Sykport

Previously

The message left me with an ill feeling. I realized that it was written before I had even seen Bishop, and that whoever wrote it must have had some sort of foreknowledge that I would be contacted by Bishop. Yet, I had already made up my mind. I suppose that nothing they could have said would have changed my mind; I already knew that I was going to return to Rasputina.

Yet I also considered, before kicking the design of glass to pieces, how it was the man with the steel mask who had given it to me. He had later sent the men after me as well, and while I hadn’t heard him speak the second time I’d seen him, I also wondered if he was truly the same man as before. Perhaps the one who had given me the bottle was some lieutenant, and this one who had tried to kill me was another lieutenant, who dressed like the other because of the similar positions they both held.

It would seem like an easy way to remain anonymous in any kind of organization, so that you may even switch positions whenever you wanted to, and it would be hard for anyone to know when you had. It may present the problem of unqualified people taking on positions they were unprepared for, but if everyone in the organization was prepared for any position, it would seem to me that it would eliminate favoritism.

What if they were given masks whenever they showed up for duty, and whatever mask they received determined their job?

I thought about it, and then continued to the stairway that led up to the tunnel, and followed it to the end of the building. It was day time then, so that I could see the stretching pillars of building, going to the horizon from every direction I could see, sometime eclipsed by closer buildings that were by some luck taller than the one I was near. The sky was clearer than I’d ever seen it, and it was a morning sky. I saw the sun near a hill, and guessed that it was moving up the horizon rather than down.

I climbed the stairs up, and had an easier time at it than the descent, as it was so perfectly clear. There was no snow, no whipping wind. Just the stairs and I. I reached the top, and my legs were sore, but I walked into the jungle all the same. I was determined now, to see this Rasputina, to take this task that the engine had assigned for me.

Had it all been planned from the beginning, I wondered. Was it the engine’s plan all along to subject me to the journey that had given me my skills, and had revealed better my abilities? I was motivated as I stepped through the jungle, with Livingston’s sword in its sheath knocking against my leg, motivated to seek a name for myself, to seek who I was, out among these towers.

I came to the river and followed it back, all the way to the bridge that Arthur and I had crossed, and then continued to follow it until I came to the lake. The trees above still blocked out the sky, but more sunlight cut through their branches than before, and the lights on the trees were quite dim, and offered up little light at all. The gnats returned now, and assaulted me with fervor, but in my determination I suppose I just ignored them.

I took steps towards the lake and stood, confident. My hand rested on the hilt of Livingston’s sword, and I felt all the power of a man with direction, with drive. I had spent so much time running, that it felt good to have such a major and exciting goal.

I heard the lake monster roar at my proximity to the water, and took a few steps backwards.

Then I waited. I do not know why I stopped there. Perhaps I should have continued towards the metal side of the building, and there, searched for an entrance into the tower, but I decided against it. I thought that I would be detected as I stood by the lake.

Someone walked out of the forest; I hadn’t heard her, before, until she was only ten feet or so behind me. I turned and saw that same paradoxical beauty; the bright exterior, and the dark secret that lay within.

“So you’ve come back?” Rasputina asked. She walked forward until I could smell the perfume on her form. Under the perfume I smelled a darker thing.

“Yes,” I said. “I decided to try my luck here…” I said.

“Why did Livingston die?” She asked, “Why did you have to kill her?”

“She was trying to kill me,” I said. “I have saved her sword, if you want it.” I pulled the hilt with the sword inside, from my belt, and handed it to her. “I am sorry that your sister died, but I can’t make her better again.”

Rasputina looked at the lake for a second, and then said, “I need someone to go to the top of my tower. There is a dark one there, and no one I have sent up has ever returned.” Rasputina pulled the sword from the hilt and stared at its poisoned blade. I could see that she was fighting tears, but she was fighting well, for none appeared. “My sister was to go up and destroy it. You will take her place.”

I looked at Rasputina and she handed the sword to me without looking. “Follow me to the boarding rooms, I will see to it you eat and sleep, and then you will go to the elevator.”

“Yes,” I said, “Of course.”

There is little else to discuss. She led me, with hunched shoulders, through the forest until we arrived at the steel wall that must have been the side of the tower I had climbed down before. There was a sliding door set into the metal, and we entered it. The corridors were black floors and ceilings, and yellow walls. There were portraits hung, of Rasputina and Livingston, along these yellow walls. We did not see anyone as we walked these corridors, which turned and twisted, but never deviated. So that although we made sharp turns frequently, they were the only turns afforded by the architecture.

At the end of the long tunnel we came to a chamber room, which surprised me. It was not as large as the room that had held the escaped slaves, but it was similarly vast. I saw that it went straight up, and at the center of the room was a platform that was maybe twenty feet across, squared, and raised a couple hundred feet into the air. I could only see the bottom of it when we entered the room, but Rasputina called something into the air (it was in another language, I think, that I did not understand). The platform lowered, and I saw the first people I’d ever seen since we’d entered the building.

They were armed, with some of the most vicious weapons I’d seen in my entire life. Some of their armaments curled around their wrists, or glowed a bright red on their ends. “Step on,” Rasputina said. I was further transfixed by their weapons; as I stepped onto the platform with Rasputina I saw them closer, and noticed a dark mist pouring from the cracks in the plates. I would say that some of them more resembled animals than rifles, but from their shapes and the way the men held them, that the weapons were intended to kill.

The men themselves were unremarkable. There was nothing that made me think that they were unlike Rasputina, or anyone else I’d ever seen. I supposed that they were guards from their weapons, and the stances they held.

The platform rose after a second, and one of the guards, whose weapon seemed to breathe, said something to Rasputina in that language which I could not understand. She seemed to ask a question, which the guard answered. She looked over at me, and behind her amber eyes I saw a dark veil behind them, a gulf that seemed to want to pull me into it. I broke eye contact, and she said nothing.

This platform rose and then stopped. I saw a doorway across from us, and a catwalk extended across the gulf. The catwalk was most similar to the one I had seen in the room where I had directly spoken to the engine, it was only two feet across, so we had to walk single file; one guard and Rasputina ahead of me, and the two guards behind me. We stepped across it, and I looked down at the floor below. I lost my balance for a second, and one of the guards grabbed my arm and held it until I reasserted myself against gravity. “Careful,” he warned.

Rasputina turned around and asked, again in the language I could not understand, what had happened. The guard who had saved me replied, and she said, “Yes, watch your step.”

I nodded, and moved more carefully along it, until we entered that door and were again in passageways like those that we had entered from the jungle. All of our footsteps echoed loudly in my ears, and I can still hear it today, a clear succession of footfalls lasting forever in my memory.

After moving again forward and never coming to a place where we were given a choice to turn left or right, we arrived at a place where the corridor widened, and raised itself up, to admit my sight to three doors.

“You may enter through the third door,” Rasputina said. “The one on the far right.”

“Yeah,” I said, and walked to it. I opened it by twisting its knob, and found my room from earlier. The window was now welded shut, and the book Sykport was where I had left it, resting on the uneven sheets.

Next

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Excuse me if I am becoming sloppy. This is not ending as well as I had hoped it would.)