Mage Dissolution Read online

  What had Victor discovered in these Drones? I put the thought from my mind. I couldn’t imagine a worse hell than being trapped in a body not under my control for eternity. Marcus had claimed that there was no intellect and that the personality that had once owned the shell was long gone. What if he was wrong? Dear god. What had been done to this poor man?

  I looked into the things eyes as it struggled against me. Its eyes were glazed and milky white. It wouldn’t be able to see through those – at least not conventionally. Was this, as Marcus put it, just a machine made out of flesh? Or was it something more?

  This left me with a conundrum. What should I do with this thing now. It didn’t seem right to kill it. I wasn’t even sure that I could. All I’d be able to do was dismember it so that it wasn’t mobile and I didn’t have the stomach to do that.

  No, I’d have to find somewhere to secure it. I remembered that the operating theatre had had secure bonds on the operating table. I lifted my captive into the air and carried him into the operating theatre.

  I looped a second Mana band around the restraints and locked them into place. I breathed a nervous sigh then released him from the Mana. This table was quite old – it wasn’t out of the realms of possibility that the bonds had fatigued with age. The instant the Mana bands left it, the thing on the table raged against its bindings. I could hear the complaint of twisted leather and metal being strained. Fortunately for me – it held.

  I closed the door to the operating theatre hoping that this would mollify it, but I could still hear it groaning and clawing at the table through the doors. The noise didn’t do much to improve the atmosphere of the place.

  Trying my best to ignore the shrieks I made my way deeper into the underground complex in the direction that the thing had come. This led into a small series of offices and then to a cell block. I kept my shield at full strength expecting to find another one of those things at any moment.

  I crept into the cell block. Each of the cells was secured by a small iron door and a series of bars, which fortunately allowed me to see into each cell without entering. I had cast a glow spell at the end of the cell block so I was pretty sure that there was nothing in the cells, but it paid to be safe. I certainly couldn’t hear the same type of racket that the other Drone had made upon discovery.

  It wasn’t until I got to the second last cell on the left that I found something interesting. It appeared to be a prisoner. Or at least it had once been a prisoner. I assumed that it was now a Drone. It wasn’t acting like the other one though; it was simply standing facing the wall. It seemed to be completely unaware of my presence.

  “Hello?” I said softly. My voice sounded too loud to my ears. It echoed throughout the cell block. The thing didn’t even budge.

  “Are you okay?” This seemed like a redundant question.

  The Drone’s head shook slightly as if to clear it and it tilted its head to one side as if listening. Maybe it had heard me.

  “Hello?” I repeated again.

  “… Ist da… Jemand?” a voice uttered in stuttered German. It spoke? What the hell? Drones don’t speak! The voice had been garbled and hoarse but it had definitely come from the figure in the cell. I quickly checked the lock on the cell door and noted with some degree of relief that it was secure. There was quite a bit of damage to the doorframe, but it too was still intact.

  “I’m here,” I replied back in German. It had asked if anyone was there.

  The figure slowly turned its head. I couldn’t imagine how much effort it took. Dust seemed to fall from its frame as it moved. It took the figure along time to move.

  “Who are you? It’s been so long since anyone came here.” The figure gasped as it slowly managed to turn its frame to face me. “You’re a Mage,” he accused in a croak before I could answer.

  I nodded. There wasn’t much point in denying it. What the hell was going on? This thing could see Mana?

  “How long have you been in here?”

  “I… don’t… know.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “I… think so. I don’t remember,” came the eventual reply.

  This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I wasn’t going to take chances though. This thing was a Mage and that meant that it was dangerous.

  “What’s…. the number…. on the door?” the thing croaked.

  It took me several seconds for me to locate the sign as the door had been fairly badly damaged. I found a small square of paper with some faded words on the ground surrounded by some shards of broken glass.

  “Patient 616.” I informed the thing.

  “Oh,” was the thing’s only response.

  “I… think… my name... is… Karl.” He continued slowly. He didn’t sound too sure, but Karl was as good a name as any.

  “When were you put in here Karl?”

  “I… don’t know… I remember… a camp… being… arrested… Doctors?”

  Karl’s wizzened face took on a curious expression. It was obvious that he was having trouble remembering. I didn’t blame him. I was well and truly ready to believe that he had been in that cell since the Second World War. There was something definitely off about him. When I had studied with Victor he had spoken about a technique that allowed him to regenerate his body at a cellular level. It was possible that this is what they had been researching here?

  “Do you want me to let you out?” I ventured tentatively. I wasn’t sure I wanted to let him out, but at least he didn’t appear to be that much of a threat… at least yet.

  “No!” Karl’s voice whipped out far quicker than his previous responses, “Randall is out there! He keeps trying to get in, but I can’t let him.”

  “Randall?”

  Karl didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. It was obvious who had been referring to – the Drone I had managed to incarcerate earlier.

  “I’ve locked him away.”

  “He goes away for some time – he always comes back.”

  “How long has he been trying to get in here for?”

