by J M D Reid
The demons crashed into her lines. They tore at her army of devas with scything mandibles. Hacked with jagged blades. Blood spurted golden-bright. She felt each one of them die, a tiny shifting in the harmonics singing through her body.
To her right, humans of midnight black fought. They swept out shadows that splashed like acid on the demons. They were led by the man from her dreams. Her lover in this past life. He stood among them, wearing armor of glassy obsidian. No, he didn’t wear it. The obsidian had melted around him, almost like a prison.
He glanced over at her and, despite the distance, the smile on his lips for her heartened her resolve.
Her truth resounded greater than the distance separating them.
She smiled back at him, forgetting about those who died connected to her power for a moment.
A vast, chittering screech broke through the barrier. A dozen of those connected to her, the devas, snuffed out. Their contribution to the symphony resounding through Avena’s bones vanished. Her head whipped around, pale-white hair flying. She witnessed the ant-like demons surging out in a coordinated action. They all chittered at the same time, moving with the same precision, striking and attacking in communal harmony.
Up and down the line, they attacked. The demons met the flaming people led by the blonde woman. Beyond her forces, watery figures sent waves crashing into the attacking demons. Their leader was also a woman, the one who’d been channeling the Sapphire during the Shattering. Waves of amethyst force slammed from the purple-glowing beings beyond the dark warriors, their commander radiating strength and power. He stood strong.
Like Ōbhin. A warrior. A defender.
Avena pulled something from a pocket. It was a device made of shiny metal with an obsidian shaft thrusting out the tip. She depressed a button and it crackled. She shouted into it, a cry of urgent need as more of her beings of light lost their harmony.
A humming noise thrummed from behind her. Then metal insects, like massive dragonflies, swooped overhead. Their wings were fixed, thrusting out from the side and had blurring circles whirling above them. Air slammed down at her, whipping at her hair. They banked over sharply, cutting their forward speed and turning. Some of the demons with swollen abdomens spat sizzling ichor that splattered along the hulls of the metal dragonflies. One, soaring before the amethyst fighters, spun in a smoking circle and crashed in a burst of red and yellow light.
Doors slid open along the sides of the dragonflies. Crystalmen stepped out of them. They dropped fifty cubits to the ground, bright heliodors glowing in their bodies to slow their fall. But not enough that their landing didn’t crush the demons. Crystalline hailstones hammered into the monsters. The automatons then battered into the enemy with mighty sweeps of amethyst arms. Broken chitin burst through the air. The ground shook from each impact while her devas cheered and surged forward, unleashing their light on the black insects.
Their attack drove back the demons towards the huge rift, the fracture of Black rising into the air. More fiery streaks shot overhead. One was brighter than the others. It burned across the sky. Its massive trail blazed behind it as it vanished over the horizon. A heartbeat later, a bright glow exploded, a sun dawning to the northwest.
She shouted and pressed her devas forward while her lover and his shadowy army surged towards the enemy with ferocity. Avena just knew they had to drive the enemy back into the rift before the world was completely shattered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ōbhin hardly felt the throbbing pain in his ankle as he stared at the collapsed debris. Avena lay on the other side in the arms of the thing posing as Fingers. Ōbhin’s deactivated resonance blade rested across his lap. Useless to protect her.
“Miguil, can you make a splint?” Dualayn said, his voice a distant buzz intruding on the turmoil of Ōbhin’s thoughts.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Bind the topaz to Dajouth’s arm when you do. Place it over the break.”
“Sure,” Miguil answered, sounding sullen.
Footsteps thudded behind Ōbhin. He didn’t look away from the debris. Avena was just beyond there, helpless in that thing’s arms. What would it do to her? Had he trapped her alone with the impostor by caving in the ceiling? Had he killed them all—her!—in his desperate gambit to defeat the crystalman?
“I wouldn’t brood on Avena,” said Dualayn as he knelt beside Ōbhin. The older man pressed a topaz healer against Ōbhin’s foot and activated it.
Orange light flooded up Ōbhin’s leg. The pain he’d been ignoring retreated before it. Ōbhin let out a sigh and glanced dull eyes at Dualayn. A drained lethargy weighed on him like a diamond-belly egg snake had crept into his nest, cracked his shell, and sucked all the yolk out of him. It left him hollow, on the verge of collapse.
