Chapter 42.5: Whose Mercy
Falling to a knee and sucking air back into his lungs, Minkus suddenly heard and understood what the man had said. He spun to face the room, rubbing at his scorched chest. Whatever that prod had been designed to subdue, it wasn’t an asura. The shock from it had burned a ragged hole straight through the stolen uniform. If it hadn’t been for Minkus’ magic, first absorbing part of the blast and now streaming into him to heal the burn, he knew he wouldn’t be on his feet, if even conscious.
Minkus’ mind flashed back to Wepp, to Ventyr, and to Yissa. Scattered around the chamber, the three were in different but equally bad situations, surrounded by a variety of mutilated, mewling, roaring creatures that pressed limbs and maws at the growing gaps in the bottoms of their cylinders. He cast a glance to the ceiling, quietly begging the deeper magics to be of even more help to him than usual.
They couldn’t stay in here, could they? But would they fare any better making an escape? The likelihood of Minkus fighting a path out of there for all four of them was slim, and it certainly wouldn’t fit into the plan formulated and expected by the group still waiting outside.
The group waiting outside!
The thought snapped into his head with a force that sorted other subsequent thoughts into sudden alignment. Jindel, Yult, Penny, and—though he hated the thought—probably Jinkke were all waiting outside for the halls to be cleared of the Inquest. That was the whole reason he and Wepp were in here on their own to begin with. He had to get their help, and to do that— the alarm! He had to trigger the alarm protocol, and fast.
Bounding to his feet and around the edge of the data-terminal console, Minkus stepped lightly past Wepp, careful not to step on him in his unconscious state. There were three separate terminals built into the console, along with a fourth panel lined with analog switches and toggles. Those must have been what the man had used to open the containment cells. An interesting thought, he supposed, but he pushed it aside, focusing on triggering the alarm. That was his task.
What had Wepp said about the alarm protocols: how they were accessed and which one to trigger? He screwed up his face as he shuffled through memories he knew were much newer than they felt. The last few minutes had been enough to shake most thoughts loose in his head. Just remembering felt like sifting through a floor covered in foot-deep, old notes.
One by one, though, Minkus navigated through the glyphs that flashed across the screen, recognizing most of the interfaces as they came, and fumbling through the ones he didn’t.
Finally, he reached it: the emergency-protocol view that offered a series of colored blocks and a field for digit-entry. In a flash that startled him a little, Minkus remembered Wepp’s instructions: Colors and numbers, one like the emergency and the other low, not high.
Fire was their fake emergency, so Minkus tapped the red block. That was easy, but the question that followed wasn’t so much. What exactly constituted a low number? Obviously one was as low as numbers got, at least in the forms of mathematics Minkus actually understood. But something about that scratched at the back of his mind as being wrong. Wepp hadn’t said one, had he? Was that too low? Something did seem right to him about a higher number too, a much higher number in fact, but that was in direct conflict with the instruction he remembered reciting back to Wepp about choosing something lower. It was lower, wasn’t it? Minkus glanced down at Wepp, then at the cylinders. Maybe he had time to rouse the other asura.
Among the sounds of grinding machinery that pulled at the cylinders and the vocalizing test subjects inside them, Minkus caught a faint and very different sound. He peered over the console just in time to see something small scuttle jaggedly across the stone floor and toss itself into the gap at the bottom of a neighboring cylinder. Cries of fury and fear erupted from whatever shattered creature had previously been alone in there.
Minkus’ eyes widened.
“I. Must. Make. A choice,” he demanded, returning his attention to the console.
Minkus slammed a finger down on the number 2, and submitted the entry. Claxons screamed to life throughout the room, throughout the corridor outside, and presumably throughout the complex, and relief washed over Minkus. A recorded voice came on over the station intercom: Alarm Red-2, it said. Repeat. Red-2. All staff, proceed to southern conflagration position.
Minkus gripped his ear, frowning. Southern?
