Soon it becomes apparent that despite their seeming randomness the corridors are regular, geometrically structured, and he’s able to slot their apparent vagaries into an understandable system, working his way towards the hub of the network.
Eventually Sicarius finds himself confronting the great double doors heading to the inner labyrinth of Vhed Varah, admission barred by a single guard, armored in the fashion he’d witnessed in the city. Military discipline has lapsed, no attack expected in this most impregnable of fortresses.
The assassin draws a long slender needle from his belt, approaches the lounging soldier from the rear, and with ice-cold accuracy inserts the point between overlapping plates of steel at the man’s neck. He jerks the needle with practiced ease upwards at a calculated angle, taking it into the underlayers of the brain, killing the man instantly.
Leaving the corpse, Sicarius slides through the doors. Warmly peach-tinted light spills from the vestibule beyond. The newly glimpsed grotto is partitioned off into many separate sumptuous apartments decked out with the decadent luxury of conspicuous wealth. There are sleeping figures, male, female, and hermaphrodite, who ignore him as he purposefully makes his way towards his quarry.
Vhed Varah, a squat but ridiculously corpulent man, wakes and starts up from his coverlets as the assassin enters the small enclosure. He can sense the intruder’s mission — almost expecting it.
“You’ve come to…?” he squeals in terror, but his expression of horror freezes, the scream of panic dying in his throat as the laser punctures a neat hole through the center of his forehead, its heat cauterizing the wound even as it is made. The whites of his eyes flutter momentarily like moths trapped in their sockets. Then nothing.
Sicarius lowers the weapon. The heady scented air now ionized and vibrantly charged by the needle-beams of energy, redolent of the imagined smell of adrenaline, and fear. There is no pleasure in death, just acceptance. For all men must die, even as they must breathe. He smiles at the thought.
Sicarius waits for long moments, preparing himself psychologically for what is to come. For what has happened times without number. Vhed Varah lies half-naked across plush eiderdowns, the pale light catching and silvering the glisten of sweat along rolls of fat and near-black body hair. There is no blood. The murdered politician’s eyes are lifelessly fixed on the partitioning tapestries of heavy weave.
An ugly and disgusting death. A contract fulfilled. The impulse to life. The impulse to destroy life.
Now there is sound beyond the small enclosure of artificial intimacy, the raster of fear punctuated by raised strident voices, the thump of heels. And the assassin’s patience is eventually rewarded as the drapes are wrenched brutally aside and three masked soldiers break in. He spins to face them. They wear easily penetrable armor, his eyes professionally noting points of vulnerability. The first of the guards carries a trident. Calmly, the assassin thumbs the laser grid to minimum, raises the weapon to waist level and depresses the stud, hitting the forearm through its defensive plating, scorching the flesh. The soldier yells and lunges forward, a purely instinctive reaction. The center prong lodges in the assassin’s eye cavity, its tip on its way to the brain.
Suddenly, the soldier is bracing the haft of the trident, aware of the solidity of impact on the interior of the other man’s splintering skull, the murdering intruder coiling down to sprawl at his feet, the closely scrutinized vinyl jerkin now unmoving. Only gradually does he become painfully conscious of the laser burn on his forearm where the muted beam has melded his armor, blistering skin. He can feel the curdling sickness at the base of his stomach. He lurches, the second soldier moving forward to support him, speaking reassuringly.
A month later, Erason slouches across the low couch in his private room to the rear of the ‘ANDROGYNE CATHOUSE’. He rubs his slightly lacquered hand down the side of his face, feeling the perfect smoothness of his depilated skin. Smiling falsely at the soldier, he sucks in a breath and lets it out raggedly. “You have business with me?”
“The encumbrance has been removed,” says the man, palming his perspex mask clear, the upward movement revealing a plassealed forearn. “Trade need no longer suffer.”
Erason stands slowly. “I don’t quite understand fully.”
“Understanding was never part of the agreement. Vhed Varah is dead. I’ve satisfied the accepted identification procedures, and now request only that your commitment for payment be fulfilled.”
Erason can feel his neck muscles tightening involuntarily as he looks at the stranger. “Yes. You’re right. Of course you are. I was merely curious. The trade of assassin is one carrying a certain ancient mystique. The reek of lost sciences, perhaps even shape-shifting? Presumably you got out of the fortress due to your…ability?”
The other man relaxes visibly, and nods.
“And you intend leaving the city? It would be unhealthy, from my point of view, for you to remain.”
Again the soldier nods, glancing about the room with no particular focus of interest. Intent only on escape.
“Then I’ll detain you no further.” Erason reaches down to hoist twin panniers onto the couch that stands between them. “Reward for your services, as we agreed.” He loosens the clamp on the brocade leatherwork of the uppermost pouch.
“Here, for your inspection.” He inserts his hand beneath the flap, and withdraws it clamped around a projectile pistol.
The man’s eyes fix on the weapon even as the trigger goes in, the dart catching him soundlessly in the throat.
“I’m sorry,” begins Erason. “Truly I am sorry, but it would be unsafe.…” His eyes widen, almost white, the correction lenses clouding them into colorlessness. Then he screams, drops the pistol, his hands clawing upwards at his hairless temples, long nails drawing blood. The room seems to fragment, small, juxtaposed sounds vorticing in from the void beyond. An aimless jumble of perceptions, slowly and painfully reorienting. Understanding comes at him tangentially as he watches the soldier/assassin die, and feels the correspondingly vampiric growth in his own head. A slithering insinuating evil, a blood-red darkness as old as time, undying, eternal, gradually possessing him. Drowning him, as he sinks relentlessly beneath tides of alienness.
The scream ceases. He listens to it dissolve in the low currents of air. There is no more pain. Erason is gone. Sicarius rubs his hands together self-consciously, then passes the palm of his right hand experimentally over his unnaturally high forehead, brushing the fringe of black beaded hair. He bends down to retrieve the projectile pistol, replacing it precisely in the uppermost pouch of the panniers. Then he moves towards the door, carrying the bags, raising the hem of his dark synthsilk robe to step over the soldier’s corpse. The body that, briefly, he had occupied.
Erason/Sicarius closes the door behind him, the noise of the Cathouse shifting, the globular room with its atonal music to his left. But instead he paces evenly down the low arched corridor and out into the blinding daylight of the thruway.
A carriage waits. Erason is important. He doesn’t walk the city street. As he climbs into the carriage, its upholstery settling, he chances a covetous glance at the kilometre-high wall rising monolithically above the sloping roofs of the squat cubist buildings. An instinctive reaction, a gut-wrenching vertigo, makes him clench his fists, the lacquered nails impaling the soft skin of his palms, drawing small half-moons of blood as he recalls every centimetre of the nightmare climb up the wall’s relentlessly vertical face.