Chapter 201: Regretting it Later (1/2)

Jason looked around the skimmer as it sailed smoothly over the rocky ground. It was an unremarkable patch of desert, but the walk between the mountain and its hidden sacrifice chamber and the Vane Estate had been an important time for Jason. It was his first chance to slow down and get some answers from someone who didn’t want to eat him or throw him in an evil blood pit.

That was when he really met Rufus, with his solid dependability and Gary with his boisterous enthusiasm. Then there was Farrah. She was the one who made the team work, bringing Gary into line when it was time for business and loosening Rufus up when he was causing unnecessary tension. Smarter than either, she could have easily led a team of her own. She was wise enough to recognise that she didn’t want to, leaving that to Rufus while she engaged in her own pursuits.

Jason hadn’t realised that, at the time. He was still agape at the terrifying volcano powers she had used to annihilate the sanguine horror. He was only just getting to know the people who would be his first friends and mentors in his new world.

Returning to the place it had all started, the path he had taken weighed heavily on his mind. It was a path of violence from the very beginning, so different from the safe, prosperous life he had known. That first night he had spoken to Rufus of his fears, of what a life of violence could turn him into. Rufus had not given him the reassurance he sought.

Instead, Rufus told Jason that he would have to choose between holding onto his innocence or seizing his own destiny. He promised that a life of adventure would give Jason the world, but it would come at a price. That price was safety and the inescapable stain of bloody hands. Looking back, Rufus’ promise had been kept. Jason had money, power, influence. Precious friends and boon companions. But he had also faced danger, and been the danger faced by others. It could be considered a naiveté, but he wondered if violence and killing had become too easy.

The need for violence and the moral action was a harder thing to balance than he ever thought. He was proud of his growing capability, and largely of what he had done with it. But that pride also brought danger and regret. He’d gone along with everyone else to fight the Ustei tribe on their sand barge, and while they had certainly needed to be stopped, no more than a token effort had been put towards conciliation. That he didn’t know how many people he killed that day was bad enough. That it had been for someone else’s reasons made it all the worse.

He thought about the men he killed in the shopping arcade. For all that he told himself it was justified, he could have easily escaped without hurting anyone. In his most honest moments, he knew he didn’t kill them in self-defence or through some need to send a message. Not any message worth sending, anyway. It had been pride. They had the temerity to challenge him and he had wanted – needed – to let everyone know that to come for him was to pay the price in blood.

Thadwick Mercer was, at the core, a creature of pride. It was what made him so easy to wound and drove every mistake he made. In the Reaper trials, Jason had come face to face with his own dark future, with the place that pride would take him, if he was not mindful of it.

That he had been more successful than Thadwick made people more accepting of his pride, but that was a trap. Something that made his pride more insidious, more dangerous. He had dismissed the Adventure Society’s need for him to make a humble gesture, thinking himself clever for turning it to his own purpose. He was coming to realise that he had a greater need to find some humility than he thought.

“Is that it?” Clive asked, next to him, as they crossed a rocky rise.

When Jason had first spotted the Vane Estate those months ago, it had been an incongruous stretch of green. Rufus had remarked on what a waste of resources it was to maintain a temperate springtime in the middle of the desert. From the yellows and browns that had replaced the green, that price was apparently no longer being paid.

“That’s it,” Jason said, double-checking his map. “It looks a bit worse for wear than the last time I was there.”

“Stop the skimmer on the outside,” Henrietta said, leaning forward to speak to Clive. “We don’t think there’ll be anyone in residence, but the Adventure Society wants us checking for a reason. Best not announce ourselves too loudly.”

As they approached, they found wilting plants, withered bushes and half-barren trees, their remaining leaves the brown, red and yellow of deep autumn. The Vane Estate had been an English country garden, held in a perpetual spring. As the energy maintaining the artificial climate depleted, that spring was passing through a deep autumn on the way to a sun-scorched, desert winter.

The pillars placed along the outside edge of the estate grounds still marked the border between the desert and the estate. Clive drew the skimmer up next to one and the team disembarked and stepped across the boundary. The air inside was still cooler than the desert, but hotter than what Jason remembered. Guided by Jason’s map, they set off across the yellowing grass for the inner reaches of the sprawling estate.

