Behind the Bitmask Read online

  “What’ve we got here?” It wasn’t really a question. I looked at the covers of the books, and the third one caught my eye.

  “Unfathomable Destruction? Edgar once told me about this book! It’s supposed to be the gold standard for combat magic! It even has a section on how to computerize magical spells, even though it was written by a titan. It’s like the Kernighan and Ritchie of its genre!” A couple of nods of approval, even if Kernighan and Ritchie’s take on C programming had been superseded by more recent books in the field.

  “You aren’t thinking of studying it, are you?” said Alexander. That gave me a damn good idea.

  “I’m taking it. It’s mine now.”

  Dead silence. Alexander opened his mouth to speak again, but I cut him off.

  “What, you think Sigmar’s going to miss one spellbook? Worst case is he notices my performance has improved, and he starts listening to me and actually improves our conditions,” I snarled. “If any of you snitch about this, I’ll slit your throat and use your blood to make Dewey some friends.” It worked, even if I wasn’t entirely pleased with how extreme I’d gotten towards the end. There was no further dissent on the subject of the spellbook. It probably would’ve been better to test the blood daemon with a trifecta of books, and then later discretely pick up my copy of Unfathomable Destruction a bit later, but this way, my subordinates also understood that even if I was perhaps a little obsessed with increasing my power and knowledge (I freely admit it), it would work out better for them if they cooperated.

  We talked to Sigmar after it became clear the blood daemon could perform its tasks correctly, since there was a remaining problem: running back and forth to shelf, reorganize, and maintain a collection of books requires a great deal of both physical and mental energy, and blood daemons can’t exactly nourish themselves in the same way that humans do. I’d heard there was a way to keep it running without blood sacrifices; while I was under the impression Sigmar would veto that just because it’d make us suffer, it turned out that he was at least tentatively willing to investigate it.

  “You could try jamming a titan battery into the daemon’s spine. That’ll keep him going for a few weeks,” he suggested when I brought up the question. “If it works, and you’re extra well behaved in the meantime, I’ll get you another when the charge runs out on the first.”

  “What exactly is a ‘titan’ battery?” I asked. I had to know, even if I got prodded again for daring to wonder.

  “Oh, it’s pretty much the same as a human battery, in that it uses chemical reactions to store energy. Thing is, us titans are way better at making them, so they last a lot longer, and you can store both magical power and electrical energy in them. Neat, huh?” Sigmar snapped his fingers, and one floated to his side from a nearby table. It had a fancy, almost corporate-looking sigil on it, but looked about as large as your average C-sized battery.

  “Funny story about these, Charlotte. When I was ransacking Aux’s realm, I couldn’t find a single one of these things! I think Aux didn’t even know about titan batteries. How did you guys even function without me?” Sigmar laughed at himself and somehow coerced the battery to discharge a bolt of magical energy. It whizzed by me, and I turned just in time to watch it hit another underling in the back. He jumped ten feet in the air and ran around in circles like his clothes had caught on fire. I could not avert my gaze.

  It was getting increasingly hard to ignore these little incidents. We all had our various beefs with the new management, but I was hoping that showing off our ingenuity and command over matters both magical and mundane would allow us to retain something of the old status quo. Still, Aux had never tortured us. Those who incurred its wrath were quickly punished – quickly being the key word here. Sigmar, on the other hand, would inflict pain because he was bored. He’d do something even worse if you’d actually done something he didn’t like. There really was no way out of this. What was I going to do?

  A few days later, it suddenly occurred to me that Sigmar had been even more nonlethal than usual as of late, at least when dealing with the coven. For all I knew, he was taking out his negativity on something else in hell... Did I really want to go to the trouble of finding out, though? Who knew how long this respite was going to last? I was going to do something nice for myself, and maybe my trusted circle of lieutenants if they found out before I was done. But what to do?