Brittle.
“This is going to hurt,” Dualayn said as he grasped Ōbhin’s ankle. “I need to set the break so the Topaz can restore the bone properly.”
Ōbhin shrugged. “I don’t—”
Dualayn wrenched his ankle with a hard jerk. Pain exploded. The agony shot through Ōbhin’s dazed thoughts, focusing his awareness on the grinding bones. He leaned back on his hands, head snapping back. His scream echoed around the ramp. It shouted back at him again and again. Then the topaz’s gentle tone soothed the pain.
The touch of a mother. Of Aliiva’s healing song.
“Avena is smart and capable,” Dualayn said as he bound the topaz to Ōbhin’s ankle. “She has the map and knows how to read the characters of Old Tonal. She’ll find her way to the Hall of Communication on her own.” He smiled. “She might even find it before we do.”
“And if she can’t?” Ōbhin asked, his mind working as the pain retreated. The topaz soothed him the way his mother’s lullabies had as a small child. She would take off her mask to sing to him, exposing her face, her smiling joy and shining eyes, to her child.
“She can always leave. Unlike us, she has a path she can follow back out. We’re the ones who might never find our way out.”
Ōbhin glanced at Dualayn. “Fingers was carrying her. I saw that during the collapse.”
Dualayn nodded. “I saw her standing before the ceiling came down. Perhaps she was injured by the car the crystalman threw, or perhaps she suffered more interference.” He finished tying the knot and then clapped a hand on Ōbhin’s shoulder. “She has a healer in her bag. Fingers knows how to use it. He cares for her. She’ll be fine.” Dualayn grinned, his gaze growing distant. “She’s brilliant, you know.”
The smile on Dualayn’s dusty lips comforted Ōbhin. It shocked him a moment later. Dualayn didn’t feel like a monster. At that moment, his thoughts cleared by the jewelchine driving back the pain, Ōbhin realized what angered him the most about Dualayn. Not just the betrayal, but the man’s caring attitude. He genuinely wanted to help people. He was almost a good person who was too driven to accomplish his goals.
Too willing to cause a little pain.
It unsettled Ōbhin at how pernicious it was. This man would gladly spend all night fighting to save your life and the next day decide that chancing your death would aid him in understanding more about healing and jewelchines.
“We need to keep moving,” Ōbhin said. He rose with a grunt. Putting his weight on his left foot flared the agony. The topaz healed him, but the bone felt fragile. He limped on it, keeping his weight on his right as much as possible. “How many packs do we have?”
“Three,” said Miguil. “Only your pack was lost.”
Ōbhin nodded. “Dajouth? Can you walk?”
“Better than you,” the young man said, his face tight. “Black-cursed roaches and rats! Hurts to move my arm wrong.”
Ōbhin almost laughed. “Eat rations, drink water, and then we’ll find where this ramp leads.”
*
The dream of the ancient battle against the ant demons—are they the darklings? she wondered—faded. Avena became aware of her body cradled in strong arms. Not Ōbhin’s. She could feel a padded gambes
on stretched over a large frame.
“Fingers?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. He slowed and stopped. “You okay?”
“My shoulder still hurts,” she groaned.
“Lost the healer,” Fingers said as he set her down.
“The ceiling collapsed on it,” Bran said.
Her insides stiffened.
The impostor Bran stood nearby, holding a pair of diamond lanterns. He had his backpack on, a fine layer of gray dust covering his entire body. His eyes were shiny holes through the grime. The same coated her. She grimaced, feeling the grit in her mouth. Her lungs.
She coughed, leaning against Fingers while her insides broiled. She couldn’t help but stare at Bran. The impostor. He looked at her with delight, a boyish smile crossing his lips. All a lie. That exuberant, bright lad snuffed out by this thing.
Then Avena blinked. “Where are the others? Ōbhin?” Her voice echoed down a tunnel. Water dripped from overhead. “Ōbhin!”
“He collapsed the roof of the carriage house on the crystalman,” Fingers said.