“That’s the hedge maze,” Jason pointed out. The towering hedge walls looked thinner than he remembered, the pale green hedges a pale reflection of its previous, lush glory. “I came into this world somewhere in the middle of that.”

“Is that what made that big hole?” Sophie asked, pointing. There was a ragged arch in the hedges, mirrored in the hedges they could see through it.

“No, that was Gary,” Jason said. “He and Farrah sent their summons right through the middle of it. He said it was to sweep out any cultists, but I think it was mostly to annoy Anisa.”

“Anisa?” Henrietta asked.

“Priestess of Purity. She was temporarily attached to Rufus’ team. The church were the ones that sent them out here, which we think was all part of their game-playing. I have to imagine an alliance between them and the Builder cult is an uneasy one.”

“It seems dangerous for the cult to involve outsiders, like that,” Belinda said. “Too much chance of exposure. Getting too impressed with the cleverness of your own plans is a sure way to mess them up.”

“The Builder cult apparently had their hearts set on this place,” Jason said. “I can see how the combination of isolation, space and comfort would appeal. The matriarch of the house didn’t like the Builders, though. Didn’t approve of her son being part of the wrong cult.”

“You seem to run into a lot of cultists,” Humphrey said.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Jason said. “Back in my world they come to your door with pamphlets.”

He turned his gaze back to the hedge maze.

“I couldn’t tell you exactly where I appeared in there. My arrival didn’t seem to do any damage, and every place looks like every other in a maze. Which is the whole point, I guess.”

As they progressed through the estate, they saw more and more damage beyond that caused by the desert reclaiming the land. Someone had a taken axe and flame to the place, breaking down outbuildings and torching gardens. When they reached the manor, it had clearly taken the brunt of whatever ire had driven the vandals. Only sections of burned and collapsed building still stood at the original height. Every section of wall intact enough to fit it had been painted with bright red graffiti, denouncing the inhabitants as blood drinkers and murderers.

“It seems word got out about the blood cult preying on the nearby towns and villages,” Humphrey said. “There isn’t much of a manor left to check out.”

“There were some fairly extensive cellars,” Jason said. “They may be intact.”

The team made their way into the gutted ruin of the manor house.

“Careful of the parts that haven’t collapsed yet,” Henrietta warned.

They quickly discovered that the floors had been burned through, dumping the charred remains of the house above into blackened piles in the expansive cellar space. Jason managed to find the entrance to the underground ritual room, but the tunnel was packed tight with debris.

“Should we dig it out?” Humphrey asked.

“No,” Henrietta said. “If we did it fast, what’s left of the house would collapse on us. If we went carefully, it would take too long and might collapse anyway.”

“There’s another entrance,” Jason said. “It’s bit of a crawl through a tight, wet tunnel. Which is at the bottom of a well. After that, though, it’s just a subterranean cave with a walkway and you’re there.”

“I don’t think we need to go that far,” Henrietta said.

“Perhaps we should be thorough,” Humphrey said.

“Agreed,” Jason said.

“Alright, we’ll compromise,” Henrietta said. “I’ll sweep my aura senses from above through that cave system. It should be between here and the centre of the maze, right?”

“I can put us right over it, using my map,” Jason said. “Maybe we should actually go down and take a look, though.”

“By crawling through a wet tunnel at the bottom of a well?” Neil said. “If there were still cultists here, then they would have killed the people who came to burn this place down. Or left, if it happened before they came back.”

“It does seem worthless as a place to hole up,” Clive said. “Without the manor, it’s just a place they’ve been known to use in the past. That makes it all threat and no value. Even if they came here, they would have moved on.”

“That does make sense,” Humphrey acknowledged.

“Still, I’ll do the aura sweep, just to be thorough,” Henrietta said. “We don’t want to go regretting it later.”

From within the edge of the estate grounds, Timos and Zato watched the skimmer disappear into the distance.

“Consider this a formal apology,” Zato said. “I thought your ideas were overwrought. Burning down the manor and moving everyone into the cave. Using so many of our resources setting up the aura suppression. You protected our final chance. Even if we killed them, more would come looking.”