The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Three

The White Rooms territory looked like any other part of the undercity, at least at first. The moment the White Rooms themselves appeared, it became obvious. 

I wasn’t sure how White Lily had managed it, but the White Rooms were one of the more impressive spots in the underground. Much like the arena had come from a sunken and converted, well, arena, the White Rooms had originally been a hospital, a century or two ago, before it had sunken into the ash and muck. 

White Lily had found it and moved it, used countless earth shaping spells to form an absolutely massive cavern surrounding it, then broken open a part of the mountaintop, just outside of the ring of mountains that encircled the city. The in the mouth of the cavern provided light and fresh air, even if only distantly, and had been instrumental in White Lily’s rise to power in the undercity. 

The hospital had been updated and renovated into the White Rooms. Half brothel, half hospital, it stood over the slums that White Lily as a monument to her power and prestige like a castle from one of the northern folks who still thought stone walls could defend them from an artillery shell enhanced with siege spells. 

Skyboats, the smaller ships that were powered largely on sorcerer’s magic, floated up and down out of the open hole in the sky, allowing those who wished to enter the White Rooms to do so discreetly and without having to ever touch the undercity’s poor and homeless. 

And there were a lot in this area. Some were ordinary people who had tried to eke out a life living under a big fish after being abandoned by the legal parts of the undercity for whatever reason, but most were employed by the White Lily in some way. They passed beastfolk like satyr and minotaur who had clearly undergone extra augmentation in order to fill their jobs, elves and aster who had their inhuman grace refined to an unnatural degree, favura who had been changed to look more humanoid and have an easier time on land, and above all, there were humans. 

There were humans who had undergone shoddy and cheap modifications and whose bodies were practically falling apart. There were humans who had the face of a child but the body of an adult. There were humans who looked like nonhumans, but who were lacking a certain something that revealed their ultimate humanity. 

Out of all of them, only about one in ten weren’t the first category. After all, the White Lily and White Rooms could set you up for life if you spent five years working for them. 

They didn’t need your modifications to look pretty or nice after your tenure was done. You weren’t their problem anymore. And if you had the money to afford stable, permanent modifications, you wouldn’t need to live down here. 

Hadiya looked faintly disgusted, and whispered out of the corner of her mouth. 

“The Concrete Crown would never allow his citizens to be left… Like this.”

I glanced at her. I’d suspected she’d grown up in the undercity. If she’d grown up in the Crown’s territory, that certainly explained some things. The Crown wasn’t great, they were a mobster, but for all that they did wrong, they took care of those who lived in their territory and paid dues. 

Hadiya was probably right that he’d never allow people to be wrung out and used in their territory. The brothels under Crown’s rule were cleaner and had rules, but they were also less profitable. Odril had liked the Crown a lot, claiming they would make a perfect Demonic Aspirant. 

Still, badmouthing the White Lily in her territory was probably not a good idea, and I glared at Hadiya, who realized what she’d done a moment later, and her eyes widened slightly. I thought she might have been blushing in embarrassment, but between her dark skin and the poor lighting, it was hard to tell.

“Sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve been back down here,” she said. “I got my way out through spell design, and then I didn’t look back.” 

“I should introduce you to Megan,” I informed her. 

“Your sister?” 

“No, that’s Zone. Or Jessica. Depends on which one you wanted. Megan’s a witch I went to college with. Similar story to you, though she went into airship design through alteration spellcraft, rather than spell work.” 

“Is she cute?” Hadiya asked. 

“Do you like angular faces? If so, then yes,” I said idly, drawing the sword as someone stepped up behind us. They pulled a knife, but I spun and knocked it from their hand, then smacked the flat of the sword against their temple. Not hard enough to kill, though it probably hurt. It was more about the message. 

I slipped the sword back into my belt, flicked my fingers and stole the knife, then handed it to Hadiya. 

“You should take this. I have two knives, a sword, and the gun.” 

“And I have spell tattoos and an assortment of artifacts,” she said. “You just don’t see them.” 

Still, she took the knife. 

“I don’t have an in with White Lily the same way I do the Contractor,” I informed Hadiya. “Which means we’re going to have to do this the hard way.” 

It took us a little while to get to the White Rooms, and I headed into the brothel side. The medical bay was better and cleaner, but it couldn’t get us an entrance with Horse. 

The brothel smelled of incense from the far south, an imitation of woodsmoke that tried to give the place an air of sophistication, and we were greeted by a middle aged woman. She’d clearly been modified to look to be in her twenties, but there were imperfections that I was able to pick up.

“Hello!” she chirped happily.

“We need to speak to Horse,” Hadiya said. 

“Horse doesn’t do couples,” the woman said smoothly. “But I’d be hap–” 

“Not for this job,” I clarified. “His other work.” 

 “Of course,” the woman said. “In that case, please come with me. And please leave your weapons here.” 