  “I don’t know.” Karl replied somewhat irritably. I’d heard that asking the same question in different ways could jog the memory of someone with amnesia. Maybe this was the same?

  “I remember... a camp… I think.” Karl continued, “…I thought I was going to die there.”

  Karl’s voice, which was already difficult to hear, cracked and for the first time I thought I heard a glimmer of the man beneath.

  “But… someone came… a man… a soldier…. He was like us… he pulled me from the crowd and… took me somewhere… Here... I think.”

  Karl’s story took several hours to unfold completely. He was Polish Jewish by birth on his mother’s side and when the Nazis had invaded Poland, Karl had been rounded up with other Jewish people and sent into concentration camps. He hadn’t known for sure at the time, but the rumours were that they were being taken somewhere safe out of the country. Karl hadn’t believed them at the time, but couldn’t have guessed what the truth actually was. They’d had suspicions though.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that those camps had been death camps where the Nazis had executed close to two million people. Had Karl been sent to in one it was unlikely he would have left. I don’t know what kind of hell that Karl had been forced to endure here, but looking at his twisted and desiccated body it was quite clear that death would have been preferable.

  Karl continued with his story and it wasn’t difficult to see what had happened if you read between the lines. A German officer had removed him from the rest of the prisoners and brought him here. The German officer had been a Mage. Karl had known about our kind, but was unable to make much use of our powers. He wasn’t that powerful. His mother had been a Mage too, but she had died before the war. Karl had been quite sure that the fact that he was a Mage was why he had been removed from the camp, although he did say that other non-Mages had been selected as well.

  I was almost certain that this officer had been Victor. I wasn’t
surprised that Victor had once been a Nazi – it seemed obvious given his past. Marcus had mentioned that there was a black mark against Victor that had prevented him from being elected as Primea. Involvement with the Nazi party seemed like a fairly serious breach of our kinds laws. We weren’t supposed to overthrow governments or invade other countries. The Nazi party had done both.

  I vaguely wondered why Victor hadn’t been put to death. Our kind had harsh punishments for those of us who broke our laws so flagrantly.

  Karl had said that there were hundreds if not thousands of people who came through this research facility. The death rate was catastrophic with prisoners undergoing surgery and experimentation according to some unknown roster. Periodic trains of new prisoners would come and the body bags of the victims would be sent back. Prison labour had been used to ferry the bodies from the facility onto the trains.

  Karl was lucky in that he had managed to avoid most of the surgery and had survived longer than most. He had mostly been questioned about his heritage and any others of our kind that he had met. The German officer had been most persistent in trying to trace Karl’s linage as he had refused to believe that someone of Jewish descent could be a Mage. It hadn’t complied with the concept of Arian superiority.

  This didn’t surprised me very much either. During my stay with Victor he had on numerous occasions indicated that our powers were passed down through bloodline. He had also stated that our bloodline appeared to be Romani in nature – gypsy. He hadn’t sounded very happy about that at the time, but I hadn’t thought to query it until now. Karl’s memory had been vague at best and I had to piece together pieces of information from what I already knew, but one thing was certain – human experimentation had occurred on this site.

  Karl had only undergone one experiment and it had been in the final days of the facility. He had surmised this because most of the officers and other prisoners had already left the camp. There only remained one other prisoner – Randall. He had been in the cell across the walkway from Karl. They had spoken briefly before they had dragged Randall away.

  When they had returned Randall he was a changed person – in that he wasn’t a person any longer. He simply followed his captors and did as instructed. When no instructions were given Randall stood still and simply waited. The most frightening thing about it was though, Randall now had a Mana signature. Karl had tried to talk to Randall to find out what had been done, but Randall remained mute.

  They came for Karl the very next day. He remembered trying to fight his captors, but being forced onto a surgical gurney. In vain he tried to use the Mana, but it was as ineffectual as his fists. His captors were simply too strong and he was too weak. Months of inactivity and poor diet had taken its toll. They brought the gurney into an operating room and forced a mask over his face. That was the last thing Karl remembered of that day.

  He wasn’t sure how long he was out for, but when he awoke he was in a small room with the German officer that had pulled him out of the prison camp. He was surprised to find that the officer was actually the Commandant of the complex.

  The conversation was short and sharp with the Commandant simply inquiring how he felt and Karl was surprised to note that he didn’t feel any different. He searched in vain for surgical scars but couldn’t find any. The Commandant then asked Karl to draw upon his powers, to simply lift a small object from the table.

  Karl hadn’t been the most powerful among our kind, but simple levitation was well within his capabilities. At least it would have normally been. That day he was unable to draw the necessary strength to even lift a teacup. It jittered and rocked slightly, but didn’t overly rise. They had removed his powers.

  Karl would have assumed that this had been the point of the exercise except that the Commandant had been furious demanding again and again that Karl try to lift the cup. They had even resorted to beatings and punishments, but his threats were ultimately unsuccessful. Karl could see the Mana in his body and it appeared to be doing something, but not what he was trying to get it to do. It was as if the Mana was already being used elsewhere and nothing was left for anything else.

