Imoen lay in her cell, craving something to drink. She knew the constant drip-drip-dripping came from outside the bars, too far to reach anyway. She was too weak to move. The torturer hadn't come back for hours now. She wondered if dying from thirst was less painful than the things he liked to do to her. Her mind skittered painfully from one thought to another. Her head ached, her skull tied together with only a few flaps of skin. It wasn't the only part of her that burned with a slow burn, or sunk a steady stream of poison into her from a dirty wound.
She wasn't expecting the angel.
Slender and fair and naked, with long though dirty pale flaxen hair. Imoen could tell she was an angel, on the grounds that she had energy wings rising from her back, struts made of the same unnatural light that glowed in her eyes. No iris, no sclera: just an inhuman scarlet. She had unnaturally large eyes, too. And odd pointy ears.
Imoen sat back and laughed. She must be going seriously insane by now. Besides, she'd always thought angels were supposed to have heaps more wings and eyes than that.
"Imoen," the angel said, with a voice like a hive of bees trying to buzz in tune to a cello, "get up and escape."
Hello, Imoen. "Why does everyone know my name?" Imoen clenched her fists. "You're one of his mind tricks, aren't you? He knew my name, too! He knows everything!"
"I'm your mother, Imoen," the angel said. She raised a hand. Imoen saw the bars of her cell melt into a heap on the ground, then freeze into a pool of metal. Such nice work from her torturer on the illusion.
"I've told everything I know. I didn't want to, but I did," Imoen pleaded. "Don't do it again. Let me be."
Get up, Imoen. This time the buzzing voice was directly in her head, thrumming and strumming her brain like an instrument. Imoen touched light, saw a loud noise, and tasted a rain of frogs and honey. It was a god. It was some sort of god.
I am the Mater Mundi, the angel told her. The Mother of All Souls. The esper gene is in you, Imoen. It has already been activated.
Bells rang in Imoen's head. She saw colours she didn't have words for rise and unfold before her, strange dimensions she couldn't understand. She heard a multitude, a holy choir, singing a kabbalistic prayer in the same voice. She felt other minds, shining like suns ...
The visions faded, before she could even begin to understand them. But a gate in her mind was open, swinging back and forth in the dark. "That's enough. Get up," the Mater Mundi said.
And Imoen followed, the cell floors cold and hard below her bare feet.
The Mater Mundi raised a hand and pointed to another door, which shattered into dust. Imoen heard rushing water. She followed the Mater Mundi onto a walkway above the underground river. There was an iron cage, swinging above the waters.
Imoen stared, and blinked a few times just to make sure. "I know her!" she burst out. "Ourawang! Grown a little taller, but it's her! Ourawang, Owan for short. Sister!"
Imoen and Owan weren't blood related, but Gorion and Dan took in another girl for a time. Imoen and Ourawang promised they would be sisters and swore a blood bond. Even though Owan left her life barely a year later, Imoen had never forgotten.
The woman crouched in the cage didn't look like the girl Imoen remembered, but it was the way she carried herself and the lines of her expression. Or maybe it was some other sense that flickered in Imoen's head.
"Wha—? Who the hell are you?" Owan said, and it was her voice. Her fists gripped the bars of her cage.
Ourawang, called Owan, was short, zaftig, with dark hair and darker eyes. She had brown skin, with many more scars on it than Imoen remembered, a broad flat nose, and a generous mouth twisted into a painful scowl.
"It's me, Imoen! And the Mater Mundi, here to blast you out of prison! She's the closest thing to God in the underground, but you can call her Mum for short," Imoen said. She couldn't help being flippant, not right now.
"Ourawang, child of Bhaal." The Mater Mundi pointed, and the door of Ourawang's cage was wrenched from its hinges. The bars reshaped themselves into a narrow bridge, from the cage above the river to solid ground. "Your torturer is away. Come down."
The Owan that Imoen used to know did everything. Climb trees, jump off walls, run for miles. She was already half-trained to fight when Imoen knew her. She was tougher than anyone else their age.
But this Owen cringed back in her cage, her eyes rolling to the water below.
"Walk down! I have made a bridge for you," the Mater Mundi snapped. But Ourawang didn't budge. She held on tightly to the other side of the cage.
Goddamn it. He's broken her. Imoen hated this. "Can't you mindlink with her?" she asked the Mater Mundi. "Get her down."
The Mater Mundi turned her inhuman glowing eyes on Imoen. It was like being watched by God. "She is not an esper," the Mater Mundi said. "I cannot open her eyes."
Ourawang was still cringing back in the cage, her eyes on the water. Crap. Owan'd never liked swimming. Imoen started forward to help her, but the Mater Mundi placed an arm in her way.
"If she cannot control her fear now, then she will never be of any use. Child of Bhaal, come down, or resign yourself to your captivity forever."