  I passed by our kitchen, and remembered that it was a great place to get some serious cooking done. The official purpose of the kitchen is for making enchanted food and drink, but any magician worth their salt will tell you that’s a very bad idea…food and magic don’t exactly mix. One of the first things I’d learned in the coven was never to use a computer to summon food and eat it. Think about it like this: you eat it, parts of it are metabolized and incorporated into your body, and suddenly the script stops running. Boom! The matter that composed the food disappears, and you’re suddenly bleeding out. You’re at least going to get sick from that. It makes me wonder – what horrors await if someone tricks me into eating conjured food? Stuff like this is why we try to keep the coven secret.

  So in short, the kitchen is for mundane cooking and refrigerator storage only. Not that I mind. I like magic-free food and drinks just as much as the next girl because they keep me alive, and my life is sacred. Nutritionists are going to disagree with me on this, but the best foods are rich, luscious desserts that melt in your mouth. I had the perfect idea of what to do, and a few minutes later, I was mixing sugar, cocoa, and milk in a pan for a batch of fudge. Nothing fancy, but sweet, delicious, and enough to take my mind off the dire situation for a while. Also, it’s easy to portion out this stuff so that it can be shared, so I guess I’ll be passing it around. I’m definitely going to give Sarah a generous share. Fudge is easy once you get the technique down. I just had to heat the mixture, concentrate the sugar, make sure it formed a soft ball when dropped into cold water-

  “Are you goofing off? Are you fucking goofing off when there’s work to be done?” said an unidentified voice from the doorway of the kitchen. Nobody talks to me like that!

  “Sugar, cocoa? This certainly doesn’t look like a useful potion to me,” the unknown interloper continued. I deigned to look at the doorway – he looked like the sort of person who didn’t so much hit the gym as much as he infested it. Clearly dumb muscle, if the shaved head and brutish scowl were anything. I didn’t want to deal with people interrupting my kitchen time, but it wasn’t apparent how I was going to get him to go away...

  “What sort of horrible fate would befall you if we were to tell Sigmar about this unauthorized use of coven property?” That tears it.

  “Do you even know whom you’re talking to?” I snapped at him, turning back to the mix and spooning a small portion into a conveniently-placed basin of cold water.

  “I care not for your rank! I am Nicholas, the chosen enforcer of Sigmar’s will, and you shall immediately cease this unlawful activity!” That was when I decided I’d had just about enough of this.

  “No. Get out of here.”

  The mixture was still at the syrup stage. It occurred to me that I had a large pot of super-heated sugar, it could cause some serious burns if it were to come into contact with human flesh. Then it occurred to me that Nicholas was advancing into the kitchen, flexing his knuckles like he was about to get into a fight – oh crap.

  “We’ll teach you a lesson you won’t soon forget, wench!”

  Before I could figure out what Nicholas intended, I grabbed the pot off the burner and tossed its contents at him. My first thought was that I regretted wasting what was on its way to being a delicious batch of fudge. Anything else in that vein was cut off by Nicholas’ shrieks of agony, and after about a minute, blood-stained spluttering coughs and wheezes. I guess he was right about teaching me a lesson I wouldn’t soon forget, though. Here’s a hint – never assault a woman slaving over a stove. She will destroy yo
u.

  “Charlotte, what just happened?” One of my lieutenants dashed into the room, lured either by the delicious sugary bacon scent that was now presumably wafting through the office, or perhaps by the screams. What was his name again? I could swear that knowing this was important, but I’d never taken the time to commit it to memory...

  “I’ve never seen you this angry before!” he continued. “You’re okay, right?” I realized that I still was holding the pot in a death grip that was beginning to hurt my hands, so I forced myself to relax a little, putting it on a spare burner to cool down.

  “I’ll live, I guess-” I began, before Nicholas screamed again. That was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “Will you shut up already? You deserve it for trying to throw your weight around.”

  I was about to grab a handy knife in order to finish the job, but at that moment, Sigmar decided to pop into existence to ruin my day.

  “Nicholas deserves what, exactly? Just curious.” He seemed nonchalant for the moment, but I really hoped that Sigmar didn’t value Nicholas’ well-being than my own.

