by A. L. Knorr
“Mad ol’ boy doesn’t come with a mute button, I’m afraid,” he said with a broad smile. His handsome features were ragged and painfully sharp, lips cracked raw, eyes fever bright. Life on the run had been hard on him, but life as a demon’s vessel was eating him alive.
“Let them go ’fore I put a hole through your skull, lad.” Stewart raised the rifle to his shoulder.
Sark’s smile widened beyond human proportions, bones twisting like rubber.
With viperish speed, a length of chain whipped out and twisted around the sergeant, who roared in pain as it squeezed his arms to his sides. His rifle kicked off a single useless shot as it was slammed back against his chest.
Howling my defiance, I launched the sheet forward, sharpening the leading edge as it flew.
Sark sank deeper into the mass of chains and trapped soldiers. I couldn’t hit him without slicing one of the security team open. I halted the tin and drew it back, letting it hover, ready to defend or attack.
“That’s better,” Sark cooed, sliding to the fore once more, though he kept his human shields close. “Now we can talk like civilised people.”
In answer, I sheared my section of siding in half with a thought. One leaf moved in front of me, a rough shield, while the other hovered menacingly at my shoulder, a sharp projectile ready to fly.
“If you want to talk,” I growled, setting my feet into a fighting stance, “then let them go.”
Kezsarak’s mechanical pulse quickened at the demand, sending a tremble through the chains. I prepared to defend and attack simultaneously, but his assault didn’t come.
Sark eyed me. I’d spent enough time with him to be able read his face: he was afraid. He wasn’t sure, even sharing a body and abilities with Kezsarak, that he could take me. Good. Let him doubt. I wasn’t sure I could take him either, but I’d be damned before I’d let any uncertainty show.
“I will let them go.” Sark’s gaze swept over his captives with open contempt. “But first you need to listen.”
I shuffled left and then right, looking for a way to get to Sark that didn’t go through my team. “I’ll listen if you let them go.”
“Afraid not, lovely.” He shook his head. “They’re my insurance. Wouldn’t want things to get ugly.”
“Judging from what that demon’s done to you, that’s impossible.” I gave him a pointed up and down.
“Not when she’s still useful,” Sark hissed, but not to me. He focused and smiled again. “Sorry about that. He’s … well, if anyone knows what he’s like, it’s you.”
I kept my eyes fixed on his face, but a corner of my mind swept the area.
“For a bloke saying he wants to talk, you aren’t saying much.” I needed to keep his attention on me. “You went to all this trouble just to be cheeky? Is this your idea of flirting?”
“You’re saying it isn’t working?” Sark threw me a leering wink.
“We are far past that stage. You’ve gone insane, Sark, simple as that. You need to be stopped.”
Sark’s eyes widened with a burning light that would have made even an edimmu like Daria wince.
“Insane!” he snarled, spittle flecking his ravaged lips. “I’m following the plan! The plan that you could have helped me with!”
“You mean the plan to kill your way to Winterthür?” I retorted. “Yeah, wonder why I didn’t sign up for that.”
I felt a pair of metallic flickers in the wreckage behind him. I shifted, hoping to steal a peripheral glance. If he sensed me manipulating metal, my plan would be doomed.
“He’s awake now.” The pronouncement was flat and heavy.
“I know.”
“If we had worked together, we could have stopped him,” Sark said, his voice thick with sincere emotion. “Now that he is awake, the only way we can possibly survive is by working together.”
“Not like this,” I rasped. “Not your way.”
Sark’s eyes flashed, and the muscles in his jaw clenched. “It is necessary. What are a few lives to saving the planet?”
I met his grimace with a calm, steady voice. “That’s not good enough,” I said, appealing to whatever was left of this tortured creature’s humanity. “A guardian doesn’t sacrifice what they are meant to protect. I’m a guardian.”
Sark’s laugh was a jagged file across my nerves.
“You’re a fool,” he sneered. “Your high minded ideals will see the world burn!”
