Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium Read online

  Tonight, having given up on sleep, she went wandering in these alleys, and became aware that she was being followed.

  After a little distance she sensed the rhythm of the step, and realized that she knew who her pursuer was. It was Zarles Kreiger, the assassin turned Scythe-Meister.

  She stopped, and turned.

  The Scythe-Meister was standing a little distance from her. His flesh had the same sickly luminescence that hers did; a bacterial brightness that was part of Agonistes’ handiwork. The rawer the wounds (and there were parts of both their transformed bodies that were designed to never heal) the brighter the luminescence with which they burned.

  “I thought you’d left the city,” she said to him.

  “I did. For a while. I went out into the desert. Meditated on my changed state.”

  “And did you learn anything from your meditations?”

  Kreiger shook his head.

  “So you came back?”

  “So I came back.”

  III

  A few days after the three Generals had exchanged their fears about the presence of unsacred powers in Primordium, Montefalco brought them together again for a midnight journey.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a man called Doctor Talisac who has been conducting experiments on my behalf for several years now.”

  “What kind of experiments?” Urbano wanted to know.

  “I hoped he would perfect me a soldier. Make a fighting machine that was not susceptible to fear.”

  “Has he succeeded?”

  “No. Not so far. Nor do I have great hope for him now. He’s addicted to many of his own medications, and…well, you’ll see for yourself. But there was one failure of his which might be useful to us now.”

  “A useful failure?” Bogoto said, somewhat amused by the paradox.

  “We need a creature that will drive the unholy elements out of Primordium. I believe he has such a creature.”

  “Ah…” said Urbano.

  “So will you see this creature with me?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I have him hidden away in what used to be the Hospice of the Sacred Heart, on Dreyfus Hill.”

  “I thought the place was empty.”

  “That’s the impression I intended to give the world. If anybody ventures in there I have them killed and thrown in the canal.”

  “Is that what happened to the nuns?”

  Montefalco smiled. “Nothing so humane, I’m afraid,” he said. “Soldiers can be brutish if left to their own devices.”

  The subject was left there, and the three headed up towards Dreyfus Hill.

  IV

  Zarles Kreiger stretched out naked on Lucidique’s bed. She looked at him admiringly: at the plethora of scars; at the intricate way the machinations of his flesh had been bound to Agonistes’ own creations. Silver bonded with bone and nerve; gold and bronze the same.

  She climbed on top of him. Arcs of electricity leapt between them: nipple to nipple, eye to eye.

  What a time this was! she thought. Here she was mating with the man who had taken her father’s life. In a sense there was something even more taboo about their intimacy. They were both the offspring of the same father. Both Agonistes’ children.

  “I wonder if he’d approve?” Lucidique said.

  “You mean Agonistes?”

  “Yes.”

  Kreiger didn’t speak. It was Lucidique who realized what her lover’s reference to Agonistes implied.

  “You saw him in the desert?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he sent you back here?”

  “Yes.”

  “To find me?”

  “To be with you. He said you were the only thing that would make me happy.”

  V

  The Hospice of the Sacred Heart was an enormous edifice, its upper floors in darkness. But the Generals didn’t have to wait long for a guide. After a few minutes a female dwarf—who introduced herself as Camille—came with candles. She escorted the uniformed trio through the echoing cloisters (which were heaped with huge mounds of dirt) and down two flights of steep stairs into Doctor Talisac’s laboratory.

  His workspace had been dug out of the earth so as to accommodate the scale of the Doctor’s experimentation and still preserve the secrecy of his location. In place of tile there was hard-trodden earth beneath the Generals’ boots, and the walls were beaten dirt. The place stank of cold earth: which served to complete the scene. For if the stench was that of the grave, so were many of the sights before them. The dead were Talisac’s raw materials, and they lay everywhere around, in various states of amputation. He was an uneconomic consumer. In many cases the corpses were lacking only a limb, or a portion of a limb; an eye, in one case, lips in another.

  “So where is he?” Urbano demanded to know.

  Camille pointed the way over a carpet of corpses to a dank corner of the immense chamber, where Talisac awaited them.

  He looked, to the Generals’ astonished eyes, like one of his own victims; a terrible, implausible experiment in the extremes to which a human carcass might be put.

  He hung by his mouth from a device whose purpose was beyond the Generals’ comprehension, his mouth hooked up, as though he were a fish. In his perversity, or his genius, or both, he had created some kind of external womb for himself. A semi-translucent bag hung from the lower portion of his abdomen, down between his spidery legs. There was life inside.

  “A Mongroid,” Camille whispered.

  Montefalco took his eyes off the foul sight of the womb and its twitching contents, and addressed its owner.

  “Talisac?” he said. “We need something from you.”

  Talisac turned his fluttering eyes in Montefalco’s direction. When he spoke, the maimed form of his mouth meant that what he said was virtually incomprehensible. It took Camille to translate it.

  “He says: ‘What? What do you need?’”

  “We need a fiend to put fear into the heart of the Devil himself,” Montefalco said. “A beast amongst beasts. Something to scour the city of its monsters by being still more monstrous.”