He listened as the message repeated, and it definitely said southern. But he thought they were supposed to go north. How had—
A juicy and sputtering roar drew Minkus out of his worries. Just left of him, the skale wormed at the gap beneath its cylinder. Minkus could make out the strips of scaled flesh dangling from its pale-green arms, where it seemed to have raked itself with its own bloody claws, and he winced. Its reptilian jaws free and snapping, the skale was held back by just the ridge of spines along its back. A twist would set it free completely, something the creature didn’t seem to recognize.
Around the room, Minkus saw that more and more of the cylinders neared heights adequate for their subjects to escape, and his worry shifted away from the alarm. Wepp was unconscious, two of those cylinders held his friends, and a horde of disfigured, tortured creatures would soon be pouring through the room.
What could he do? What could he do?
The mangled murellow cubs escaped containment and dragged their ragged bodies in different directions. A skelk too, Minkus realized, had just slipped free of its chamber and was now fumbling its way after one of the cubs, weaving on and off the trail in a feral confusion. For now the escapees seemed to be unaware of him and the others, but it wouldn’t be long before some of the larger subjects were getting free, and he had a bad feeling about what they would do in any state, let alone under the suffering they’d endured.
He whispered a quiet plea to the deep magics, and looked back down at the console in front of him. He sped past the first, second, and third panels; those terminal screens weren’t going to do him any good, he didn’t think. That left him with the panel of analog toggles the man had used to open all the containment chambers.
“My ears!” Minkus popped, nearly hopping back. How had he missed it? He was standing at the controls that could close the test chambers!
Minkus nearly began to flip all the toggles back to closed again, when another problem struck him: Ventyr and Yissa. Like all the other subjects, his friends were scrabbling at the space between their glass containers and the floor platforms, both of them almost free. He had no idea which toggles controlled their specific containers, and if he closed the wrong ones now, they’d be crushed. Minkus needed to give them a moment more.
Each second seemed to draw out into a day, a week, a lifetime, as Minkus waited for his friends’ freedom and simultaneously watched the escapes of more psychologically tormented creatures. He saw it all happening, honestly feeling the pain of not just Ventyr and Yissa, but the charr and the other asura. Even the animals subjected to that cruel treatment were pulling at his sympathy. None of them deserved this, for any reason. The alarm continued to blare as he waited.
“Minkus!” Yissa called, straining her voice to be heard beyond the noise. She was fully escaped from the cylinder and fumbling over two of the murellows. “Minkus, help! Do something!”
He snapped a glance at Ventyr, farther on in the room but still visible. His toggle must have been flipped late in the sequence, as his chamber was only now reaching a height where the sylvari could successfully slip out. With a final thrust, Ventyr slid his lower half free of the glass and over the lip of the platform.
Minkus wasted no time, slapping as many toggles at once as he could. He ran both his hands across the panel, flipping everything to closed.
As soon as he did, though, the room changed—its sound changed. What had been cries of unguided fury and confusion suddenly quieted. For a second, it felt like there was only the alarm sounding, but that didn’t last. Just as quickly, the cries returned, only now they were anxious, terrified, and rising in volume and pitch. Looking up from the console again, Minkus recognized what was happening: the very thing he’d feared for Ventyr and Yissa was now happening to all the other creatures caught in this horrible place. Everything that had just been clawing its way to freedom was now pinned down, slowly being crushed against the base-plates of their cells.
Starting to sick up, Minkus stared down at the board. Ventyr and Yissa were free and not in danger of being crushed; that much was done. And he supposed it made practical sense to remove creatures that could be dangerous to them. He imagined Wepp or Jinkke painting it that way, and they were probably right. But the sounds. The pain—all that pain. And from creatures who’d already sustained so much.
What about settling the toggles into a standing position, between the open and closed position? If he could do that—if that we’re an option, it would keep the remaining subjects pinned but not threatened.
He tried, but it didn’t work. The switch snapped right back to closed, and the cries continued. Minkus couldn’t tell which were the animals and which were the people.
People, he thought, there are people here. A charr and an asura. And however mad they might be, they were still alive. Minkus couldn’t let them be crushed, not them and not the animals; he could not be responsible for something like that. He’d decided.
