Slumrat Rising

Vol. 4 Chap. 52 The Serpent's Tale

Truth met Cho’s eyes. The silence stretched. The secret policeman was still. Returned to the absolute calm he had cultivated over a lifetime of being everyone else’s worst nightmare. Truth could watch the man sort through his options. All the things he had learned from this meeting and the recorded meeting at the Sung Clan. Every action they thought or suspected Truth was related to. Every inference of his politics, his ideology, his motivations. Trying to figure out what he wanted.

Truth watched him confront the fact that, while Truth might not be crazy in the medical sense, he certainly was in the colloquial sense. There wasn’t a hint of it on Cho’s face, but Truth imagined his mind was humming with instructions from the listening crowd. Some spell in action to allow one-way communication. Billionaires and bureaucrats buzzing in his ear, torn between a need for control and a need to escape.

“An obvious question arises- if you think you have found his tracks, why haven’t you run Starbrite to the ground? Even if you weren’t going to go at him, it would still be better to know where he slept.” Truth smiled slightly.

“Before he sold his first widget, he had taken steps to ensure he was untouchable. It’s still a mystery how many people are secretly his. How many people are living quietly in small apartments, invisible hostages of the most powerful man in the world.” Cho kept fidgeting with the crystal.

“Oh? When was that?” Truth leaned forward.

“Oh… I’d have to look it up. Before my time. Before my grandfather’s time.”

“You don’t know.” Truth couldn’t stop the grin winding up his face, or the laugh bubbling out. He could hear the madness in the laugh, but refused to stop it. “You don’t know when he did any of that. You just ‘know’ he did it. Tell me, when did Starbrite sell his first talisman? Hmm? Surely you know that. One day they weren’t for sale, and the next they were. When was that? Exactly?”

“Not to shock you, but I do have a job to do. One that doesn’t permit memorizing irrelevant trivia.”

“Oh no you don’t! You don’t get to run away that easily. You just said you had been on Starbrite’s trail for a century. And at no point in a hundred years did someone have a word with the Ministry of Revenue about their taxes? Nobody examined the business records of their suppliers or the warehouses storing their inventory? Nobody pulled the building permits for any of their buildings? In a CENTURY?”

A strange look crossed Cho’s face. “We did. And do. For some of that. I’m just saying that I don’t remember exactly when it all started.”

“What’s the oldest record of Starbrite you do remember? A hundred years ago at least, right?”

“Right.” Cho was struggling to keep his face flat. Now that Truth had rubbed his nose in the obvious, he was starting to ask himself why he hadn’t already seen it.

“But you can’t tell me when the company was established. Despite the fact that you clearly reviewed, carefully, the material that you are going to hand over to me.”

The silence returned, brittle, like a balancing plate over stone tiles. Truth chuckled, shattering the stillness. “Hand it over.”

Cho gave him a long look, and tossed the crystal to him.

“Anything I should know about before reading this?” Truth asked.

“No. I disarmed the safety mechanisms. Any questions, you can ask me afterward.”

Truth activated the thumb sized crystal. Most of the information was supporting documents- evidence to support the main thesis. Which was insane.

“You think he cut himself into pieces?!”

“Keep reading.”

Truth’s eyes kept moving, sorting through the hallucinatory information provided on the crystal. Pictures, charts, tables, invoices, loading documents, architectural analysis, on and on and on it went.

“You think he cut himself into pieces.”

“Yes, but it’s more complicated than that.”

Truth just sighed. “Elaborate, then.”

“Starbrite is, from what we have been able to discover, so much more powerful than the so-called National Guardian tier Level Eight or even Level Nine mages, they might as well be different species. There are no survivors of any attacks on Starbrite, nor are there any records from people trying to observe that fight.”

Truth blinked understandingly. He wouldn’t have believed Cho if he had said otherwise.

“Forty years ago, Starbrite stepped down from the company’s leadership and assumed the role of CEO Emeritus. The current CEO is Level Nine. Everything else we know about him is, essentially, lies. His whole history and identity have been fabricated. Crudely. Starbrite made it abundantly clear that the CEO is his puppet.”

“So… how does he get away with it? If the CEO is blatantly a puppet, with no network, no connections, no industry experience, how does anyone do business with Starbrite?”

“Because everyone knows that the CEO is a puppet. Nothing has changed. Starbrite is just delegating the physical-presence part of his job. Analysis has a sort of parlor game they like to play, where they guess how many glamorous and enchantments he’s under. I believe the current theory is that he’s not under any, but was raised by an army of succubae to be completely, insanely, loyal.”

Close. Truth couldn’t bring himself to grin. That is alarmingly close. If his soul hasn’t been turned into a duplicate of Starbrite’s, I’ll be shocked.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“So… what does he look like?”

“The CEO? There is a picture in the file.”

“Starbrite. It sounds like people have met him, but I’ve never seen a picture. Not even a sketch.”

Cho looked awkward for a fraction of a second.

“We don’t know.”

Truth slowly and deliberately buried his face in his hands. He was quite proud of the fact he didn’t scream.