“It was amazin’ to watch,” Bran said, his eyes bright. “He slashed the column.” He mimed the swings while making swishing sounds. “Just like that. Then he baited the crystalman to punch it and . . . BAM! The ceilin’ came down and crushed it.”
“I ran carryin’ you,” Fingers added. “I followed the dogs. They were fleein’ and they led me to this tunnel. Bran . . .” The older man studied the impostor with a strange look. “Bran followed us.”
Fingers saw that final change, Avena thought, remembering Bran’s neck getting twisted about by the impact of the metal carriage.
“I’m sure Ōbhin’s alive,” Fingers added.
“He was runnin’!” Bran said. “I saw that. He’s gonna be fine. Him and Miguil and Dajouth.” The impostor’s dirty face tightened, brow furrowing. Caked dust cracked across his forehead. It had the consistency of cake frosting. “Dualayn’s probably fine, too.”
“I see,” Avena said, her emotions battling. She wanted to draw her binder and beat the thing pretending to be Bran to a pulp. Nauseated disgust rippled over her. She pushed down impulses of revenge and anger. That wouldn’t help. “Ōbhin will find me—us!—so let’s keep going.”
She focused on her mission while she struggled on what to do about “Bran.” They continued down the tunnel, Avena taking a lantern from the impostor. Emeralds gleamed on her earthen gauntlet. It was still intact. She had her binder on her belt. She wasn’t helpless.
Ideas bubbled through her mind, her rage simmering deep inside of her.
The tunnel led to a set of stairs covered in dust-laden cobwebs. Fingers just sighed and swept his hands through it as he led the way upward. The stairs were rusting metal, creaking beneath their feet. Tight and narrow, not the broad sweep they’d descended to the carriage house. With every step, Avena’s stomach lurched.
The staircase shifted.
“Pus-filled roaches and crap-eating rats!” Bran cursed at one lurch, gripping the railing so hard his knuckles whitened.
Fear? Avena wondered. Is it real? How can you fake posing as Bran so well? What are you? She was positive that foul Dje’awsa had created the impostor with magic, using crystals with blood and foul obsidian in ways that violated the natural laws of jewel machines and crystal harmonics. Ust was brute work done fast in a few hours, but this thing must have been labor. A feat that took days or weeks to create.
Fingers shouldered through a door. It squelched open, metal scraping on metal. A street lay before them, the middle buckled and sagged, massive cracks rending through the stone. The surface looked poured, like the concrete but different. It was black, almost like hardened tar. One of the jewelchine carriages lay crumpled beneath fallen debris. Some sort of arch lay over them like the street once had a ceiling for a short way. Part of it had collapsed. Red tree roots dangled down like frozen waterfalls.
“There’s a sign,” Bran said. “Can you read it, Avena?”
“Yes,” she said, voice tight. She pulled her map out of her pack and studied it. She recognized one of the names. “Hall of Assembly is that way.” She pointed off towards the darkness. The tunnel led that way for a short stretch. “That’s where we should be going if Dualayn’s map is accurate.”
Fingers grunted. “He’s a piss-drenched bastard, but he’s not often wrong.”
Bran spat, a look of disgust on his face.
Avena folded her map and led them forward; the dull throbbing in her shoulder continued. It hurt to move her arm, but she had full range of motion if she had to swing her binder or use her enhanced strength. The emeralds were dull right now, not active. They couldn’t operate for too long despite being networked together to spread the load amid the smaller emeralds.
The tunnel ended at a pile of rubble, forcing them into another building. This one appeared to have been a shop of some sort. It contained rotting shelves. The items they held were long gone, scavenged by rats or maybe the dogs. Thick strands of cobwebs ran between the aisles, and a thick layer of dust covered the floor. A vein of ruby ran through the center preserving boxes on the shelves affected. One had only partly been transmuted, the side rotting away, revealing its contents to be some sort of clumped noodles or maybe twisted yarn.
It was hard for Avena to say.
They passed through a storeroom of decayed crates and a smattering of bones. Teeth marks from small animals decorated the remains, one bone gnawed for its marrow. Avena shuddered, her fingers twitching with revulsion.
