Redemptor by Seth Skorkowsky

Author:Seth Skorkowsky [Skorkowsky, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: urban fantasy
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2018-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

I should reach Atik’s village tomorrow. Strange music thrums in the distance, igniting some primeval anger. It haunts my dreams.

Chapter 20

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Deep beneath the earthen floors of Villa 15, also known as the Hidden City, Sicthwa coils and swims within her private sanctuary. Few know of, and less have ever seen, the chamber with its uneven, red brickwork and tiered, concave floor. Who had built the cistern is unknown even to Sicthwa. The date scratched into the mortar reads, “1938.” But she is grateful for it. The roominess and blackness provide her ample room to play.

Her children will lock victims in here with her. She enjoys watching them stumble in the dark, disoriented, hands stretched out before them as they whimper and search for escape. A splash of her tail or whispered word brings the terrible realization that they’re not alone. Swish, swish. Sometimes she touches them, sliding her body across the backs of their legs, just for an instant, but long enough for them to know that they’re alone in the dark with a monster. Wide-eyed and blind, they scream or beg. Some boast hopeless threats, swinging fists at the darkness. Others fold themselves into corners, arms hugging their knees, and piss themselves. Once she tires of her little amusements, she feeds. Twice a month, providing her hunger is satiated, she blesses one, impregnating it with her child.

Sicthwa prefers this den more than her previous one in Villa 31, though the despair was more exquisite there. She should have foreseen the Valducans finding her. While she has never spoken to her sisters since the night of their hatching, Sicthwa knows some of them are no more. In her dreams, she has felt them, and whispered untold secrets. Three of them have fallen silent. They were the same flesh, but not spirit. Sicthwa doesn’t mourn them, but fears what their deaths mean. The Valducans are coming.

After violating her sanctuary, decimating her children, they’d survived her little trap. She’d seen them with her own eyes and knew their names. Anya had known them. Anya, who had given herself to the Great Mother and whose face Sicthwa now wears. Anya had understood the Valducans, brought them to their knees. Anya knew their weaknesses and therefore so does Sicthwa.

Hiding wasn’t going to work. It has failed for three of her sisters and has nearly cost Sicthwa her own life. No, if she intends to survive she must attack. The Order is not invincible. Their refuge is their weakness: the archives, the Masters holed up as the troops perform their murders, the orphan weapons.

She smiles to herself in the darkness, lips drawing away from venomous fangs, as a plan begins to crystallize.

A shout yanks Sicthwa from her thoughts. A man screams and gunshots erupt somewhere above.

They’re here! Sicthwa swims out from the pool and into the air, water pouring off of her long body, and she wriggles into one of the two concrete tubes leading from her sanctuary. The tunnel extends straight forty feet, ending abruptly at the base of a half-built hospital, its construction abandoned in the 1970s.

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