  Talisac made a strange sound—which might have been laughter; shaking as he hung from his hooks. The creature in his womb responded to its parent’s movement by spasming.

  “How the hell did he come by that thing?” Bogoto murmured to Urbano behind his hand.

  “Don’t whisper,” Camille snapped. “He hates it.”

  “He was wondering how Talisac got himself pregnant?” Urbano said.

  This time Talisac pressed his lips into service, in order that he answer for himself. The reply was a single word:

  “Science,” he said.

  “Really?” Urbano said, sufficiently reassured to step over some of the mutilated bodies to examine Talisac more closely. “Well I’m pleased to hear that. I would have been distressed if there’s been some sexual impropriety here.”

  Again, Talisac laughed, though none of the Generals were in the mood to see the humour of the situation. His laughter spent, he spoke again. This time Camille’s services as a translator were required.

  “He has a golem he thinks would suit your purposes very well,” the dwarf said. “He only asks one thing in return…”

  “And what’s that?” Montefalco said.

  “That you shouldn’t attempt to hurt any of his children.”

  “Meaning that?” Montefalco said, nodding towards the twitching womb.

  “Es,” said Talisac. “Is my ur chile.”

  “What did he say?” Urbano said to Camille.

  “He said it was his child,” Camille replied.

  Montefalco shrugged.

  “No harm will come of this Mongroid, if we are given a fiend of our own,” Montefalco said. “I will personally guarantee that.”

  “Good,” said Camille. Then, without Talisac speaking again, she added: “He would prefer if you did not come here again together. Only General Montefalco.”

  “Yo
u’ll get no argument from me on that account,” Bogoto said, waving the horror away as he retreated. “If he gives us our monster, then he can give birth to a thousand little brats as far as I’m concerned. Just keep them the hell away from me.”

  VI

  Lucidique lay on the blood- and sweat-stained

  bed beside her lover, and watched the moon through the window.

  “This can’t last for long, you know. This thing between us.”

  “Why not?”

  “For two such as us to find some happiness together?” she said. “It’s against nature. You killed my father. I should hate you.”

  “And you put me through hell at Agonistes’ hands. I should hate you.”

  “What a pair we make.”

  “Maybe we should go back out into the desert,” Kreiger said. “We’d be safer there.”

  Lucidique laughed. “Listen to you. Safer! Isn’t the world supposed to be afraid of us? Not the other way round.”

  “I just want to hold on to this…hope that I feel.”

  Lucidique reached across the bed and ran her blade along Kreiger’s arm. “We can’t leave Primordium,” she said.

  “Why not? It’s going up in flames, sooner or later. Let it burn.”

  “But love, we started the fire, you and me. We should stay and watch it to the end.”

  Kreiger nodded. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s the way things have to end.”

  “End? Why do you say that?”

  “Hush, love. It’ll be better this way, you’ll see.” She leaned over and kissed him. “Do it for me.”

  “That’s as good a reason as any I ever heard,”

  Kreiger said.

  “So you’ll stay?”

  “I’ll stay.”

  I

  Having made the arrangement with Talisac to provide them with a creature, the three Generals—Bogoto, Urbano and Montefalco—returned to Military Headquarters and waited. Bogoto was the most anxious of the three. He’d seen his share of battle scenes; bodies blown to pieces, the stink of burning hair and bone in the air: but the grotesqueries of Talisac’s laboratory had left him sickened and nervous.

  He decided to do what he often did when his life became difficult: he drove across the city in the night to seek the comfort of a woman called Greta Sabatier, a reader of fortunes. Though he would have been appalled if he’d thought any of his fellow Generals knew it, Sabatier’s advice had been behind much of what Bogoto had done over the years: who he’d favoured amongst his subordinates, and who he’d demoted; even, on occasion, how he’d run some of his military campaigns. And as events in Primordium had steadily become more crazed, Bogoto had come to rely more and more upon Sabatier’s wisdom. Her cards, he had come to believe, carried vital clues to his fate. In a world where madness was constantly in the air, and nothing and no one could be trusted, it made a paradoxical sense to seek illumination from a woman who read the future from a pack of dirty cards.

  “You’ve seen somebody powerful,” Greta told him that night, tapping one of the cards she’d just turned over. “I can’t tell if it’s a man…or a woman.”

  Bogoto pictured Talisac, hanging up from his hooks, with that vile womb of his hanging down between his legs.

  Sabatier was studying his face.

  “You know this person I’m talking about?”

  Bogoto nodded.

  “Well then you don’t need any warning from me. He, or she—which is it?”

  “It’s a man.”

  “Well he has friends…allies…it’s hard to be sure exactly who or what they are…the cards are very ambiguous. But there’s harm from this source, whatever it is.”

  “Harm to me?”

  “Harm to the world.”

  “Huh.”

  “That matters less to you, yes?”

  “Of course. Do you think I should consider leaving the city?”

  “Well…you’re a military man. It’s not the first time I’ve seen death in your cards, General.”