  The Commandant was eventually forced to admit that the experiment had been a failure, but hadn’t specified how or why. He hadn’t even bothered to tell Karl what they had been trying to achieve. The facility was completely abandoned the next day with the notable exceptions of Karl and Randall.

  Karl wasn’t sure how long he had waited in the dark until he had thought of escape. The rumbling of his stomach eventually shook him into action, but he found that he was unable to break out of the cell – the bars were simply too strong. He had managed to survive for some time using water from the cistern from the toilet, but eventually that ran dry and he was forced to go without.

  It must have been at least three weeks before he realised that something was wrong. There was no way for him to accurately measure the amount of time that had passed. With nothing to eat or drink his body was wracked with starvation and was beginning to succumb to death. Starvation is a horrible way to die, but being in a cell Karl was unable to do much about it. He had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to take his life, but had also been unable to complete the task. It was as if his body just refused to damn well die.

  Karl didn’t know how long it had been when he realised that something wasn’t right – that he should be long dead. It seemed like months since food had last passed his mouth and his body had become shrunken and weak. He went through fits of delirium, and hallucinations were common. He finally came to the conclusion that he simply wasn’t going to die.

  Some unknown agent was keeping him alive. There was only one explanation – it was the Mana. Somehow the experiment had caused the Mana to sustain him past when he should have died. His body had twisted in on itself as its usual source of nourishment had been removed and it was forced to subsist on Mana, but he was still alive.

  The knowledge sent him crazy. He had no way of knowing how long he spent in the dark, in the cold, surviving on magical powers he could neither control nor cease. His next memory was that of a noise bringing him out of a stupor.

  It was coming from the other cell. At first it was a low groaning. Randall was making noises. Karl couldn’t see him, but he could see the Mana signature and was shocked to see how shrivelled the frame of Randall’s body was. It was skeletal. Leathered flesh, pulled taunt over a skeletal frame. Karl didn’t need to be told that his own frame mirrored Randall’s. In truth Karl wasn’t as bad as Randall, he at least had maintained a muscle structure and frame – albeit incredibly frail.

  Karl had come to the grim conclusion after what must have been months that of the two of them, Randall had been the luckier as he didn’t appear to understand or care what had happened to him. That is at least up until now. The noise Randall was making was getting worse. It was nothing more than a rumble in his throat, but it was getting louder over the days, weeks, months or years. Karl had no way of knowing.

  Karl tried to placate Randall, and his soothing seemed to calm him down a little. Karl had no idea how long this went on for as he himself dropped in and out of stupors. One day it came to the point when Karl had tried to quieten Randall and it hadn’t worked.

  Previously Randall would respond to his name and the groaning would stop. But this day the groaning got louder and louder and Karl was unable to make it stop. Then something new happened.

  Randall took a hesitant step forward, turned and screamed. He screamed and screamed until his voice turned hoarse. He took a second step and fell forward onto his knees. It took him several tries before he was able to recover his footing. Karl couldn’t see this of course, but could determine what was happening by the noises being made. He kept calling to Randall to attempt to calm him, but nothing appeared to be working.

  Then the beating began. It was the sound of pulped flesh hitting solid metal over and over again. Randall had started bashing against the inside of his cell. Karl didn’t know if it was a break for freed
om or merely another symptom of the madness that had overtaken Randall.

  Karl can’t remember how long it took for Randall to break out from his cell, but it must have taken ages. Eventually there was a metallic shriek and the door swung open with a grinding chirp.

  Karl had been happy for his friend to have finally achieved his freedom, but soon learned the truth. Although free from the cell – Randall was far from free. When Karl had called to him, Randall responded with a groan and stumbled over to Karl’s cell, The sound of mashed beatings began again.

  He was trying to break into Karl’s cell. Now that Randall was closer Karl could make out his appearance. There was nothing of his cell-mate left. The ‘thing’ trying to break into his cell was a monster and Karl knew without a doubt that his own appearance was similar.

  Eventually Randall became distracted and had wandered off. He would return periodically to resume his assault on Karl’s cell, but so far Karl’s cell had proved stronger.

  Still Karl knew that it was only a matter of time – after all Randall had broken out of his own cell, it stood to reason that he would eventually break into Karl’s.

  Karl soon found that he was looking forward to it. He knew that once Randall broke in that he would finally die. Only a sliver of doubt remained in Karl’s mind. What if he didn’t? What if he remained trapped in this shell of a body after Randall had beaten it senseless?

  I shuddered at the thought. The longer Karl spoke the more eloquent and knowledgeable he became. It was almost as if he was waking up from a long sleep, which I suppose in a very real sense he was. After he finished his story, he begged me to kill him.

  The only problem was, I wasn’t sure that I could.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Over seventy years?” Karl repeated incredulous.

  “As best I can tell, given that we don’t know exactly when you were put in here,” I said.