“How. Is. That. Possible? Starbrite runs twenty five percent of the entire Jeon economy directly, and at this point I don’t even want to guess what percentage depends on the corporation. This has been the case for over one hundred years, probably a couple hundred or more. He must have conducted hundreds or thousands of negotiations in his time. Shook hands on deals. Networked over a bowl of hookers and a bed full of noodles. So. How is it possible that no one has met him and can describe him?”

That did rate a snort of amusement from Cho. “We don’t know.” Truth was about to stand up and smack some sense into him, but was stopped by defensively raised hands. “Really. He hasn’t actually done any of that. When people did meet him, it was always in a literal throne room, and he was concealed behind a curtain. At best, they saw a vague outline of a person wearing ornate robes and some kind of hat or crown. Most of the time, a court attendant did all the talking. Starbrite rarely, if ever, spoke. And he hasn’t even been that visible in decades.”

“Forty years, perhaps?”

“Approximately.”

“A pair of dots does seem to connect there.”

“Yes. Though the significance of that connection is still unknown.” The colonel spread his hands. “But this does lead us to why we think he has literally chopped himself into pieces.”

“Yes, given that you don’t actually know the name, gender, appearance, age, origin, or any other damn thing about Starbrite, how do you come to believe that he’s portioned himself? And who the Hell was making deals with some silent figure behind a curtain?”

“People who respect a person who can flatten six city blocks, including five skyscrapers, by gently lowering their hand. It’s generally considered a solid basis for a business relationship. And-”

“Wait, wait, wait! Are you saying Starbrite did-”

“He assembled a panel of witnesses from the Army, the Ministry of Rites, the University of Jeon at Harban, and the Institute for Studies in Civil Engineering. All of them permanently lost the ability to blink or look away when someone points at something as a result. The footage was never released, but from the right angle, you can make out the company name and a seven pointed star etched in the dust plume.”

Truth had to digest that one. He knew that disaster from the history books. Funny how he never questioned it being caused by a systemic failure by the bureaucracy to stop shoddy building reinforcement talismans produced by shady foreign manufacturers from being used in major urban construction, combined with an unexpected flare in cosmic rays.

“Alright. I, too, would consider that a solid business partner. So, circling back to the currently-in-chunks thing…

“As you can imagine, we are highly motivated to track his movements. Unfortunately, any attempts to scry him result in both the diviner and their tools violently exploding. Attempts to track him indirectly haven’t been successful either.”

“Indirectly?”

“Look for places where the diviner suddenly explodes, where they can’t perceive anything, massive unexplained draws of cosmic rays, that kind of thing.”

“Imagine you found a lot of illegal alchemist operations.”

“Among other, less savory things, yes. So we found a lot of ways that didn’t work. What we eventually resorted to is everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Every direct and indirect detection method running all at the same time. Did you ever wonder why Jeon is coated in recording talismans? We spent twenty years making sure surveillance culture was baked into everything.”

“And it finally worked?”

“No. Or at least, not until the new System rolled out.”

“Still can’t believe people went along with that. You have to know how it works.”

“Oh, we do. But we had to do it. It was finally enough.”

“Enough?” Truth raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Enough pieces moving all at the same time. Cosmic energy, aetheric vibrations, active spell effects. The sudden, but persistent, failure of certain surveillance talismans. The sudden, but persistent, death of certain officers and assets.”

“And somehow this led you to conclude that he, Starbrite, had turned himself into a wings bucket.”

That got a startled pause from Colonel Cho, but he pressed on regardless. “We discovered that the failures occurred at six distinct, unmoving, places. Before you ask, no, they don’t make six points of a seven-pointed star. Sort of a box shape with a line sticking out of it. The map is in the crystal.”

Truth nodded slightly. It really had been his first guess.

“All in Jeon?”

“Most of them. Two of them are just off shore.”

“Still not seeing how this links back to Starbrite.”

“Simple. Sacrifice.”

Truth blinked. “Too simple.”

“We think he is sacrificing himself, to himself, along with all the mind controlled people the system managed to drone.”

“Why, though? Self sacrifice has never been part of his nature, from what I can tell.”

“How old do you think the oldest living Level Nine is?”

“Oh… no idea. A few hundred years old?”

“Two hundred and forty, and they are practically dead. I mean that literally- she is sealed in a magical coffin, kept alive with enough magical reagents to qualify as a separate line item in the national budget. Not our nation- Gisbane.”

Truth racked his brains, trying to remember where Gisbane was. He had no idea. Probably unimportant then.

“But we are quite sure Starbrite has been around for longer than that, at least one century, and probably more like three or four.”

“One century is how long we have been investigating him hard. He has definitely been on this planet for longer. We just don’t know how much longer.” Cho nodded.

Truth nodded back. No need to mention Merkovah and his improbable lifespan.

“There are vastly older demons, of course, and a few humans who have made certain arrangements with certain powers to extend their lives past all normal bounds. But such agreements have consequences, always. Consequences most sane people cannot endure.”

“So…?”

“So we pieced together every scrap of historical evidence we could get, and while the Shattervoid were willing to trade with us, tried to source as many books as we could. You would not believe the price placed on information.”

“I know you know how to get to the damned point!”

“Based on everything, we think he is performing a grand ritual. Has been for more than a century. We think he is using his own body and all these other lives to recreate himself as a stellar eminence. And we think we have identified some of the ritual sites.”

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