I pointed at the cube. 

“That’s a shield generator, not a weapon, but I’ll turn over the rest.” 

I floated over the gun, sword, and knives, and Hadiya passed over her purse and knife, which were all stored in one of the lockers. We were handed the key to the locker, then led into a small private room, where we sat and were made to wait for Horse, who was currently with a client. 

It took almost an hour for the young assassin to show up. He was young, barely older than Kelly, and handsome in a way that suggested that the assassinations he’d performed had been used to pay for modifications. 

“Horse,” he said, nodding to us. 

“Mist,” I said, and Horse’s eyebrows rose. 

“Mist as in THE Mist, or Mist as in someone trying to cash in on the legacy?” 

I curled my lip in the kind of pompous smirk that I would have worn when I was a kid. 

“We need information,” Hadiya said. “First and foremost, did you kill Senator Ermonte?” 

“Nope,” Horse said. “I couldn’t have done it.” 

I studied him. I wasn’t as good at reading people as I should have been, but I didn’t think he was lying. 

“The Contractor thinks you could have, with time to study the wards and an enchanted rifle to make the shot,” I said. 

“Sure, but I couldn’t have studied the wards,” Horse said. “Lemme be real – no abjurer in the world could have made that shot. Those wards were supercharged and layered to the point that even trying to scan them would have set off a hundred alarms.” 

“How do you know that?” Hadiya asked, leaning forwards. 

“Can’t say,” Horse said. “I got paid to be quiet.” 

“We’re willing to pay you,” Hadiya said.

“No,” Horse said. “It would ruin my reputation to tell you. Don’t care if you pay me a billion thick-panes.” 

I was pretty sure a billion thick-panes would be enough to make anyone spill their guts, given that was more than the entire net worth of some large companies, but I took the point. 

“I understand,” I said. “That said, we do need the information.”

Horse’s eye spasmed then, and he ripped a gun out from behind his back, leveling it at us. 

“I told you,” he said. “I can’t say.”

In the seconds his hand moved, my magic surged. I altered the metal spell that was keeping the metal box alight. The gun had anti-tampering enchantments, but I shattered them with raw power and used it to rip the gun from his hands. 

To my immense frustration, the anti-tampering enchantments were the sort that slagged the gun, rather than let me use it, so I quickly shifted strategies, compacting the slag into a crude knife before I started speaking. 

“Have you ever looked into the kind of things quicksilver can do to a human body?” I asked, leaning forwards. “It doesn’t take a lot, not once it goes into the bloodstream. It bonds to the blood. First you’ll have diarrhea, then your liver shuts down. The liver can heal itself, but is yours enhanced enough to handle it?” 

Horse’s eyes kept twitching wildly and he ignored my words, exploding forwards, hands outstretched. 

I frowned as I caught him by the metal in his belt and pinned him to the ceiling. When he’d pulled the gun, I thought the kid was just a trigger happy street tough, but now…

“Mental mage,” Hadiya said, a moment before I could. 

“Probably designed to put pressure on him if he gets asked too much about the senator,” I concurred. 

“White Lily?” 

“Maybe, or maybe whoever tried to hire him.” 

“I can fix it, give me a second,” Hadiya said, pulling a pen from her pocket and starting to draw onto the table, shifting sparks of aura onto the table. Midway through her spell array, Horse stopped twitching, and I lowered him to the ground. 

“You okay, kid?” I asked hesitantly. 

Then I noticed that his face was starting to turn blue, and I let out a long curse, whipping my head over to Hadiya. 

“Death spell,” I said. “He couldn't kill us, so it’s killing him.” 

“Human mind magic can’t do that,” Hadiya said. “Frying someone’s brain just leaves them senseless for a few hours until they can pull themselves back together. It can’t shut off the autonomic nervous system.”

“Then it’s not human mind magic,” I said, and raised my hand, shaping out a spell. 

There was a reason Rhys and Haidya had made me expose my aura to them during the spell where a Faerie King searched me. As a metal sorcerer, I had all sorts of tricks I could pull.

One of them was to transform my aura to have certain properties of metal that I had on me via a sympathetic link and infusion. Silver could help me hurt a demon, for example. I didn’t keep silver with me, since I didn’t want to risk hurting Odril when she was already damaged.

There was a chance this was demon magic, and if so, it wasn’t great, but there was also a chance that it was Mindscape, Elemental, or any other plane. 

Specifically, Faerie. I had an iron ring on my finger, so there was a chance, however slim, I could do something. 

I infused the linking spell to my ring into his body, and for a moment nothing seemed to happen. 

Then Horse’s body spasmed as his neck jerked at a strange angle, and Hadiya gasped.

“Flesh elemental,” she said. I gave her a horrified look.

“Flesh Elemental?” I asked. 

Before she could respond, an explosion ripped through the hall, and both of us fell to the ground.