Chapter 15
Unexpected Brawl
In his mind, Dastou pictured the faces of Nes, Saan, and Trenna, and for some reason couldn’t remember them smiling. All he got were made-up images of them in pain, crying out for help, bleeding, dying. The Saint was crumpled half on the ground and half against the hallway wall as the imagined pains of his allies circled around in his head. The rumble of the water blasting through the busted pipe had decreased, replaced by the less violent splashing and gurgling of what was already vented as it spread outward from the Wax Room to the wood cutter room to the hallway, to him, and it sloshed impolitely at his knees, thighs, and boots. When he tried to move his head, it felt like his brain exploded inside his skull, an electric buzz sent down to his neck, waning as it went, and he stood still for another moment to let himself get used to that.
When he was ready, Dastou stood up slowly and with a few cuss-filled grunts, ignoring the numerous spots of soreness and his mildly swollen brick-kicking feet in favor of moving on. He had to find those fantastic people that came down here for him, he had to go help them. The sounds of those animals howling repeated in his memory again and again, and he found himself able to do a much better job of ignoring how hurt he was. The Saint removed his sopping jacket, dug into a pocket to remove the wax paper Stitch he still had, and checked the ink. These things were made of wax paper the ink used was one that partially permeated the wax layer and was, in and of itself waterproof. There wasn’t even a smear on any of the symbols, so he put the tool away. He let the jacket fall to the ground with a wet squelch, the throat mic items still in another pocket – those weren’t waterproof. He supported himself with a back against the wall and glanced in both directions. To the right was where he came from, the gridded space with the living quarters, ghostly library, and useless rope-lift. To the left was the way he must have been dragged in while pretending to be knocked out, with a sharp left turn leading out at the end of this straight corridor. Saan had checked a map when they spoke briefly after Vaiss trapped him, revealing that her group was “across the hall.” Both left and right would guide him to the opposing passageway, the one he didn’t take earlier, but left was a shorter distance, so that’s where he went.
The Saint jogged as fast as he could, boots splashing into a few accumulated millimeters of water that was flowing steadily in all directions away from the busted pipe. He hobbled thanks to the injury on his thigh that he sustained after landing on a brick in the Woodcutter’s Domain, his aching shoulder and rubbery calves not helping. Dastou got to the sharp corner and turned into it, finding a vestibule and two paths: the hallway leading to where Saan’s group would be and the way out of this monastery. A short two-level display that featured a cut out piece of fabric at the top met him in this open space. He checked the leftover fabric and surmised that whatever was here was very recently removed.
By the black he was tired, and hurt, and forcing his body not to shiver itself unconsciousness. All that was left was to find his friends. Friends he led here with a blood trail. A pang of guilt hit him thanks to the knowledge that if he didn’t desperately want to satisfy his curiosity about this place, if he followed his own goddamn rules about never exploring dangerous places without backup, they would be safe here. No, not safe here, safe elsewhere. Where did those words come from? It gave him a tingle to think about that, and Vaiss’ face flashed into his mind.
A Stitch; was something else here creating some hypnotic suggestion? He stood straight up, took in his surroundings, and found it instantly. A combination of the diode lighting, a pattern to the ancient masonry, and a barely-noticeable scent in the air, maybe a sedative, combined to create an extremely subtle hypnotic effect. His guilt grew stronger, realizing that his own agents, as well-trained as Nes and Saan were, wouldn’t know the Stitch was here until long after the effect established itself. He had led them to a second trap, and it made him sick to his soul.
He slumped, the rigid posture he kept while scanning around already taking its toll on his back and neck. He was about to start limping his way into the other inward-leading corridor connected to this foyer space when he heard footsteps running toward him. His knife had not moved from his belt since it was used to remove mortar and he gripped it now, ready for another fight but not hoping for one, wanting no more delays in getting out of this place, no more wasting of the little energy remained in him.
He stood perfectly still for a few seconds, hearing the footsteps create a light splatter of water from what had already meandered down the hall he was meant to go down. Dastou paid close attention, heard the sound getting close and closer. He was too overwrought to think about holding back against whoever came next. Dastou did his best to tone down an old, familiar heat – a stinging anger that left more than one room he was in in absolute shambles after a few minutes of alone time. It felt so good, though, this rage. If he had it going, even when a drunken mess years ago, it was the best euphoria imaginable to wreck every inanimate object with full, unhinged fury. It was a way to fight against everything around him when he didn’t know what he was fighting, when he could do nothing good in memory of... those he lost.
When the person running toward the turn in the hall was about to reach him, Dastou tensed up, his grip on the knife handle tight enough that he could swear he heard his knuckles grind. He moved his foot without thinking, ready to throw himself at and stab whoever this was coming at him...
... And Trenna Geil turned the corner, saw him like a wildcat ready to pounce, screamed, and almost fell on her ass, slipping on water.
“Oh, crap!” Dastou said as he put away the blade and she stood regained her balance. “I’m so sorry, I thought you might be, well, someone else. Where...?”
“Sir,” she interrupted, out of breath, her hands on her thighs for support. She looked like she ran here faster than she normally could have, her words coming between ragged breaths. “Sir, please, I don’t know what to do. Someone... came... said something strange.”
Dastou half-panicked, but kept it internal. “Said something strange” could mean Citizen Vaiss paid the others a visit, and if he went into a Kaialus seizure after the man’s vocal Stitch, he couldn’t imagine what would happen to someone less capable of handling it.
Dastou kept a serious, controlled tone to help Trenna. “Where? Show me.”
“Sewing room,” Trenna said, pointing down the hall she came from.
The Saint turned down that direction. This corridor had a few doors and double doors spread far from each other, work areas like the side he was at, but the first room on the left was where he needed to go. One of the loud animals, some bizarre derivative of a fasshim, was dead on the ground in front of an open door in the middle of the hall. The animal had a broken leg and appeared trampled. Dastou half-limped down the hall, Trenna close behind him, and heard the distinctive sounds of hand-to-hand combat more with every step. The grunting voices belonged to Nes and Saan.
“What’s going on in there? Who are they fighting?” Dastou asked.
“Sir, they aren’t fighting anyone else. They’re just fighting. It happened after the man came. He took the animals and Milser with him, and left right before I heard all those bangs and stuff in the other hall.”
The bangs referred to the Wax Room wall shattering and the wave of brick-laced water hitting the wood shop’s walls and floor. Trenna’s explanation meant that Citizen Vaiss took his pets away – including Milser – minutes after leaving Dastou to die. These hallways were not overlong, and in a hurry it would take no time to round the halls to get here. Why did Vaiss wait so long? Did he actually come back after leaving? He seemed eager to get to the Caravan, and with those access codes at his disposal the more time the bastard had to himself in the mobile headquarters the better. Another oddity to Vaiss’ actions, but for now what mattered to Dastou was his comrades.
The Saint reached the fasshim corpse and Sewing Room. There were three huge spools of thread laid out in front of the doorway, a barricade against the anima
ls perhaps. Some sort of nearly-circular net of metal wiring and fabric was to the right of the spools, one of the two-horned creatures stuck in it, also dead. A trap, and probably Saan-Hu’s idea since Nes was more the hit-things-until-they-die type. Dastou couldn’t really be bothered to examine anything else about the room thanks to the fact that his two friends were trying to kill each other.
Saan and Nes were aggressive, fuming, and holding nothing back. As the Saint watched, Saan was able to avoid a punch that had far too much behind it, then grabbed Nes and hip-tossed him to the ground hard. All the corporal did was grunt, spit, and try to shatter Saan’s wrist while still on the ground as she attempted to get into a choke hold position. Neither tactic worked, and the two broke apart, Nes standing up and getting ready to go after his superior officer and best friend again, who herself was practically snarling.
“What in the pure black void is this?” Dastou asked Trenna.
“I don’t know. The man, when he came, he made the animals stop after they broke through and cornered us. He said some words, I didn’t understand them, and of a sudden they were frozen in place,” she said, pointing out the brawling Nes and Saan, talking fast. “He didn’t bother me, said I’d serve as a good messenger to what happens if you pick the wrong side.”
