by Steve Vera
“Cavern ahead. Thirty meters,” Donovan announced.
To his left Cirena looked in thinly veiled horror at a statue of an armored knight holding up his arm futilely in an attempt to defend against some long-gone assailant. The pale light of her Quaranai hardened the lines of her face and revealed the tendons standing out of her neck. Blue flames simmered around her fingers.
“Do you see anything?” Gavin whispered to Donovan. The caverns that the pass emptied into were good because they made movement easier, but bad because they usually were...occupied.
“They’re in the wall,” Donovan rasped.
That explained the faces.
Cheaters.
“Sur Stavengre,” Pyrk said, hovering about three and a half feet ahead of them. He pointed down and to the sides of what seemed to be rusted hinges hammered into the stone of the mountain. They could have been there a thousand years. “This was once a door,” their tiny scout whispered.
Running along the base was a two-foot space that might have served as a track for said door and to the sides...twin black orchids. There was a shift of color in the stone, fingers of condensation that followed Gavin’s face as he studied the hinges and then a macabre, open-mouthed face jeering at him. Glowing eyes. Gavin jumped back.
“They’re toying with us,” Donovan said. “They could come out of the walls whenever they want.”
Now that he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses, Gavin could see Donovan’s eyes, incandescent in the light of his Quaranai.
“Donovan, you’re with me.”
Gavin’s rival didn’t argue and stepped to his side. Thank you for not being a jerk for once. Gavin glanced at Amanda, who kept her lips pinned against her teeth, pistol outstretched.
“Cocoons,” Gavin ordered, and a sizzle like a flipped grilled cheese sounded through the mountain corridor as each cocoon materialized. “Forward.”
Gavin and Donovan crossed first, swords at the ready. The moment they stepped beyond the threshold of the invisible door they were attacked by a sudden wind, as if they’d just turned the corner of a building in downtown Chicago in February. They couldn’t feel the cold because of the cocoon but could hear it hiss around the gossamer field of silver-blue light. The Mitsutada shined in the light of the Quaranai and together, Gavin and Donovan led the way. The others followed.
“What do you see?” Gavin asked Donovan.
“They’re all around us.”
“How many?”
“Hundreds. More.”
Gavin nodded grimly. What the hell did we get ourselves into?
The problem with cocoons was that they required a constant stream of both focus and strength. It was like lifting a one-pound weight horizontally shoulder-level. Quite easy at first; the problem came several minutes later when that single pound felt like fifty and the arms began to tremble. Once upon a time, last life, Gavin could have kept up a cocoon for twelve hours straight—required to pass the Test of Ordainment—but seventeen years of living in a civilized world where man alone was dominant and magic didn’t even exist had eroded his magic muscles. Five minutes and he was sweating.
“What are they waiting for?” Skip murmured from behind. Even though the enemy was invisible, their presence was as palpable as a roomful of computers. There was a pitch. A pressure.
It was a question Gavin suspected he knew the answer to. He looked around. Here was as good a place as any.
“Back to back,” Gavin ordered. With an ease of water flowing downhill, his Shardyn fell in and positioned each escort carefully. Tense faces scanned the surrounding darkness. “Drop cocoons.”
The first thing to hit them was the frigid air and the stench of decay. Their breath came out in plumes.
“There is some sort of chasm or gorge ahead,” Tarsidion announced.
“How wide?”
“Twenty-three point four meters.” That would be Donovan.
“Do you see anything, Noah?”
A moment of silence. “No,” she murmured, “but we are not alone.”
“All right. Donovan, go back with the others and watch our six.” Had he just said that? “Dwensolt, protect them.”
The Druid nodded, straightened his staff and spoke a spidery word. Donovan almost looked as if he were going to refuse but after some internal deliberation, he acceded. A thin field of greenish light enveloped the rest of them. It hummed softly.
“Noah, you’re with me, Tarsy and Cirena, anchor. We’ll move up two by two and spring this damn trap.” What else could they do? He took a deep breath and looked at the group. Amanda, despite her best efforts, was fear-numbed, hollow-eyed and blue-lipped.
When this is through I’m marrying you.
He looked at his knights. “The plan is simple. We kill everything.”
* * *
Nobody, not even Donovan, knew that the floor would give out. It disintegrated like a sheet of powder snow in an avalanche. Only it hurt a lot more. Skip and Amanda disappeared immediately in a deluge of falling rock, followed by a tumbling Dwensolt, who instead of leaping clear scrambled after his staff, which also disappeared down the hole. Donovan should have easily been able to leap out of the way, but at that instant the walls exploded in black light and his body was seized by a cold so fierce his muscles locked. Whatever had been waiting for them in the walls attacked in full force.
The pain was terrible, his shock real, but it wasn’t over...a foreign presence invaded his mind. A supernova of black light exploded inside his mind and the blood in his body froze within their arterial walls.
Donovan fell with the rest of them.
Instinct took over. Instead of falling with the others, Gavin and his brethren blurred forward at the same instant the walls erupted and the floor crumbled. The voiceless screams of the descending Nightshades mixed with the screams of his love and future wife. He tried to turn back, to save her somehow, but they’d blurred right into an army of Undead. Waiting.
And then they were fighting for their lives.
Chapter 24
The touch of the amorphous spirit was an acid bath on Donovan’s soul. Pain he’d never even fathomed crystallized the edges of his lifeforce from a touch colder than liquid nitrogen. The Nightshade, as he’d heard it called, attacked with mindless, savage glee, coming from everywhere and nowhere—a turbid storm of writhing hungry rage. It was in this moment, in the middle of a cave in the Realm of the Undead on another world, that his five years of fending off the Lord of the Underworld within his mindscape paid off.
