The Cache, James Brogden [ebook e reader TXT] 📗

Some said Cracius was the oldest living soul in the Spike. Some said that he had exiled himself after a failed attempt to overthrow the prime adjutant’s predecessor. Others whispered that he stole and ate children. All Lyse knew was that Brother Putorius considered him to be a dangerous heretic in possession of outlawed knowledge, and right now that was exactly what she needed.

She scooped up some uneaten food into a flask for an offering, gathered the rest of her things and slipped away.

For as long as anyone could remember Cracius had lived in a region called the Cyst, which scavengers like Lyse made long detours to avoid. This was, quite simply, because it was haunted.

It lay half a mile below the hab-halls but not quite as far as the lower reaches, and its effect was felt differently by those foolish enough to get close. It caused dizziness and disorientation, spinning you around and spitting you out in a different location. Sometimes it provoked profound unease, the sense that you were about to plunge into a bottomless shaft or were being followed by unseen things. Worst were the hallucinations: of being asphyxiated by gas, or burned alive, or chased down tunnels boiling with hordes of crawlers. If you bullied your way past all of this by brute willpower, you came to places where the straight up-and-down passages and shafts were blocked by curving bulkheads of strange, leathery material. Anyone with any sense took the hint and kept well away, unless they were a half-mad tech-priest or somebody desperate enough to be looking for him.

She knew she was getting close when the shadows in her peripheral vision began to scamper, and the pressure that had been building in her head began to feel like hydraulic pistons on either side of her skull. She gritted her teeth and forced herself forward, trying not to be distracted by the leering faces that she knew weren’t really there. When a tall, multi-limbed silhouette clambered out of the walls of the passage ahead she nearly blundered into it, convinced that it too was an illusion. Cracius’ form was bulky with robes over a metal carapace that wheezed and creaked, and was hung about with arcane devices and amulets. Without warning, articulated mechanical claws gripped her wrists and she was hauled off her feet to be held, kicking uselessly, in front of a face that glared from within a thick transparent dome.

‘What is it?’ rasped a voice, distorted through amplification. ‘Human,’ it continued, as if the question hadn’t been meant for her. She was turned this way and that, inspected. ‘Three-seven point two kilograms/malnourished… Female/possibly/err percentile one-seven point zero-four. What does it want?’ After a moment he shook her like a doll and repeated, ‘What does it want?’

It seemed she was being addressed after all.

‘Master… Cracius,’ she gasped. It was hard to breathe with her weight hanging off her arms. ‘I have… food.’

‘Food, is it?’ She was hauled closer for a more detailed inspection. Behind his protective visor, Cracius’ face was wizened with age, his eyebrows like white wire brushes, and parts of his bald skull were plated with riveted metal from which tubes drained a brackish-looking fluid. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he grunted and let go, and she dropped to the floor. ‘Let’s have it then,’ he ordered.

She fumbled for the flask of leftovers. A segmented tentacle emerged from amongst his robes, took the flask, and withdrew. ‘I assume this is payment for some favour you are about to waste my time by requesting,’ he rasped.

‘I have something,’ she replied, and showed him the medallion. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’

He peered at it, and grunted. ‘Possibly. First, though…’ He reached within himself and pulled free a tube. An intravenous needle tipped the end, from which a bead of blue fluid welled. ‘This. It will help with the hallucinations. Shield your meat brain.’

She looked at the needle. No way was she sticking that in any part of her. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

He shrugged. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and set off down the passage, his heavy footfalls making the floor shudder. She ran to catch up. Grasping hands came out of the floor to grab at her ankles, but they weren’t really there. She focused on the tech-priest’s disappearing back and followed him.

Master Cracius’ cell was so crammed with tech that she wondered how he managed to move around. There were teetering piles of machinery, wires, gears, pistons, valves, data-slates, even a small pyramid of broken servo-skulls, and a hundred other things that she couldn’t begin to identify. In only one place was anything clear: a section of wall that bulged outward slightly and appeared to be made of a different substance to the rest – something dark and pearlescent – the wall of the Cyst. It was covered by a mosaic of data-slates connected by venous cables, their screens scrawling with glyphs busily writing themselves.

The tech-priest took the golden medallion to a device that looked like a giant overturned spider on a lectern, and placed it in the centre. Then he detached one of the cables from deep within his robes and inserted it into the spider’s head, whereupon its legs spasmed and curled themselves over and began to probe at the medallion with surprising delicacy. Meanwhile, ugly slurping sounds came from within Cracius’ carapace as he ingested her leftovers. She tried to ignore how the bulge of wall was growing, because she knew it wasn’t really happening, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from its distended swell, like a pregnant belly gravid with horrors, or the smaller bulges roaming around as whatever was on the other side seethed to be born…

In an effort to distract herself she asked him, ‘What makes the hallucinations?’

‘Sequence/iteration/else/cogit-failure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s not the question you need answering.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘Null/else/this: you must be aware that this place was once populated more densely than is