  This was the first time Greta had ever made mention of the General’s profession. Whether she knew it from the cards or from the broadsheets in which he was regularly eulogized was anybody’s guess.

  “But I don’t think I ever saw it so near to you,” she went on, looking at the cards.

  “I see.”

  “So yes, I think you should consider leaving. At least until this unsettled period is over astronomically.”

  “So it’s not just the cards, it’s the stars too?”

  “They’re all reflections of one another: cards, stars, palms. It’s the same story wherever you look.”

  She sorted through the cards as she spoke, and now dropped one down on the table in front of General Bogoto. It was called The Tower, and it represented—in a simplified, even crude, form—a tower struck by lightning. Its upper half was erupting, raining down rubble, and bodies; the lower half was cracked and ready to topple.

  “This is Primordium?” Bogoto said.

  “It’s the city’s future,” Greta replied, nodding. “Or at least one of them.”

  “So will you be leaving too?” Bogoto said, thinking to catch the woman out. Greta was as old as the antiquated table she read her cards upon and her legs were a good deal less reliable. She’d never leave Primordium; or so he thought.

  “Yes, I’m leaving. This will be the last time you see me, General, unless you should come to Calyx.”

  “You’re moving to Calyx?”

  “Tomorrow. Before things get any worse.”

  II

  The house on Diamanda Street, which had once belonged to the murdered Senator, had gathered itself quite a reputation of late.

  There were lovers there, it was rumoured; several of them. Night and day, passers-by heard the sound of lovemaking: the sighs, the sobs, the irresistible demands.

  The houses nearby were all virtually deserted, their owners having fled Primordium for safer cities; or better still, for the country. Life on a pig-farm might be boring, but at least it had a chance of being long. Nevertheless people came to Diamanda Street of late, simply to hear the noise of pleasure out of the lamp-lit home. No, not just to hear. There was a feeling about the place, which got under people’s skin. The energy seeping out from open windows was enough to make the fireflies assemble in their many tens of thousands each dusk and describe elaborate arabesques in their pursuit of one another, the air so thick with their passion, and their light so insistent, that the house was festooned with their flight paths, which lingered long after the deed was done and the insects lay exhausted and extinguished in the long grass.

  Sometimes the human voyeurs, who lingered in the shadows of the nearby houses, hoping to catch a glimpse of the lovers, were granted what they were here to see. As the strange force of the lover’s din suggested, they were not natural creatures, not by any means. They seemed to be hybrids; one third human, one third metallic, one third the no-man’s land between flesh and devices made to strip it and slash it and scour it. They bled as they rose from their nuptial sheets; but smiled, kissing one another’s wounds as though they were inconsequential, as though these flaps and sores and gougings were proof of devotion.

  Word got round, quickly enough. It didn’t take long for General Montefalco to hear about the house on Diamanda Street, and the reputation it had got for itself. He went to the location, late one night. Things were in full swing: the air filled with weaving lights, the houses moaning and shaking. Then shrieks of terrible joy out of the fire-lit interior, and shadows on the blinds, moving from room to room as the momentum of the lovers’ passion carried them around the house.

  Montefalco had never seen, heard, or felt anything like it before. A wave of something like superstition passed through his body, weakening his bowels and making his hair, which was a quarter inch from widow’s peak to nape, stand on end.

  He started to retreat from the house, clammy-palmed. As he did so he heard a voice behind him. He turned. It was Urban
o. He looked like a man who had just discovered some truly terrible thing about himself, or God, or both.

  “These we kill,” Montefalco said, very calmly.

  General Urbano began to nod, but the motion was too much for his sickened system. He puked a yellowish puke, which spattered his immaculately polished boots. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth; then he said:

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. These we kill.”

  Later that night, Montefalco went back to see Talisac. He went alone, which turned out to be a wise move. Neither Urbano nor Bogoto had the guts for what awaited him there.

  The place had deteriorated considerably in the forty-

  eight hours since he’d last stepped over the threshold; the bodies were still everywhere, but they were in a new condition. It looked as though all the moisture, all the energy, had been sucked out of them, leaving them withered. The eyes had gone from the sockets and the lips had been drawn back from the teeth, giving them all the look of blind, squealing monkeys.

  The flesh on their torsos had withered to bones, as had the meat on their arms and legs. The skin itself was now like a thin layer of dried tissue, covering the structure of the bone. When the dwarf Camille appeared to greet Montefalco, and kicked a couple of the corpses aside, they rolled away from her kick like so many paper mannequins.

  “Is it done?” Montefalco asked her.

  “Oh yes, it’s done,” Camille said with a twinkling smile, “and I think you’re going to be very pleased.”

  A voice emerged from the shadows, speaking words Montefalco could not comprehend.

  “He’s asking me to unveil it,” Camille said.

  The General scanned the dirt-walled room, looking for what ‘it’ might be; and there at the end of the chamber he saw a monumental form, covered with a threadbare tapestry obviously brought down from the floor above.

  “That?” he said, not waiting for confirmation before approaching it. As he strode through the bodies, they cracked beneath his heels, erupting into dust and fragments. Soon the room was filled with spiralling bits of pale human stuff.