“Then I’ll spend my last breath putting out fires.”
The demoniac engine sounds grew more urgent and shrill. Sark shook his head viciously as the chains tightened fractionally. Every man in their grip held his breath, eyes wide.
I waited, inching over a little more.
“Let me handle this,” he muttered out the corner of his mouth.
KILL HER
“Oh, shut-up!” Sark snapped. “A little patience wouldn’t hurt you, you animal.”
“Might hurt you, though,” I deadpanned.
Launching my leaves of sheet metal, they flew through the air half a metre over Sark. As I expected, he shielded himself with my team – the poor wretches colliding with a clamour of metal links and wounded grunts. For a terrible instant, I feared I misjudged, but the metal cleared the men’s heads by scant centimetres and sailed over Sark.
Sark didn’t have time to consider his good fortune before the twin spines of rebar I’d spied behind him lanced into his back and dragged him into the air. His shock and Kezsarak’s outrage kept him from mounting an effective defence, and with a heave of raw will I pulled him free of the chains.
The lengths of stained metal collapsed, limply hanging about their would-be victims.
I focused on pushing Sark up and away as quickly as I could. I felt the combined wills of Sark and Kezsarak pressing on the intersecting rebar, one trying to expel while the other began to violently dissolve them.
I drove my ringed fist up in a pantomime of an uppercut and sent them hurtling onto the roof of the cannery, landing with a crunch.
Summoning the twin leaves of sheeting back to me, I held them at my shoulders, ready to sweep down and block or lash out at a thought. I reached out to the lengths of chain not wholly compromised by Kezsarak’s viral will, reinforcing the leaves with hardened folds and ridges. The extra links I spun out to encase my arms and shoulders in a metallic skin.
It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. I didn’t think for a second the fight was over.
Some of the team pointed at me, someone muttered the word “angel”. I spared a look at the reshaped metal sprouting from my armoured shoulders. I hadn’t intended it, but they did look like wings.
“What do we do, Bashir?” Stewart eyed the roof of the cannery as he moved to stand beside me.
“You need to run.” Something shifted in the auras of metal within the cannery. I squared my shoulders.
“We’ve been over this,” Stewart snorted. “Like bloody hell I’m leaving you.”
I couldn’t help but smile. The one time the crusty grunt treated me like one of his own and not baggage was the one time I needed him to drop me.
“There’s nothing you have that can hurt him,” I explained. “It’s not Sark that will be coming now, but Kezsarak. Your weapons will only give him something else to hurt us with, and a stray shot could put me down. Simple as that, Sarge.”
The chains in the stockyard shuddered and retracted into the cannery like a tide of clamouring, black snakes.
“Please.” I took a step toward the looming industrial building, pulse picking up speed. “Help me by getting to safety.”
Stewart ground his teeth loud enough to make my jaw ache, and then cursed as only a Scotsman could.
“Alright, lads,” he bellowed, his face twisted like he’d swallowed a lemon. “You heard her. Hoof it!”
The security team had just cleared the yard when the roof of the cannery erupted. Stabbing up through the gaping wound was a nightmare of live metal and twisted hate. A serpentine trunk of
jagged metal plates swivelled, a blunt head crowned in fused barbs revolved to face me. The head bloomed and out of its gaping throat came Sark’s head and shoulders, but not his voice.
NOW YOU DIE TRAITOR
I didn’t wait for the nightmare to come for me.
The wings clamped to my armoured shoulders, and with a surprisingly natural impulse I drove power into them. My feet came off the ground, and after a second of faltering, I let out a cry of terrified excitement.
I was flying! Flying to my death perhaps, but flying.
A wordless battle cry, something melodious and primal rose up in me as I surged forward to meet the demon’s fury. The industrial worm lurched to meet my charge, bladed tines gnashing together in eagerness.
It was a game of chicken. With everything I had I thrust the jagged edges of my new wings forward and poured on more speed.
