant people familiar with them could move from place to place unseen by an assaulting force. Lots of places to hide. Perhaps a smaller team could use the same architecture to its advantage.

  This was helping. Focusing on the mission made it easier to ignore the tickle at the back of his mind, the one he couldn’t ignore now that he had a name for it. The Abyss spoke to him beyond his hearing, a faint whisper on the back of his neck wherever he went.

  "A sizable force could get in through that main thoroughfare," thought Jeremiah.

  "It's a chokepoint," said Allison, "Easy to defend, one would assume there'd be some kind of defense or alarm."

  "Definitely," said Bruno, "Traps or alarms at the very least."

  "Better idea," said Delilah, "We can start get infiltrators in by shadowing the exits. Pressuring people who can-"

  Jeremiah sensed the body before he saw it, a familiar empty pull of necromantic potential drawing his gaze before he even realized what he was looking for.

  There. A dead woman by the side of the street.

  The masked denizens of the flock just stepped around the body, save for a few who prodded it with a foot, then moved on as though dissatisfied with the quality. The dead woman also wore robes and a mask, although the mask had been cracked by one of the dozens of stab wounds that marked her face and body. A puddle of blood was pooling beneath her. The murder was fresh.

  Someone had enjoyed their freedom. Someone had heeded an urge to indulge, and it had led to the violence arrayed before him. The whisper in his mind grew stronger for a moment, as he took in the scene. Jeremiah could almost sense the ecstasy the murderer felt.

  “Yours?” someone asked.

  Jeremiah jumped. A woman stood beside him, tall enough to be of orcish descent and wearing deep purple robes. Her mask was a chaotic swirl of colors. Trailing behind her, a pair of collared halflings stood close, looking away from the body.

  “Um, no,” said Jeremiah. “I didn’t do this.”

  The woman waved a hand. “I meant, are you claiming it? Or do you just want a piece?”

  Jeremiah shook his head. “Just looking,” he muttered.

  The woman snapped her fingers, and the two halflings moved to the corpse and arranged it between them.

  “Her own fault,” the woman said as her slaves struggled to lift the body, “walking around down here without situational awareness. Something like this would never happen to me.”

  “I wonder if she thought the same thing,” said Jeremiah.

  “Psh! If she did, she was clearly wrong,” said the woman. “C’mon, let’s get this thing moving.” She left, the slaves following with the body.

  That doesn’t concern you,” said Allison.

  “You’re on edge as it is, focus on the mission,” said Delilah.

  Jeremiah watched the woman leave, and no one was giving her a second glance.

  “What’s one more atrocity,” thought Jeremiah. He had to know. He didn’t know why he had to know, but he did. He looked down and saw some of the woman’s skin flaps had been left behind on the ground by whoever had cut them away. This had happened in view of everyone.

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  “It’s a deep dark hole kid,” said Flusoh, “they chose this. They all chose this.”

  “You’re right, they all chose this. They chose everything that happens here,” thought Jeremiah, surprising himself. The memory of the man in the closet. He was here. He was everywhere down here. What did that mean?

  But Jeremiah watched them go. No one else gave them a second glance. His hands hurt, and he realized he had been digging his nails into his palms.

  “The people weaken the curtain when they give in to their needs, ”Lyle had said. “The thinner the curtain, the more they give in.”

  What lay at the juncture between humanity and absolute freedom?

  Ignoring the chorus of voices in his head telling him to let it go, Jeremiah began to follow the woman. He had to know.

  ?

  ?

  Jeremiah followed from a moderate distance, noting that the woman’s situational awareness was mediocre at best.

  Several blocks down, reaching toward the edge of the light in the city, the woman led Jeremiah to a peculiar building. Unlike the other homes and businesses here, which resided in ancient and reclaimed structures, this one was a new construction. It was broad and long, some sort of warehouse. Windowless with wide double doors at the entrance, it was definitely set up to receive shipments of some sort. The two halfling slaves dragged the corpse inside while their owner held the door open.

  “Whatever is in there, you don’t need to see it,” said a cacophony of voices in Jeremiah’s mind.

  “Oh but you do,” said Flusoh.

  “Why would I go this far and not go farther?” thought Jeremiah.

  He shoved open the swinging double doors and found himself on the customer side of a butcher’s counter. A glass case displayed cuts of meat and sausage. Jeremiah did a double take on the stack of human legs alongside the more typical cuts of meat.

  The corpse was up on the butcher’s block while an enormous human cut away its robes, revealing the naked and torn flesh beneath. The orcish woman stood by and watched him work.

  “Ah, Kelthis has been at this.” The butcher’s voice was thick and deep. He had eschewed his robes for a thick leather apron, and wore a blood red mask with a wet, reflective sheen. “He took his choices and was happy. Wasteful to be honest, but to each his due.” The butcher pointed to some sections of missing skin.

  “Thought he was off the girls?” said the woman.

  “Swapped again. Some bloke put him off. She’s in good shape though, give you six silver.”

  “Oh, feeling generous, Gurg?” said the woman. “This is as fresh as they come, you know.”

  Gurg and the woman haggled for a few minutes before she accepted a price. Coins in hand and slaves in tow, she swept out of the shop. “Help you?” Gurg asked Jeremiah, beginning to work on the corpse.