  “You know what? I’ll ask him myself,” Sigmar continued when I failed to respond. Exactly what could I say? I wanted Nicholas dead for fear that, if allowed to recover, he’d attack me again. But what good would that do if Sigmar decided this was the last straw and actually killed me? He was spinning his trident again. I’d learned to dread that trident – all it did was spread pain, fear, and misery. With a quick raspberry, Sigmar psychokinetically lifted the smoldering syrup off Nicholas’s body, revealing just how horrifically I’d burnt him. Was I about to get a taste of my own medicine?

  After a few more trident tricks, I noticed I was still alive. Sigmar tossed the floating syrup blob off into a corner, where it was bound to eventually ruin someone’s shoes or possibly get mopped up. For a brief moment, I hoped the syrup actually had killed Nicholas, but I soon saw he was still breathing. I was not pleased.

  “You roasted Nicholas good, Charlotte! I guess I’ll have to restore a backup,” he said. He flipped the trident a couple more times (when will it end?) and prodded Nicholas. For once it did something other than incinerating or electrocuting what it touched. Nicholas’s body was briefly surrounded with what looked like ghostly floppy discs and cassettes. They dissipated to reveal a Nicholas who bore no evidence of ever being burnt to a crisp. I suddenly noticed he was wearing chinos where before there’d been a pair of black gym shorts, but before I could dwell on that, he woke up.

  “Sigmar, what are you doing here? Why am I on the floor? What happened?” For a guy who’d suffered critical burns, he seemed pretty calm. I took a few steps back and tried to look like I wasn’t scanning the stove for extra implants in case we had an immediate repeat of the fudge incident.

  “Looks like you really pissed Charlotte off. She came this close to icing you,” responded Sigmar.

  “Iced? That was boiling sugar syrup!” I shouted. So much for stealth and decorum.

  “I’m aware of the irony.”

  Nicholas ponderously dragged himself off the ground and furrowed his brow in a vain attempt to understand the situation.

  “You tried to kill me with boiling syrup...which you certainly shouldn’t have been making on Sigmar’s time?” he asked.

  “Really, Nicholas?” said Sigmar. He looked slightly disappointed, as if this happened all the time. “I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. I have her run the coven because she takes everything way too seriously. You and I could never be that cruel!”

  Okay, Sigmar is definitely fucking with me. It beats dying.

  “Anyways, I’d give her a very wide berth when she’s cooking. Maybe, if you’re especially well behaved, she’ll give you a cookie.”

  Sigmar was definitely fucking with Nicholas, too, so that’s...good? I find Sigmar’s whims too unpredictable to say for sure. He promptly turned towards me, and I suspected an impending death blow.

  “Someday, we’re going to need to have a talk about how you discipline your subordinates,” he told me. For something that didn’t entail immediately dismembering me and throwing my remains into a grave, it sounded gravely serious.

  “Honestly? You should try more terror and less summary executions. It’ll be a blast!” Sigmar continued. He laughed maniacally and scurried out of the kitchen, deliberately tripping up my loyal subordinate and ripping an arbitrary chunk of cloth from his shirt.

  I’d just about given up on trying to figure out what my boundaries were – the relevant chunk of my brain was beginning to fill with outfit plans for the next two weeks. Life in the coven remained frustrating, but I increasingly started taking my troubles out on Nicholas. After all, his reaction to my fudge-making escapade had convinced me that he was basically human garbage, to be dealt with as I saw fit.

  About a week later, I went into the kitchen to check on our baking supplies, when I felt a horrific splortch beneath my feet. I looked down to see the congealed remnants of my fudge project clinging to my shoes. I shrieked like a daemon – these were $200 heels! There was no way I could possibly remove the goop from them without destroying them or otherwise rendering them unfashionable, which was probably why they cost $200 in the first place. Sigmar appeared yet again, almost as if I had demanded his presence.

  “Oh, man...you really stepped in it!” he snickered. “Remember how you made a big mess a week ago? Nobody cleaned it up! What a bunch of jerks!”

  Really? Nobody cleaned it up? What good is the coven if it can’t maintain its living space? That’s got to be symptomatic of some greater communication issue!

