Written by Bruce Baugh
©2002 by White Wolf, Inc.
As always, Simon Peter chuckled briefly when they turned onto Avenida Insurgentes. Roxana didn't look away from driving. She liked the big sedan they'd taken after slaughtering both a band of kidnappers and their English hostages a few weeks earlier, but it took a lot of concentration to handle properly. "Same old joke?" she asked.
"Same old," he agreed. He didn't want to bore her with repetition; it's just that he kept thinking that the urban planners had no idea what real insurgency could be like. He hoped that some night he might show them, and once again reminded himself to find out just who was responsible for the street names around here and if they were still alive. "Carry on."
They headed south toward San Angel. Behind the quaint little shops and cobblestone streets tourists love was plenty of outright squalor, very suitable for concealing entrances to the sewers and the catacombs beneath them. Any locals out at quarter to four in the morning would take the car as an official vehicle, or as the property of some criminal secure enough to amount to the same thing.
Nobody got in their way as Roxana steered through a warren of increasingly narrow alleys to their garage. It still bore a few traces of the ground-floor apartment it had been before all the interior walls were removed and replaced with some heavy-duty reinforced beams. Simon Peter no longer gave the remaining bloodstains much attention, but he appreciated that they were there. It was good to remember that his kind flourished at the expense of humanity--predators who mistook themselves for primary producers could get into a lot of stupid trouble.
Down a flight of preexisting stairs into the basement. Down a ladder through a hole chipped in the floor, into the storm drain running alongside the street. Through it for a couple of blocks, then down a connecting tunnel to the bigger conduit for the neighborhood. Through that for a half dozen more blocks, then down an unofficial tunnel to the power access tunnel just above the Metro Line 3 extension. Back the way they'd come, only deeper now, and then into the top of one of the small network of caves. Along a clean, smooth slope down, past now-vacant antechambers, and then into the Chamber of Regrets.
The Chamber itself was a perfect cube twelve meters on a side. Roxana told Simon Peter once that one of her contacts said it was an act of contrition by some old-time war party leader who screwed up his, her, or its tactical estimates and got a bunch of potentially useful grunts slaughtered. The Chamber was certainly a monument to mathematical precision, from its overall dimensions to the decorations which wrapped all its surfaces: actual equations, perfect spirals constructed according to various systems, and more esoteric math-based art.
Bishop Andrew waited for them, standing on shadow-born legs next to his wheelchair. Simon Peter had only met the bishop in person once, but knew of him by reputation--Andrew was in his way as much a technological experimenter as Simon Peter, and that put them into something of a shared subculture within the Sabbat. Shadows cast by oil lamps down the hall told Simon Peter that at least two more people waited in one of the smaller chambers further down, close enough to hear any loud noises in the Chamber of Regrets but not precisely part of the conversation here.
"Excellency." The magician and the mystic spoke in unison.
The bishop was given, so Simon Peter had heard, to sustained bouts of bitterness. It was indeed one of his lingering attachments to mortality, though he'd deny it--nobody could get worked up in quite that way about injustices unless they still believed in justice. Certainly he was in a sour mood tonight, his customary dour look even more pronounced than on the last occasion he'd spoken with Simon Peter. "I've been talking with, among others, Bishop Francisco of the Old City," he began.
"Oh, shit." Simon Peter looked startled, wondering if he'd blurted it out himself, then realizing that Roxana had done the job for him. Blood suffused her cheeks, and the magician could see her rocking forward and back ever so slightly, trembling on the brink of frenzy.
The bishop's expression didn't change. "You don't think that's a good idea? Explain why, please, Roxana."
"He...." She stopped. Simon Peter saw her arms and legs tremble as suppressed the urge to attack, or flee, or do almost anything other than answer. "We...." She paused again, and a neglected mortal reflex made her gulp for air. The magician winced on her behalf, realizing that in denying herself the frenzy she was sinning against the version of the Path of Night she practiced. "He was our ductus, from 1989 to 1993."
"Yes." The bishop's voice flattened even further. "And." It wasn't even a question.
"We...." Another pause. "He had no talent for magic, and he was interested. So we tried to teach him some, and to share the experience with him through the Vinculum."
"Yes. And."
"And after a few years of this, he thought and we agreed that he seemed to be getting the hang of it. So he decided that what he needed was more research material. He...."
"Yes. And." The bishop's features slowly sank into uniform shadow. His eyes remained distinct and flickered constantly. Simon Peter realized that the bishop saw as much or even more of Roxana's struggle than the magician did himself.
"We suggested that he raid a Tremere ship on its way from Europe to the United States, bringing some flunkies and a backup copy of one of their big archives. We'd had a defector tell us about it earlier, and as near as we could tell, it was true. So...."
This time the bishop didn't say anything at all. His shadow-wrapped head merely nodded.
"We put our pack together with another one, up in Miami, and made plans for a big pirate attack. We launched the assault. It...." Again she struggled to maintain control. "It was a trap."
"Oh?" A question for once.
"They were waiting for us with fire and wards. Only the three of us--Simon Peter, Francisco and I--got away, and all of us were badly injured. It took us three nights to get back to shore, spending the days down deep and swimming along as best we could."
"And?"
"And Simon Peter and I took the blame for not having examined the defector thoroughly. He'd been conditioned with his story, and as soon as he heard that the raid had gone off, a mind bomb of some kind destroyed him on the spot. So we couldn't even examine him to find out who'd done it. The psychic traces were distorted by our questioning, and we took the blame for that, too."
"I see."
"But the bishop must have told you all this himself, if you know enough to ask. Your Excellency." There. She'd managed to get past the worst of it now. If she could just avoid compensatory arrogance, she'd survive to see the next night.
"Yes, he did, in fact. I've been given a project, and Cardinal Timofiev suggested that I speak to him. He gave me a full account. But it was necessary to see whether you'd be honest about it."
Simon Peter spoke up. "What kind of project, Excellency?"
"I'm -- we're going to be hunting someone, and I wanted at least one magician along with me, since that's a weakness in the target."
"Has someone important gone rogue?" Too late, Simon Peter realized how bad that could sound.
Andrew seemed not to care about the implications, to Simon Peter's great relief. "Yes. Or rather, someone important went rogue, around 1200."
"1200..." Simon Peter paused. "You want us to help you hunt a Methuselah? Isn't this a job for the Courts of Blood, or the Black Hand, or someone trained for it?"
"Oh, that's been tried. Now, in this case...."
"Shit!" Simon Peter suddenly made the connection. "Beg pardon, Excellency, but are you taking a bunch of kiddies up against Lucita?"
Andrew smiled. "I am. And you're in."
"Um. Suppose I refuse?"
"Then we stake you out someplace with a nice view of the sunrise."
"Um. I see."
Andrew paced back and forth. "I'll be honest with you. This is a punishment assignment. You've both been waiting for the other shoe to drop since 1993. It can't have escaped your attention that neither of you is getting anywhere important, despite obvious talent and dedication." He nodded at Roxana. "You did very well there just now. A touch less control and I'd have had to rip you apart on the spot. Clearly you've learned lessons, but frankly nobody who could sponsor you into more important roles quite trusts you.
"This is your chance to clear your records." He saw Simon Peter beginning to speak again, and raised a warning hand. "No, let me finish.
"I'm being punished too, for this one. I have to go with you. I believe that we're not particularly expected to survive, despite a few bits of good signs from oracles. More about that later. But here's the deal. I believe that we can survive, if we do this right. And I propose to come back to be covered in glory. I'm willing to share it, too. Work with me, and we can get somewhere with all this.
"Now let me introduce you to the other members of our new little family."