Something whispered to Avena’s right. She cocked her head, struggling to make out the sound. Was it a current of air caressing over cobwebs?
“A door’s over here,” said Bran. He grabbed it and twisted the metal knob. Metal clang and it came free in his hand, parts tinkling as they hit the floor. He threw it down and slammed his shoulder into it. The door slid a few inches outward into darkness.
thud . . . thud . . .
Avena froze. Bran whimpered. Fingers cursed.
thud . . . thud . . . Thud . . . Thud . . . THUD!
“Down,” Avena hissed at the sound of the crystalman’s approach. Was it the same one that they’d fought in the carriage house? Or were there more? Avena pondered these questions as she slid to her belly on the floor and killed her diamond lantern with a panicked thought.
Bran, crouching against the wall by the door he’d partially opened, turned his off by pushing a button on its top. The last Avena saw of him was a face full of fear. Dust filled her nose, tickling her nostrils. She clapped her hand over her mouth and nose, fighting against it. The thudding came closer, drowning out the whispering hiss.
“Elohm’s blessed Colours,” Fingers muttered nearby.
A glow filled the window. Soft. Red and green tinged with a purple hue. Fuzzy tingles rippled around Avena’s fingers. She grimaced at the alien feeling assaulting her. Her mind recoiled from her flesh, wanting to flee it. This wasn’t her any longer. She was a brain in a jar.
This is my body! screamed through her wavering thoughts as she fought against her mind’s rejection of her flesh.
Fingers and Bran whispered as the signal interference built and built.
*
Ōbhin limped up the ramp. Despite the topaz healer bound to the outside of his left ankle, each step hurt. He gritted teeth as he followed the others up the ramp. It had a curving sweep that opened onto a street cracked and pitted. The road had sunk lower than the ramp’s terminus, creating a drop Ōbhin’s height. Dualayn scrambled over the edge, grunting and groaning while Dajouth leaped down.
Ōbhin slid off the edge, gripped it with his hands, and landed on his right leg, fighting to keep from putting weight on his left. Off-balance, he crashed to his right only to be caught by Miguil.
“Got you,” he said, his strong hands gripping Ōbhin’s arm. “I got you.”
“Thanks,” Ōbhin said, leaning on the other man for a moment. He cursed in his native tongue agai
nst the fresh wave of pain.
“Now that is promising,” Dualayn said. He had picked up something from the ground. A sign of some sort. It was stamped into a silvery metal that didn’t tarnish like others. “Hall of Communication is to our left.”
Ōbhin limped on.
The sides of the collapsed road revealed broken pipes buried beneath the street. Some were big enough for a child to crawl through. The trench ran for nearly four hundred cubits, a makeshift tunnel before it ended at a ramp leading up.
They found a small void created by collapsed debris. In it, a door rusted in its frame. It didn’t budge. Ōbhin’s sword cut through it. On the other side lay a barricade of rotting furniture. They hauled clear a path and entered.
A dozen skeletons, with bits of flesh remaining, were strewn through the room. Some seemed to be huddled together in fear. At the stairs, they found another demon, warmth radiating from its scaled hide. Traces of red bled through the black decay of its scales.
“Fascinating, the way it still radiates heat,” said Dualayn as Ōbhin limped past to head upstairs.
“Not why we’re here,” he reminded him, worry gnawing at him for Avena.
The next floor was a mess. Fighting had happened here. Sections of walls didn’t look like they had collapsed but had been battered down. Bones lay scattered everywhere, dozens of skulls, and the bodies of two more demons. Other walls looked charred, and the debris littering the floor looked like an inferno had swept over them. The upper floors were gone, perhaps burned.
“Do you hear that?” asked Miguil as they neared an exit on the far side of the building from where they entered. “Thudding.”
Ōbhin knelt down. He pulled off the glove of his right hand without hesitation. There were no women around, so no need to maintain his modesty. He pressed his naked palm to the floor, fingers pushing dust out of the way.
It vibrated with a rhythmic pattern. Footsteps. He swallowed as he glanced up at Dualayn. The man looked like he was straining to hear, hand cupped over his ear. Miguil’s face, despite the coat of gray dust, had a green tinge to it, his free hand clutching his stomach.