In the back of my mind, something bemoaned a foolish blaze of glory, but a burning elation drowned it out. Something like joy but brighter, harder, and more terrifying took the place of my heartbeat, and I was a speeding spear, an arrow loosed.
To my eternal surprise, the demon blinked. With a shriek of metal twisting against metal, the monster tried to turn away.
It was too late.
My lyric-less battle hymn crested as I plunged between the grasping barbs, my wings driving into Sark’s shoulders. My momentum blasted out the back of the hellish construct’s fused skull, and the whole thing began to crumble. Together we soared higher and pirouetted in the air.
Kezsarak’s hateful spirit struck at me like poisoned claws, and I felt my wings succumbing to his rot.
DIE
“You first.” I drove my ringed fist deep into his molten chest.
Pain--like fanged lightning--chewed its way up my arm, lunging toward my heart. Sark’s head snapped back with an inhuman shriek, Kezsarak’s bellow joining in.
I wrenched back, away from the excruciating pain, but my fist was lodged inside his chest. My screams joined the cacophony of sound as tongues of metal dragged my hand deeper. The metal encasing my limb began to glow. Heat built around my arm, soon to be scorching and unbearable.
Unable to free myself, and nearly blind with pain, I did the only thing I could: drove my fist deeper.
Things shifted and darted beneath the grinding pressure of my driving gauntlet. Pain and pressure increased. I ground my teeth and pushed deeper yet.
My knuckles pressed against his pulsing, metallic heart. Sensing the molecules of Kezsarak’s rotting core coming apart, I opened my fingers to clasp his beating heart.
Then everything came apart in a flash of scouring light.
10
I was falling.
A sulphurous sky hung above me as I plummeted. Something struck, causing me to roll and tumble; the world became a nauseous blur of sky and dark city below. My arms pinwheeled, I kicked at empty air, to no avail. My wings were gone, and my metallic sense felt nothing.
I was going to die. There was nothing I could do while falling from this kind of height; terminal velocity meant certain death.
I had long enough to wonder how I could be falling like this: Sark and I had only been thirty or so feet up. The surreal calm I felt at acknowledging my inevitable death combined with the absurdity of what would cause it stole over me. Laughing as you died didn’t seem so bad.
There was a jolting shock as I struck the ground and rolled: shoulder-back-shoulder-stomach-shoulder three times over. I stopped, lying on one side on blurred grey stones. My stunned gaze followed the contours of distorted paving stones as they stretched into a narrow street that ran between insubstantial structures toward something huge and looming on the horizon. A lance of white light spiked into the dirty sky.
I am not sure how long I lay there, not daring to move, scared to even think for fear that the impact would catch up with me. Eventually, I raised my head in curiosity to watch the light’s path into the heavens.
I sat up: not dead, and nothing wrong with my body. I clasped my hands to my knees, which seemed as solid as ever, and felt the hard surface beneath my body. I wondered how something which seemed so translucently out of focus could support me.
The light throbbed and I lost all interest in the composition of the street.
Still hardly believing that my legs worked, I stood and took a step. One foot followed another across the half-there stones, moving steadily toward the light. Partially formed thoughts surfaced – where am I? where am I going? – but they fell by the wayside as I trudged on.
A low-level anxiousness nagged at me, a fear that I was going to miss something. Every step I took was a short-lived salve against that nibbling awareness. I had to keep moving, getting closer to the light.
I could not miss it.
My peripheral vision registered the inane constructs of woven darkness on either side of the lane. Every so often something more tangible but just as dark would slither between the spun out blackness, but it did not keep me from walking.
I was closer, but the anxiety nagged that I could still miss it.
The street rolled on, perhaps rising in pitch by a degree or two, until I was close enough to see the source of the light.
A cyclopean presence, a mountain or pyramid of massive proportions squatted over the horizon. From its blunt crown, the light, so bright and beckoning, drove upward without a single flicker, a solid beam of raw energy.
I couldn’t stop walking, didn’t want to.
Closer, always closer.