  Jeremiah finally raised his face from the dead woman. Upon seeing the pristine condition of his mask, Gurg’s demeanor changed instantly. “Ah, welcome! Finding your feet?” the butcher asked.

  “They just love new people. Why is that?” wondered Jeremiah.

  “You make them feel better about their decisions,” said Delilah.

  “You’re a potential new asset,” said Bruno. “Or product. Or victim.”

  “Stop getting distracted!” said Allison. “Scout and leave.”

  “Yes, I’m just getting the lay of the land, so to speak,” said Jeremiah. The polite joviality tasted like sand in his mouth.

  The man laid down his knife to introduce himself. “I’m Gurg, and I’m something of a staple down here. Storage is my game mostly, but I dabble in meats as well, as you can see, and procurement. Odds and ends. If you need it, I can get it for you.”

  “Weapons?” asked Jeremiah. “Armor? Potions?”

  Gurg nodded. “Exactly what I’m talking about, real product! Yessir, I’ve got the lot. I’m the supplier for the militia down here.”

  This was the good stuff, this is what he was here for. “Oh, there’s a militia? That’s a little surprising,” said Jeremiah.

  “Collective defense, very important. If the call goes out that there’s real trouble, militia members grab their gear and muster. People have fun with it, to be honest. Breaks up the day.”

  “Have trouble often?” asked Jeremiah.

  “Eh, no, not really. Once in a while adventurers stumble in, or the kobolds get restless and make a raid. There’s bells stationed all over, if you see a kobold just give a ring.”

  Gurg brought out his cleaver. Jeremiah tried not to flinch as he brought it down on the woman over and over, separating the cuts that were of interest to him. The woman’s limbs and torso were expertly sectioned. He collected the blood runoff in a bucket placed under his block. Certain organs—the liver, heart, and pancreas—he placed carefully aside and wrapped in paper before dropping the rest into a large barrel with a fleshy splat.

  The head Gurg left intact. He displayed it on the counter, setting the broken mask aside and pulling the hair back away from the face so the woman’s deathly visage greeted anyone who walked through the doors. Satisfied, he salted the limbs and torso sections, then bundled them up for storage.

  “I’m going to head down to the warehouse, if you’re interested in the tour,” Gurg said. “There’s lots of inventory I don’t have space for up here. Fresh stuff, too. And you can see the storage facility on offer.”

  “Okay,” said Jeremiah. “I’d like to see what else you have.” His blood pounded in his ears. He may have been a necromancer, but he had never witnessed such disregard for a lost life, much less one that had been a member of the community a mere hour prior.

  “Great, you can give me a hand with this, then.” Gurg handed Jeremiah a few packaged pieces of the woman, and bade him follow.

  Jeremiah had handled thousands of bodies in his life. The packages he carried now felt different. Heavier. He could still feel the warmth of life through the white paper.

  Gurg led him down a short hallway before they arrived at an iron door sealed with a trio of locks. This door was properly secured, reinforced with several layers of bolted plates. “Gets a little loud in there,” he said.

  He undid one lock, and Jeremiah heard a low murmur from beyond the door.

  The second lock clicked, and the murmur turned to a roar.

  With third lock, the voices began to scream.

  Gurg threw the door open, and a chorus of wailing assaulted them. “Let me know if you see anything you like, I offer good discounts for newcomers,” he called over the din.

  The walls of the warehouse were lined with row upon row of cages, and in nearly every one was a living person. Jeremiah saw men and women of every age and race staring back at him. Some cried, most screamed, their voices blurring into a continuous cacophony of inconceivable despair and terror. The screams filled Jeremiah’s ears, his head, his lungs. He could feel it in his teeth and in his hair.

  “Right over here, please,” shouted Gurg. He led Jeremiah past the cages towards an area where a dozen bodies hung by their ankles, chest cavities hollowed out. Another blood-stained butcher’s block stood nearby, as well as a row of shelves bearing similar white paper packages.

  “Weapons and gear are all down that way, but as you can see, we have the means to store plenty of live bodies until you need them. Good security, and the cost covers food and water.”

  “Oh that’s nice,” said Jeremiah. The smell. The screams were so overwhelming he hadn’t noticed the stench. It was indeterminate, organic, and it set off every instinctive alarm in his brain.

  “Come on home ,” said Allison. “You don’t need to be here.”

  “I do processing and dressing too, if that’s what you’re looking for. De-tonguings, blindings, full amputation. Stuff like that.”

  “Oh good,” said Jeremiah. The screams weren’t stopping.

  "You've done enough," said Delilah.

  “I sell wholesale too, if you’re not intending on bringing your own.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Jeremiah. The screams weren’t stopping.

  "Let us take care of this," said Bruno.

  “Sure enough. Got a fine selection to be sure-”

  The screams weren’t stopping.

  “Got the standards, of course, men and women-”

  The screams weren’t stopping.

  “Got em younger too of course-”

  The screams weren’t stopping.

  “Oh you eat children,” said Jeremiah.

  "Come on home kid!" said Flusoh.

  The screams weren’t stopping.

  “Wha? Me? Never. Cannibalism is barbaric. I just sell what people are buying.”

  “Ah, of course,” said a man who wasn’t as Jeremiah as he used to be.

  “If you’ve got the coin I can get you the real veal specials as well.”

  The man in the closet screamed at him from every cage.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Sure. Women with child are hard to come by in the wild. But if you’re patient we can-”

  Rise.