Imoen waited. Her teeth chattered. Owan, please. I can't do this alone, she thought. Another part of her only wanted to get the hell out of here, right now, quit wasting time. She had no idea when the torturer would return. She'd fight him, scratch and claw and bite and better let him kill her rather than hurt her again. Not like Owan, holding onto the bars of her cage because she was too scared to escape.
Imoen turned away. But she was wrong. She heard movement. Ourawang had made her decision. She was on her hands and knees, crawling on the bridge, moving painfully slow. And she swayed from side to side above the river. Imoen tried to reach out a hand to help, but the Mater Mundi still wouldn't let her.
One of Owan's feet slipped and she fell to the side. She paused for a moment that lasted much too long, her knuckles white. The water wasn't far below her. Then she shuffled along again, inch by inch. Imoen would have helped her, if she'd been allowed. But she wasn't, and Ourawang was a warrior.
She reached solid ground. Imoen pulled her into a hug, tears running down Imoen's cheeks.
"Get your hands off me." Ourawang shoved her back, harshly. She stared at the Mater Mundi. "Take us out."
"The Master will never allow that."
It wasn't any of them speaking. Imoen gave a start, and there were two of the torturer's assistants behind her, with a combat android by their side. Two of the women with exactly the same face and the same blank green eyes, the ones who mindlessly obeyed him and always helped him hurt people. Sometimes he hurt them too, for demonstrations, but none of them seemed to care. They both held disrupters, pointed directly at the group.
"Lie on the ground. You cannot escape," said the clone on the right.
Ourawang started forward, her face twisted in rage. But the Mater Mundi stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
Imoen's mind reached out again, a link formed in despair, and she was snared by the impossible light of the Mater Mundi. You cannot look into the sun without going blind. She was caught in the gestalt, hearing the screams of so many other bleeding and dying espers, and she could not look away.
But she had her sister, her Owan, the only childhood friend she'd ever had, and she reached out for Owan's mind. Her hand gripped the slack skin around Owan's arm, and the contact was enough to set their minds against each other.
Ourawang was in featureless black armour, without any crests or insignia. A mercenary to the bone. She carried a sword on her left hip, disrupter on her right. Imoen crouched behind her, wearing rags. Hoping to be protected.
They were a gestalt, a mindmerge greater than the sum of its parts. And the Mater Mundi saw the other souls in this place.
Clones of the same woman, sharing one face and one body, but each had a soul her own. They were tortured and beaten and brainwashed just like his other captives, so it was no wonder they served him. Their pain was rooted deep in their flesh. Some had melted faces from working with the strange device and its energies. Some were test subjects for cybernetic implants rooted inside them, the better to motivate the Empire's battle troops. Others were hurt only on the inside, but it pained them as much. They were sisters, and the Mater Mundi touched all of their minds.
There is one kindness I can do for these children, the Mater Mundi said, and Imoen clung to Ourawang with a nameless dread.
The goddess reached out across the river of souls, and silenced them. Life fled from Jon Irenicus' clones, and with it their pain. The last one smiled beatifically, and fired her disrupter at the battle droid. Her soul melted to oblivion as it collapsed.
A hundred candles, blown out at once. Thank you, Imoen thought that she heard in a whisper, just as the souls departed.
Imoen and Ourawang snapped back into their bodies. Imoen put a hand to her head. Her sister had protected her, like when they were children.
The Mater Mundi gathered them up with her. Her wings rose and grew. She tore through Irenicus' ceilings like so much wet tissue paper, flying into the sky.
Then she blinked away, vanishing the stars into blackness. Imoen sat up on solid ground. They'd been teleported with the power of the Mater Mundi. This was no prison. Scorch marks lined these walls deeply, and the stench was unmistakable.
She was back underground.
Ourawang took a warrior's stance, wincing from her wounds, startling like a trapped animal. Imoen stared with horror at this place. Last time she saw it, she was with her friends. Last time she saw it, she had a cyber setup just in that corner there, and the Aloras were leaning over her desk pestering her while the other cyberrats were adding funny animal pictures to her scrambler programs. She hadn't betrayed everyone, back then.
The Imperials had come and killed everyone. There wasn't a single sound of people, and there shouldn't be. Only a charnel-house of the dead. Imoen saw a flash of colour and fabric she recognised on a pile of charred bones. She didn't want to look any more. Energy weapon fire, blood, charcoal, and dismembered computer parts. It looked like the devastation went on for a long area beyond this. She'd certainly told Irenicus enough to make it happen. The underground was gone.
The Mater Mundi was crying, her skinny knees clutched to her chest. Her wings had vanished, replaced by ugly scars on her back. She wasn't the Mater Mundi, not any more. The power was gone from inside her and in her eyes, and she was only a girl sobbing, in a high human voice. A line of crude stitches traced along her bare skin.
Imoen awkwardly patted the girl on the shoulder—whoever she was, she must've been Irenicus' prisoner too—and recoiled when her first words came out between the sobs.
"I wanted to die. Why didn't she let me die?"
—