  “Bet you’re really mad now, huh? It would be a real shame if you had to punish someone for that,” Sigmar continued. He’d been present the last few times I hit or shouted at Nicholas, so I’m sure I know where he was going with this shtick.

  “I doubt there’s any punishment I could dole out that would fix this,” I responded. Kind of a weak response on my end, but the sentiment was there.

  “A shame. There is one thing, you know. You could avoid making junk food on coven time…”

  I gasped. Was Sigmar going to punish me in my moment of weakness?

  “But I saw what happened to Nicholas! I’d hate to get between a lady and her sweet tooth.”

  Maybe not. But I was beginning to recognize Sigmar’s flair for mood whiplash. There wasn’t much I could do to stop him, per say, but-

  “By the way, I was serious about holding off on the executions,” he said, switching to his version of a serious voice. “Nicholas is an obedient and disciplined soldier. I’m going to need more people like him to conquer hell.”

  “What if he goes nuts again while I’m cooking?” I asked. Sigmar pursed his lips and thought about it.

  “Maybe you should just clonk him on the head with a different pan. I asked around, and a lot of people seemed really disappointed that Nicholas beat everyone to your batch of fudge.”

  I suspected as much. Sigmar looked like he was deep in thought.

  “Try to make sure the next batch makes it into your minions’ stomachs. It’s probably more effective there,” he quipped. Then he turned to leave, took a few paces, and hesitated for a moment-

  “One for the road!”

  Sigmar suddenly charged at me and tapped my encrusted ankles with his trident. They burst into searing, mind-bending, horrific pain, and for once, I thought I truly was going to die. I couldn’t help but believe the sludge was going to cut off my feet or devour them or something terrible, and I pulled as hard as I could (distracted as I was with agony) in an attempt to escape. But the spell receded almost as quickly as it had come, and after a bit of frenzied stumbling, I found myself free of the sugar sludge.

  “Nothing personal. I just invented a new torture spell and needed to try it out; you would’ve been trapped a lot longer if I hadn’t,” said Sigmar, as if he did th
is all the time. You know what? He probably did. My subordinates didn’t say much about it, but I was certain they were meeting with similar or worse fates on a regular basis. Sigmar skipped out of the kitchen, leaving me to deal with my ruined shoes and clean up last week’s mess, since I was sure nobody else was going to do it. For a moment, I imagined grabbing Sigmar and twisting his neck until his head fell off, but I suppressed that thought – I was certain it was never going to be an option.

  After a while, we received our most horrifying task yet: we had to bring down a titan without Sigmar’s help. Why? I’m almost certain he wanted some of us dead.

  “Relax! This one’s a reactionary! They’re completely unable to adapt to the modern world, so it won’t be that hard,” Sigmar “reassured” us, as if the raw power gap between even a skilled and ever more potent caster like myself and even the pettiest of titans wasn’t off the charts. If I understood Sigmar’s terminology, Aux was also a “reactionary,” which would at least explain why I constantly had to explain basic facets of how human civilization worked back in the good old days.

  Sigmar was having trouble recruiting humans to his side through the usual means. I don’t know if he’d tried to suppress it, but rumors of how badly he was treating his underlings had probably reached the internet at large by now. On the other hand, his realm in hell was surrounded by a multitude of weak titans whom he could easily slaughter. From then on, he just had to press their underlings into his service, in a similar fashion to how he’d nabbed us from Aux.

  Sigmar had also let slip that he was considering more unorthodox methods of acquiring manpower. Most fancifully, he’d shared an idea for a complex of dedicated breeder humans. In his vision, they’d have to be restrained at all times, possibly sedated until they were broken in. I sat through an increasingly fanciful description of how this would create a caste of servants who could never know anything other than absolute servitude. Once he’d dismissed me, I’d rushed straight to the bathrooms to vomit into a toilet. Couldn’t he just go back to torturing us with his trident? Surely he didn’t actually want to implement such a morbid fantasy? I’d realized I kept telling myself this every few months, but what Sigmar told me went way beyond the limits of what I was willing to accept. Then, I’d been charged with killing another titan.