I kept moving until the monolith, a mass of dark, glimmering gold, was all I could see. I had to strain my neck to see the light. A panicked thought: I would no longer be able to see the light once I reached the base. But a few steps later, I knew it’d be okay because I would be closer to the light, especially as I began to climb.
Closer.
Something intruded on my mind, a flicker of presence nudged against my awareness. A dissonant outburst of sound. I felt relief when it stopped, but it came again and again, battering its way into my consciousness.
“Ibby.”
The auditory invasion made me cringe. I fought to ignore it; to keep moving closer, always closer, to the light… as a moth…
“Ibukun Bashir.”
This longer assault was multipronged, gouging through layers of resistance into something that painfully resembled memory and thought. The rhythmic cycle of anxiety and soothing progression was crippled, the comfort stripped away.
“Ibukun Bashir, please!”
I needed it to stop, needed it to leave me alone. I whirled my arms, lashing out, turning away from the precious light for the first time in what felt like eternity. My fists beat against a body. A solid, familiar essence.
“Professor?”
The trance broke as I put my palms out on a set of narrow shoulders. Between my hands stood Professor James Lowe: friend, mentor, and incredibly distant relation.
“My dear Ibby.” He almost sobbed as he drew me into a tight embrace. “Thank heavens. I thought you’d never respond.”
I returned the hug, my mind still sluggish from the trance; but not too numb to notice that he felt as warm and pliant as any other person of flesh and blood. The implications of his sudden change from icy ectoplasm, or rather what I feared of my own change, filled my stomach with a cold soup of dread.
Lowe drew me back to arm’s length, smiling until he saw my stricken expression.
“Ibby, what’s wrong?”
“Am I …” I found my mouth and jaw locked and my tongue reluctant to operate. I forced myself to swallow and began again.
“Am I dead?”
Lowe’s eyebrows gathered in confusion over his sparkling grey eyes. The strange city around us, and the immense structure, seemed incredibly sinister now. How could I have been so attracted to such a malevolent construct? I moved my gaze back to Lowe and hoped something he said would keep me from collapsing.
He shook his head. “No. I don’t believe you are.”
I let out the breath I’d been unconsciously holding as a tremor of weary relief passed through me. My knees felt watery and my ankles wanted to roll. I picked up one foot and flexed it, then the other, finding strength again.
“Then where are we?” I stole a glance around and instantly regretted it. Between the glistening folds of midnight that made the buildings, things moved, twisted, and stirred.
“I am not sure.” Lowe frowned as he looked around. “If I had to venture a theory, perhaps a dreamscape.”
Two burning eyes glared at me from the darkness. I recoiled at the sudden expression of livid hate, and the motion drew Lowe’s attention. He followed my gaze to the assemblage of midnight, eyes narrowing.
“Begone!” Lowe commanded in a voice more powerful than would have seemed possible for his lanky frame. “You have no business with us!”
The thing’s liquid body squirmed in apparent displeasure, the eyes tightening into poisoned slashes of light. A sound like a cat issued from the shadows, then it was gone, lost in the frozen tides of black.
“What was that?” I shuddered.
Lowe shrugged after glaring into the darkness for good measure. “An evil shade or possibly a lesser demon.”
“So… you just shooed away a demon?” I balked.
“Such beings are drawn to fear and weakness. In a dreamscape where the soul and mind form a fabricated reality, such beings hover like scavengers. If I showed it no fear, it should go off in search of easier prey.”
I stared up at him, open-mouthed.
Lowe’s pale features blushed, and he suddenly looked decades younger. He must have been striking, if not a classically handsome young man, once upon a time.
“Years of professional pedagogy has taught me that saying something with confidence, even if that something is utter idiocy, can accomplish a good deal. Self-possession is formidable, even if what hides behind it is bluster.”
I surrendered a snort of laughter as I shook my head.
“Well done then, Professor.” I smiled. “But if this is a dreamscape, it’s not mine, and it doesn’t seem to be yours.”