Like a fighter plane in flames, he plummeted deeper into the depths of his thoughts, slamming barricades behind him like a fugitive running through a crowded alley. The electric purple light of the spirit pursued hungrily.
In a reflex of self-preservation, Donovan surrendered control of his conscious to his unconscious and entered a zone of sight and knowing often referred to as the Self, and the instant he did...things changed.
The coiled mushroom cloud that was his soul, unfettered by rational thought and interference, hurtled past his consciousness and attacked the invading threat.
He could hear a high-pitched, broken laugh echo through his mind and in that moment, Donovan had an epiphany.
There were two things his Othersight allowed him to do—to see a living thing’s aura (and undead things, as it turned out), and to hear them as well. Every aura possessed a tone or frequency as unique to it as a person’s DNA. Almost as if he were dreaming, semi-lucid and soupy, Donovan matched not only his colors with the invading Nightshade, but mirrored its tone, reached out with spiritual hands and found something soft and pliant, like gelatin in a membrane. He squeezed, and the laughing stopped.
I win, you lose.
And then Donovan was choking it. It fought him at first, raking him with icy talons, sending shards of brain f
reeze through Donovan’s body, but here in Donovan’s mind, he was the master. Once he had it, Donovan implemented the second part of his plan: Tesla’s Theory of Resonance. He unleashed two rivers of vibration through his phantom hands that drenched the thrashing, shrieking Nightshade in pulsing, throbbing oscillations.
Donovan smiled and squeezed tighter.
Its struggles turned more frantic, its attacks more flailing, and then Donovan felt a tear in his mind. A second later a mini-nova of black light detonated in his brain, flash-blinding him, followed by a soul numbing gale of frigid air.
Before he could even try to compose himself he was attacked again, this time by two Nightshades. He played weak, let them come straight into his mind and then slammed the door behind them. Now that he knew what to do he was eager to fight them.
He picked one, matched its colors, and the moment it came in contact with him it kicked away like a startled bullshark. But it had nowhere to go. This was his mind. He snatched its vaporous wake with the phantom hands of his soul and pulled it back in, ignoring the searing cold raking through his back from the other.
It hurt. A lot. That one he would make suffer.
It was like trying to throttle a giant amoeba—spongy, elastic and filmy. The creature thrashed against him, bit and clawed with savage rigor but to no avail.
Donovan tore it apart like a jellyfish.
This time he was ready for the black light explosion that followed its demise and braced himself. When the last, fading remnant of its scream had dissipated, he turned to face the other. A creature such as this was beyond fear, but it did possess the impulse of self-preservation and that was enough for Donovan.
This one he destroyed slowly with the authority of a scientist experimenting on a subject, testing its boundaries of punishment by ripping it slowly in half, stopping, watching, only to resume tearing another part.
By the time he re-emerged from the recesses of his subconscious, eager for the next victim, there were none to be found.
The plunk of dripping water pulled him back to the material world and after a moment of realignment, he entered the world of the living. With that return came his senses.
Underground. Vast. Distant battle. Flashes of light. Echoing screams.
Amanda lay with her leg at an awkward angle beneath a mound of crushed rock, whimpering as a shapeless cloud of luminous air usurped her body. Her veins stood out of her skin, a mottled greenish-blue that matched the eyes of the undead. Right beside her, not four feet away was Walkins, fighting the same battle and losing. His progression from human to something else was further along, body spasming as if he were being pumped with electrical currents. Even the texture of his skin was changing.
With a grunt, Donovan stood, ignored the pain in his knee and grabbed both Walkins by his shoulder and Amanda by her ankle. The moment his colors brushed against the undead spirits, they recoiled and took off. Not so mindless after all. Slowly, life began to return to his savees, helped along by the warmth that he allowed to seep out of his body.
That’s number four, Kasey. You’re mine forever. For just the barest of moments, his spirit intertwined with theirs, pulled their sputtering life forces along by the hand, and he realized that if he wanted to he could do much more. He could enter them perhaps, stay for a while as Deos had done to him. Something to be explored another time. There was something else he had to do.
Dwensolt.
The Druid lay across the underground chamber at least twenty feet away from him. Not just one Nightshade hovered around him, but three. The green-robed Druid was on his knees, eyes rolled back while jerking as he clutched his staff in front of him. Greenish-blue lines bulged out of his skin, which had begun to split and now leaked blood. Donovan stood up from Amanda and Skip and rushed over to the old man, navigating around the minefield of debris like an obstacle course champion. Before he arrived to destroy the invaders, however, the staff between Dwensolt’s hands snapped and exploded, hurling Donovan back and disintegrating his night vision in a shockwave of light and force. There was a sudden gale of frigid air and then a familiar fading of screams. Donovan controlled his fall to a neat backward somersault but not before slamming into the side of a boulder. That sent a different sort of light through him.
From above them, thunderclaps boomed and multi-colored light flickered.
* * *
Back to back the four of them stood, a small island of swirling cloaks and flashing blades bombarded by an angry sea. Creatures that had existed only in concept lay dismembered and smoldering around them like shrapnel from bombs.
“He’s coming around, Stavengre,” Tarsidion warned, his normally buttery voice hoarse from battle.
“I see him,” Gavin said, returning his blade to middle ready after decapitating a fleshless corpse that insisted on clawing at him, despite the silver-blue flames burning its bones.
So far all the Spectre had done was watch, circling the four of them like a general assessing its troops, streamers of its ethereal blackness dissipating into a wake behind it.
That’s right, stay back there and watch. