The Comfort Of The Knife

The fourth floor—technically the third sub-basement—of Lab 447 was a maze of hermetically sealed boxes, filing cabinets, and retired equipment. Whatever the reason was, the place pushed the bounds of what I’d expected from a research archive—mainly in terms of the hoarding on display. Sphinx and I kept our heads on a swivel and as we peered between the wire-rack shelves in the low-light from saucer shaped bulbs swinging gently above to the tune of the world as they dangled. After about five minutes of walking we’d arrived to find a stele with a map of the archives on it.

Sphinx said, “It’s a flower.”

“That makes less sense.”

She flexed a claw free and gestured at the map. Traced around the many “petals and sub-petals” that all branched off from a central position—our position, going by the “You are here,” dot.

“Each petal is numbered. Is there a key?” she asked.

I glanced down and saw nothing. There was too much map for a single key to cover without covering the map itself. The numbers were familiar though triple digits, a decimal, three more digits set above a line with three digits beneath. I pulled out my sorc-deck.

“While perhaps prudent, wouldn’t requesting aid demand an explanation as to why?” Sphinx asked.

“That’s why I’m not requesting anything. I already know this,” I said. “All the major research organizations use the same method, revdew.”

“Revdew?”

I found the document I was searching for. It was a chart saved on most sorc-decks for easy reference, and how you interfaced with whatever books you had on it. With a swipe I displayed the chart—the key—in the air next to the stele.

“It’s short for Revised Dewey decimal. The first six digits across denote everything down to the subject, and the three digits below the line modify that based on how the topic of entities, the Underside, the Courts, or Sorcery are involved.”

Sphinx purred happily. “Well then, I suppose we’d be looking under science?”

“You’d think, but no.” I said, “Each section relates to a question, and science, when pure, is about the world. Applied science or technology, is how do we control it or make it do stuff. But the White Womb wasn’t the world.”

“It was a child.”

“Something like that, but the question about it is ‘what it is,’ which would be a modification of the question, ‘what am I’. You can’t mark the line between human and entity without knowing what a human is in the first place. We’re going to philosophy.”

Sphinx spread her wings as I climbed astride her back. She took off in a single stride and a mighty double-beat of her wings. Below us the multi-colored wire-racks static’d into the composite image of a psychedelic fractal flower. Its petals shifting from a motionless wind. While above us the ceiling warped and fled to an even higher height. Future-proofing in case the archives were forced to extend vertically. It didn’t hurt that the lights became broad impressionistic smears against the tenebristic dark of the ceiling.

When we landed in the specific ‘sub-petal’ of philosophy, the first thing of note was a mosaic that covered a circular seal in the courtyard. Two teardrops curved into one another with an S-shaped border breaking up the circle. In one half was some nouveau depiction of a Hungarian woman. Her arm outstretched—breaking her frame—to grasp the hand of an androgynous being of black obsidian with a crown of blades the color of Glory. It lacked a mouth or a nose, but possessed four Glory-colored eyes. Over their hands was a four pointed chalcedony star.

“The first summoner and her entity,” I said. “Sphinx, they say she was a community manager originally.”

“What happened to her?” Sphinx asked.

“Disappeared after she posted evidence of her entity to win a flame war. That’s what they say.”

I slid from Sphinx’s back, and went to examine the shelves. They were sparse, empty enough that the books were laid out flat rather than stood up spines outward. All of these were on the topic of human-entity union. While the White Womb was maybe a human-entity fusion seeing as they aren't well known I figured union would get the same point across.

“This text at least covers wombs I presume,” Sphinx said.

I leaned back from my shelf to turn Sphinx’s way. She had an anthology of entity-on-human erotica hanging from her mouth. I ignored the cover’s well-rendered and incredibly graphic art as I took the book from Sphinx. Not looking Sphinx in the eye, I flipped through the table of contents and noted a section put aside in the back for academic writing on the subject. There was an essay on consent, relationship restructuring due to the omnipresence of one’s entity in their life, and way in the back was one titled: “The Rebis: An Examination of Summoner-Entity Convergence Theory.”

“Selene Ying, Department Chair of New World Metaphysical Studies, Threyo University,” I said.

“Threyo University,” Sphinx said.

“It’s out east, past the Black Vein.”

“I know,” Sphinx said, “there used to be many of my kin who’d walk those halls.”

“Then we’ll go there,” I said as I flipped through the book for the essay.

Sphinx asked, “When?”

I bumped my legs against her shoulder. “After the exam. We’ll probably have to run anyways, so why not run all the way to the east coast.”

“If your way takes that bend then it takes that bend. I’d rather accomplish your vengeance first than delay things if possible.”

“Well now you’re just being a contrarian,” I said.

I leaned against a rack as I read the essay—technically just the abstract. Its central argument was that if entities become more “human,” defined by an understanding and successful adoption of our moral framework and viewpoint, then humans became more like entities as we ascended up the Chain. Bound tighter and tighter by the metaphysics of our bonded Court.

“A negotiation with the bitch called physics,” I mumbled.

“What?” Sphinx asked.

“It’s something you said early on when we returned to Realspace that first time. You told me not to stare lest physics noticed you cheated or something.”

“You remembered.”

“I do listen to people,” I said. “Though I could be better.”

“Trying is good enough, and your excavation of our old words is well-timed. Everything about entities is a negotiation when you subject us to the Real.” Sphinx said, “The fullness of our self trimmed down so we might exist. Anchored through the humanity our summoner provides.”

“And you did say the bond is like two cups being poured back-and-forth between each other.”

“You said that,” she said.

“Fair point.”

The rest of the abstract then expounded that there might be a hypothetical point beyond Sovereign. One where the balance of human and entity was so perfect, so blurred, that we’d be both and neither at the same time. A rebis. That was a solid enough lead far as I was concerned, so I took a picture of the essay’s first page with the author’s name and titles. Dropped my sorc-deck back into my backpack as I returned to looking over the racks.

Sphinx, however, shoved their bulk against my leg.

“Pick the book back up,” she said.

I did. She followed something only she could see, rotating until she was looking at the mosaic. I flicked on the Omensight, blinking away tears, to spot the moonsilver thread of an unknown Court connecting the bookshelf to the mosaic. Hidden in the swirls of the art nouveau border was a glowing sorcerous phoneme. The thread was taut, throbbing at a high frequency, and I quickly looked for other threads that matched it.

“Sphinx, pick up the record and the paper on entity blood samples. I’ll grab the idol and the book of dialogues.”

We darted to opposite racks and quickly lifted each item on our list. I kept an eye on the mosaic as each new item awakened the luminescence of the formation. At the third item, the idol lifted after Sphinx grabbed the record, the formation’s light flickered and died. The threads went slack.

“It has an order,” Sphinx said. “We go again.”

After everything was placed back in its original position I saw that moonsilver light race back up the threads—the formation was reset for activation. First was the erotic anthology, then the record, and this time I waited and watched. When each strand was in its proper order the strings were tight and vibrating. I laid my sight upon each strand and felt them for any differences in tension. If there was an order then there had to be a hint as to which would come next. I felt the strand connecting the paper on blood samples to the mosaic—there was a hint of vibration.

“Try the paper,” I said.

Sphinx picked it up which illuminated the next phoneme. Our code-breaking method discovered, I directed us to the end of the activation sequence. With the complete formation activated, black water flowed up from between the tiles. Filling the circle without breaking the ring of phonemes.

“Entities first?” I asked.

“We’re equals,” Sphinx said. “Together?”

I walked alongside Sphinx into the circle. The water rippled under our footsteps, but never fully broke. When we reached the center of the circle we found only our reflections staring back at us. The stacks of the archive surrounding them. When I looked up, I discovered that Sphinx and I were on a large platform overlooking a wide black pit.

“Are we in the Underside?” I asked.

“No,” Sphinx said, “we’ve just Transitioned from one local space to another.”

“Transition?”

“Another cousin court of ours.”

“Remind me to get the full family tree later,” I said.

I could only barely make out other platforms along the pit’s edge. Like theirs, our platform extended down to a small grate balcony connecting into a smooth concrete hallway. Since my Omensight was still up, I wasn’t caught off guard by the multi-layered formations that covered the hallway in a mural of sorcerous graffiti.

“Quite the net they’ve woven.”

“Unfortunately, I only have patience for one puzzle a night,” I said.

I formed the hand-spell for Inviolate Star, and strode forward into the hallway. Sphinx carried her own Inviolate Star not far behind me. The logic was simple: Inviolate Star’s light diverts fate rather than blocking it. Ergo, all of the connecting points between the formations and their traps would be temporarily diverted around Sphinx and myself, and peacefully left resting.

When the light of the star touched the first thread that connected to a formation with phonemes from at least four separate Courts—Suppression, Bondage, and two more I didn’t recognize—I ground my teeth into my lip. The threads unwound into their composite Principles like sand tossed into a breeze. The cloud of energy floated out to the air but the trap didn’t go off.

“It works,” I said.

My sorc-deck rang from inside my backpack causing my concentration to waver. I propped it back into place before I dropped the spell. As we moved forward diverting thread after thread of well laid traps, I fished my sorc-deck from the pocket I’d placed it. It continued to blare as I fumbled one-handedly to input my access sigil and end the alarm.

“Why’d you set something that obnoxious?” Sphinx asked.

“It was my alarm for sunset,” I said. “We have to hurry, the retrievers can attack at any time they want starting now.”

Sphinx and I broke out into a jog as we raced from the trap laden hallway through a doorway into another wider hallway free from any formations or previously laid spells. The floor was a grated catwalk that cut between a mess of torso-thick cables and hissing pipes that reminded me of the entrails of some technological behemoth. Pressed into the tangled mess were squares of electric blue that matched the lighting of the hall.

When we neared the first square I leaned over the railing to get a better look. It wasn’t glass—the Omensight told me that much—but some spell that separated the interior room and the exterior of the hallway. The room was stained orange with no clear hint as to what color the walls were initially. While the only furniture was a bed and a toilet—the remnants of the room’s occupant had fallen into the toilet. Strips of skin from what would have been their ass and the underside of their thighs.

The next room was much of the same though this time the few remains left behind were clumped into a C-shaped mound on the bed while everything else was coated in a yet to be unwashed glaze of blood. Each room was the same story, and perfectly reminiscent of the way the White Womb’s “mother” had exploded when it was born.

“How many rooms are here?” I asked.

“At least ten,” Sphinx said. “In this hallway at least.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s keep going. I want to find an office or something with documents.”

Sphinx trailed behind me as I pushed forward. Our hallway terminated in a T-intersection with another passage. The wall was arrayed with doors listing medical labs in numerical order—I took the closest one to the right, medical lab #13.

On entry the lights flicked on in the lab. We’d only been subjected to the darkness for a scant moment, but I wished we had it back. As the glaring light pushed my eyes to the side forcing me to see—to acknowledge—the wall of infant White Wombs each curled up and bobbing in cylinders full of some unknown sorcerous concoction. To the side of their arrangement was a keypad that controlled a mechanical claw which could navigate the multiple rows and columns of experiments—it reminded me of a vending machine.

“The children aren’t a threat, Nadia,” Sphinx said. “They lack a secondary Principle.”

“Right, so the best time to kill them is now.”

“Are you so threatened by sleeping children—”

“Stop calling them that,” I said. “Like they’re people or something. That woman blew up just giving birth to one. Who knows how many people Nemesis has been sacrificing for this experiment.”

“And now we’re sure it was Nemesis’ fault?”

“We’re in a secret ERO lab, aren’t we?”

“Even if they have a tie to your enemy that doesn’t make them your enemy.” Sphinx said, “Piggy struck the White Womb first. Gave it its first death that instigated its transition into a bastard entity of Oblivion. Who knows what would have happened had you both acted differently.”

“Show compassion to the monster, hmm?”

Sphinx shook her head. “Show compassion to the child that did nothing but live, and lost its mother for it. I’d think you would understand that.”

“That’s low.” I said, “Fine, we can’t afford to leave too much of a mess anyways.”

As we crossed the lab to the door leading to the offices I took one last glance at the wall. They were White Wombs, but they weren’t the one I’d faced. Each tube held a unique creature lightly coated in a thin haze of a single Principle. There was a corpulet little girl-thing covered in a mantle of iridescent bubbles. An androgynous lithe figure coated in chitin that did its best to contain the Storms that crackled soft as static between its plates. Taken one way, maybe they were beautiful things, but the idea of anything being able to revive as it did—strengthened by death—that terrified me in a manner that no amount of unique beauty could outweigh.

The office connected to the lab was simple and stark. Clean dark wood desks, a wire rack of research files, and typewriters on every desk to draft up the reports that filled those files.

“There’s not a single sorc-deck here,” I said. “It’s all aggressively analog.”

“When everything is minimal the smallest shifts are maximized.”

“So we put everything back as we found it.”

On the way to the research files, I stopped at a desk where a typewriter was abandoned mid-draft. The top of the document said: White Womb Incident Report #36. The rest of the document was only drafted far enough to cover how Piggy and I resolved it. As if to taunt me the last words pounded into the page were, “pertinent background information.” There hadn’t been enough time, it seemed, between then and the scheduled test.

The research files themselves proved more fruitful. I’d taken a stack of folders at once and flipped through them together for easy comparison. However, there was far more contrast. Each person—not all of the “mothers” were women after all—were traceable to origins all across and even beyond Turtle Island. Their ages ranged from as young as sixteen to as old as sixty-eight. While in some cases their time of disappearance was listed anywhere between a few weeks to a couple years before reappearance.

“Why end here, though?” Sphinx asked. “From an origins perspective they’re incredibly diverse, but their every path terminates here in Brightgate.”

It was the main point of commonality. Most of them were found on the street begging for help in whatever language they spoke if they hadn’t already been aided by a “helpful” secretary that led them into the arms of the Lodge.

“Maybe they escaped from here, and were just recaptured?”

Sphinx said, “Doubtful.”

“It makes more sense if they just all happened to appear here?” I said, “This one’s from Shin-Tokyo, and he’s from New Nairobi. Sphinx, if they were taken from somewhere else then why would they all be released here? Why not to their homes?”

“Perhaps because whoever did it knew the mothers wouldn’t survive, and their spawn left to fend for itself against whatever dogs harassed it.”

“If that’s the reason then they wouldn’t be considered mothers. They’d be…bombs?”

“Your puppeteer did imply that a Lodgemaster would have many worthy grudges on their head.”

“I can’t deny that since I am one of those grudges. Still, that’d mean there’s someone else doing this. The Lurkers?”

“Any answer I’d have would be poorly considered. Next page.”

I flipped the page to a blown-up picture of the ultrasounds done on each “mother” along with a comparative animagraphy. The former was great for checking for any physical details that might become an issue for the birth of the child, and the latter’s perfect for examining the spiritual musculature of the child in case there might be a spiritual defect. Fun fact, the animagraphy’s have great results in testing for a potential stillbirth.

While the ultrasounds were surprisingly normal, the animagraphy photos were anything but since they didn’t show anything. Each and everyone was white’d out by some kind of flash. I raised it close to my eyes and could just barely make out the frayed edge of the blur barely noticeable against the far side of the womb.

“Interference from an unknown Court’s presence,” I read. “Anthem stored in evidence box #5.”

Unasked, Sphinx dragged the box from the wire-rack over to the desk where I had the files laid out. She used her paw to flip the lid off the box, and reveal a small handful of cassette players. As well as a smaller box, unlidded, that held a mess of tapes labeled after each mother. I grabbed #20’s tape and popped it into a player that I set on the desk. Then hit play.

Anthems were an old method of cataloging a Court. Early researchers would rig a tape recorder to pick up the unique “sound” a Court made when its spells were cast or when an entity would speak or breathe. It wasn’t a bad method necessarily, but I think humans love to see pictures more than we do sounds. Pictures are harder to deny even when the sound is something you feel in the very fiber of your spirit.

“We have to find who’s making these creatures, Nadia,” Sphinx said.

I didn’t have to ask why her voice bristled in mad panic. The anthem was still playing, and in that part of my spirit where I remembered the honeyed timber of our Sovereign I heard the resemblance. However these victims came by it, Revelation was in their bodies, and none were bonded to our Court. Before we could dig deeper, my sorc-deck rang in its insistent default tone that mimicked the incessant tap of a woodpecker.

“Another alarm?” Sphinx asked.

“No,” I said, “I only set the one.”

I swung my backpack around to free my sorc-deck. Amber was calling. I answered.

“They’re here, Temple!”