The Fractured Tower

The mosaic still didn’t show the full image, but apparently seeing just enough to reveal the empty slot in the middle was enough. The slate fit into what Sorin considered the south-west side of his soulspace, where the mosaic depicted him speaking with a white outline of a person. Splashes of rainbow color highlighted the silhouette, which Sorin hoped signified that it was actually the tower.

It would be fantastic if he could actually talk to the tower directly. Even with everything he’d teased out of the clues he’d been given, he still had plenty of questions. It seemed fairly obvious that the tower was laboring under some restrictive rules for some reason, and that it was doing workarounds to try to get what it wanted. It would be nice to know what those rules were.

The new soulprint was called Eldritch Tongue, which just reinforced the idea that it would allow him to communicate with something, but not necessarily the tower itself. It was a bit frustrating, knowing what the soulprint did without being able to say who or what the recipient was. It wasn’t supposed to work like that.

Sorin left the Antechamber, still prodding at the latest development in his mosaic like a tongue pushing on a loose tooth. His best guess was that the missing space was preventing him from fully grasping its purpose, and that hopefully with another rank or two to fill in more of the image, he’d have a better understanding. Until that happened, though, he couldn’t help but prod and poke at the ability.

He didn’t spend long on Floor 13. There was no real reason to, not since the plan was to rejoin the rest of his team. He simply took note of where exactly he was, made a guess as to what was close by, and determined that there was nothing there worth spending the time on.

Liminal Gateway brought him back to Floor 0, directly into the house Nemari had rented. He’d asked for a week and managed to reach Floor 13 in just under six days, so he was pretty happy with his progress. With any luck, everyone else had finished their projects and was ready to get back to climbing, too.

He arrived in the middle of the night. Rue and Yoru were both asleep, taking up the pair of beds, and Odric was sitting against one wall, his eyes closed but awake and likely inside his soulspace. Only Nemari was active and aware of the world around her. Sorin found her sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of paperwork piled up in front of her while she worked by candlelight.

Her attention sharpened when he appeared, but as soon as she realized it was him, she returned to her work. Sorin was pleased to see that, not in the least because he’d walked right by her when she’d been on watch while they were camping once.

“What’re you working on?” he asked as he claimed the seat opposite her.

“Family stuff,” she said. “Trying to help the branch family survive without breaking apart. When my uncle died, the few main branch people left just grabbed what they could and disappeared. I’m brokering the sale of the property, which I had to fight for control over. The idea is to downsize the branch family into something a quarter the size.”

Having been the one to kill her uncle and most of the prominent members of her family, Sorin felt indirectly responsible for that predicament. But then again, it wasn’t like he’d told the ones who were left to snatch up whatever they could get their hands on and screw over the cousins from the branch families.

“Did they recover the children your uncle kidnapped?” he asked. That had been the lever the man had been using against the branch family to force them to cooperate.

“Yeah. One part of the story has a happy ending, at least. Keeping them fed is a different matter. It helps that we’re so high-ranked now. Money’s a bit easier to come by, but it’s still a lot of mouths to feed. Without the main family’s support, they’re scrambling to hold everything together.”

Sorin felt like he was missing a few details, but he assumed the reason the cadet branch couldn’t step into the main branch’s shoes had to do with predatory practices from other families that they couldn’t fend off. Their only option was to fracture or, if they wanted to stick together, to downsize their footprint in the city.

“You have it under control?” he asked, not needing or wanting any details beyond that.

“For now. Tomorrow is when the sale goes through, and I’ll be ready to start climbing immediately after that.”

“Perfect. Everyone else is ready, too?”

“We’re all just waiting on you, Sorin,” Nemari said. “How long will it take to get to Floor 24, do you think?”

A lot faster by myself, but then I’d have to push back the void alone.

Sorin left that thought unspoken. It wouldn’t help anything to voice it. “Two months, if we’re lucky. Probably longer. It’s going to be a mess.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“Maybe you should take that offer to claim the Hellions,” she said.

“Seems kind of wrong to throw people’s lives away just to buy a few more days. I figure that the ones who still want to fight the void will stay, and it’s not my place to demand that anyone else go back. Samael got into their heads and rewired them to get them there in the first place. I won’t do that.”

“Not even to save the whole tower?”

“No,” Sorin said. “Not even then. If the void spreads down to Floor 23 or 22 before I get to it, then so be it. I’ll just have to work harder to drive it back.”

Nemari frowned down at her paperwork for a few seconds. “I hope you’re making the right call.”

* * *

“Your contact at the Meat Grinder—” Yoru said.

“The Club House,” Nemari corrected. “He hates when people call it that.”

“The Club House,” Yoru repeated, rolling his eyes as he did, “agreed to work with us, though he did mention that he wasn’t doing any more dead drops or special orders. We’d have to actually come to the building from now on.”