“Slow down, think. Is that when they started fighting?”
“Yes,” replied Trenna, who then took a couple of short breaths. “He was carrying a bag, something Milser took from me with stuff we found down. He looked in it, said something else weird just before he left the room, then they went at each other. I heard the big bangs and thought it might be you, and ran away for help.”
There was a lot wrong with Trenna’s explanation. Not what she said happened, but why. Why did Vaiss come back to get Milser and the animals? What was in that bag that was so important? Dastou shook off those thoughts. None of it mattered compared to what he needed to do, which was free his friends from trying to beat each other to death with bare hands. Could he just knock them out and carry them away? No, he didn’t feel up to that, and Trenna wouldn’t have the strength to lug either of them out. The two fighters would have to be awake and alert for them to all leave together as soon as possible.
Dastou remembered the woman he experimented with earlier, the fact that his Stitch worked after a moment, but it did work. Students of Ornadais Academy were given training and therapies that made them immune to hypnotism, that made them naturals, essentially. The ragged woman he put to sleep and his brawling friends were the same: naturals who had been overtaken by Vaiss’ suggestion. The Saint still had his sleep command Stitch, but Nes and Saan needed to be looking at it. To do that, he could rely on an assumption that the suggestion they were under was meant for them to attack each other in any way possible and Dastou had a knife, the only weapon in the room it looked like.
He pulled the wax paper slip out of his pants pocket.
“That’s one of those Stitch, right?” asked Trenna, who was apparently told what these tools were.
“Yes. This one says sleep.”
“Will it work?”
“We’ll see. Come on.”
He sidled along the entry gap to avoid the broken animal’s corpse, climbed over the first spool, and hopped into the room, toward where Nes and Saan were fighting. Trenna followed. Dastou did not know her well, and did not know what she went through with the others to reach the monastery, but he was glad she was alive. He never had a doubt about Nes, not at all, but Trenna was a civilian, untrained, and he’d been afraid she didn’t survive the ambush in the subway. The fact that she did and that she wasn’t a panicked wreck meant she had more steel in her bones that he guessed at first.
Dastou led Trenna as close to the combatants as he dared, then turned away from them to hide what he was doing. He slipped out his knife and stabbed the hypnotic tool between two of the symbols on it, dragging the wax paper to the weapon’s guard so it would stay in place, and held the knife aloft. He turned back around and realized he had a problem.
“Stand next to me, and get ready to catch Saan so she doesn’t injure herself.”
“Okay,” she said with confidence.
Dastou waited, and caught a pattern to the back and forth fighting between his friends. They were trained by the same people after all, and had practiced together quite often. When he saw what he needed to, he up-shifted his brain function, what his students named Open Iris thanks to a poll with many other unpopular names on it. He counted out loud for Trenna’s ears.
“One... two... three!”
At that instant, Nes had pushed Saan away and made about a meter of space between them. Dastou threw the knife and Stitch in that space, his enhanced mind helping him use his muscles as best as he could. When the knife went between the fighting pair, they stopped and focused on it, each likely triggered into seeing a weapon they could use in this fight. The blade’s very tip sunk into a vertical line of mortar between two bricks on the wall, enough to stay in place. The wax paper fluttered as the knife hit, and Dastou’s physics calculation was, as expected in this state of mind, close to perfection. The paper spread wide, nice and level, the symbols in black brush strokes readable.
Nes and Saan stared at the knife, and therefore at the Stitch, and began to move to try and take the weapon. Their steps quickly became sluggish, then wobbly, and suddenly Nes began to fall to the side with his eyes closed. Dastou lunged forward and caught him as he saw Saan falling over as well. Trenna caught the woman, but the girl’s skinny, undernourished frame couldn’t handle Saan’s soldier’s body and they both fell to the ground. Trenna hit the stone floor first and kept Saan’s head from a rough landing. After a moment, Trenna pulled herself from under the other woman and smiled at Dastou, who was slowly putting Nes on the floor. Now all he had to do was wait a minute or two and slap them awake.
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