One after the next, Minkus flipped the toggles back the other way, seeing which cells each of them controlled. If the chamber that rose with a switch’s flip didn’t free a previously trapped creature, he snapped it back and let it seal away whatever might remain inside. Otherwise, he allowed each one to continue rising and free what was trapped beneath it.
“Ventyr,” he called, “I think you had better come this way!”
Over the noise, Minkus wasn’t sure the sylvari had actually heard him, but it was clear Ventyr recognized what was happening around him. He moved toward Yissa, scrambling to his feet and dodging around the stalker that had stretched drunkenly out of its cylinder. It turned to follow, but Ventyr discouraged it with a swift, two-handed blow to the head as he passed. Under normal circumstances, the strike would only have angered the big cat, but in its condition, it only absorbed the hit, stumbling off in a different direction, confused and hissing.
Yissa was shoving her way free of the scrabbling murellows as Ventyr approached. He helped pull her clear, and together they made their way to Minkus.
“What is happening here?” Ventyr demanded, as he rounded the console. His attention fell to Wepp, who still lay unconscious at Minkus’ feet.
“That’s Wepp,” Minkus said. “He should be fine, just— just unconscious.”
Eyes wide, Ventyr took in everything through blinking eyes, as if waking from a dream. Yissa slapped arms around Minkus in a sudden and exuberant embrace, and Minkus flushed with embarrassment. Yissa, he remembered, was in nothing but her undergarments.
He barely had time to recognize it before she loosened her grip, peering around him to the console, and she let go completely. “My ears!” she piped. “What in the Alchemy— are you letting them all loose?!”
His mind leapt from her attire to what he’d been doing at the panel just seconds before, and he reached for the remaining toggles, only to be driven clear of them a heartbeat too soon. Yissa threw her weight into him, not knocking him away, exactly, but at shifting him slowly aside as she shot her own hand at the controls, slapping the first one to the closed position.
“No,” Minkus contested, “you can’t— they’ll be crushed!”
Ventyr looked at the two of them and then at the room filled with alternately rising and falling cylinders, and he seemed to understand then what was happening. He grabbed Minkus and pulled him clear of the female. “Snap those things shut before more of them break free!” he demanded. Yissa obliged.
“They’ve already been through so much,” Minkus pleaded. “What if they can be helped?”
Despite Ventyr’s grip, he bounced to look up over the console, at the room of suffering creatures and souls, where a few more had slipped free. The moa, the skale, and the asura—he sighed relief at that one—were all out now. The charr, though, was still pinned in the space between the cylinder and base.
Ventyr tugged Minkus back from the console, giving him a better view of the hulking, feline male who fought the descending glass, slathering like any of the beasts in the room. Except, those curling lips also formed what looked like words amid his rabid barks of fury; Minkus couldn’t make them out, but he knew they were words. Patchy fur slid along corded muscle, and scraps of his already ragged clothing tore free as he pushed to clear the glass. Minkus hadn’t looked closely enough to realize it before, but he knew those colors, those patterns. The Vigil?
Minkus looked back up at Ventyr, whose gaze had also settled on the charr. Sorrow and anger danced hot in his eyes. His grip wasn’t as weak as Minkus might have expected, but it also wasn’t enough to keep a quick lunge from breaking Minkus free. Still, something about Ventyr’s expression took the fight out of Minkus.
He stilled, trying one last time. “Ventyr, what if we can help them?”
“We’re past that point,” the sergeant said flatly, his eyes still locked hotly on the charr. “This is a mercy.”
The desperate wails continued to rise, and Minkus looked away. He couldn’t watch.
His eyes traced the length of the room’s northern wall in an effort to dim the sounds, and eventually he found the doorway in the far corner that led back out to the hall. Squinting at it, Minkus could make out the forms of krewe members and golems passing by on their way down the hall outside. He blinked stupidly, suddenly remembering that the alarm still wailed in the background, and it was having its intended effect. That didn’t resolve what was happening right in front of him, but he could heave a sigh of relief at at least one thing: the main plan had worked. The alarm was clearing a path for his friends.