“That’s not a problem,” Sorin said. “It was only ever an issue because of Samael.”

“Right, that’s what I told him. I dropped off what we had for excess supplies. His buying rates are... reasonable if we factor in that we’re an independent climbing team. My family name could have gotten us better contracts, but, well...”

“Not your fault,” Rue said. “I’d rather make less money if it means your dad isn’t involved in it.”

Yoru brushed past that statement without pause. “No word yet on your soulprint vendor.”

“Then I guess we’re about as ready as we can be,” Sorin said.

It was a short walk to the portal hub. The only hitch was the side eye Sorin caught from one of the guards, though the man didn’t say anything to him. I wonder if he was on duty when everyone came bursting through here a week ago? But no, why would he be glaring at me instead of literally anyone else? Maybe he knows me from somewhere?

Sorin didn’t recognize the guard’s face or his aura, though. He was just a random rank 3, impressive for his job, but nobody important in the grand scheme of things. In all likelihood, the man was just a spy for one family or another who was keeping track of Sorin’s comings and goings, which wasn’t good, but also wasn’t enough of a threat to care about it.

They filed through the portal, Sorin in the lead and Yoru bringing up the rear. The Floor 13 portal hub came into view a moment later. It was just the swirling red portal in a clearing of dark, almost toxic-looking green grass, no signs of humanity to be found. That was pretty typical for the higher floors. The climber population capable of reaching them started to decline dramatically, and that left very little reason to establish any sort of permanent base around the portal.

The downside was that it meant climbers had to be wary of being attacked the moment they stepped onto the floor. Luck was on their side this time, though, and they all regrouped safely on the far side of the portal.

Yoru was barely into rank 16, and everyone else besides Sorin was nearing the end of rank 15. With Sorin himself close to rank 27, there was no reason to loiter on such a low floor just farming anima. Since there were no monsters for them to target in search of a specific soulprint, their plan was to head straight for the portal guardian.

“North?” Sorin asked.

“For now. We’ll swing around toward the east in a few hours, depending how fast we move,” Yoru told him. “Don’t worry, I know where we’re going.”

As a group, they started off.

* * *

Urd straightened with a pained groan. His back had been torn open by something that resembled the claws of a great cat, shredding his armor like it wasn’t even there and flaying his flesh down to the bone. The climber who’d done that was dead now, but Urd took no joy from that.

Another soldier lost. How much longer will Sorin delay before he claims the mantle? At this rate, the whole organization will tear itself apart, and then who’d be left to hold back the void? Samael couldn’t do it himself; Sorin won’t be able to do any better.

“Is that the last of them?” he asked.

“Current estimates are that twenty of them got away,” his assistant reported. “No surrenders.”

“No surprise. Without a decisive show of strength, we’re not going to bring Hantso’s faction back into the fold.”

Urd was doing his best to hold things together. The future of the tower depended on it. But he couldn’t reunite the Hellions on his own. He’d tried to step into that position and failed.

“And Sorin?”

“Reported to have disappeared into the tower again,” the assistant said. “Last sighting was about three hours ago.”

At least he’s still climbing. I just wish he’d take care of things down here first. If we have to wait for him to experience the Void Wall first hand before he realizes he needs the Hellions, there won’t be anything left waiting for him.

Urd had control of the traditionalists. His faction still believed in the mission. They recognized the importance of their work and were eager to carry it on. It was no exaggeration to say that without them, humanity would be consumed by the void.

Hantso had been in charge of acquisitions—both resources and people. He’d been the face of what most people on Floor 0 saw the Black Hellions as. The gangs, the recruitment, and the control of the city were all Hantso’s people. It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that without Samael there to direct the resources Hantso’s group generated toward the greater good, the crime boss had fallen into the trap of power for power’s sake.

Urd held out some hope for Lanir’s group. They were the militant climbers, the ones who formed the true backbone of the Hellions. They were the ones most open to returning to the fold, and truthfully, the ones Sorin would most need in the short term. Hantso provided new troops for next year. Lanir kept things from falling apart today.

And neither of them would cooperate without Samael’s replacement, which left Urd trying to keep everything from spiraling into total collapse. That was a task he was quickly realizing he wasn’t up to completing.

“Send another emissary to Lanir,” he decided. “If we can get him to agree to even a temporary truce with us, we can focus on bringing Hantso’s faction to heel.”

“He threatened to kill the next emissary,” the assistant noted.

“We’ll have to risk it. Hantso won’t listen. Lanir might if we offer him what he wants.”

“And... uh, what does he want?”

Urd sighed. “I don’t think even he knows. It would be a lot easier to cooperate with him if he could figure it out.”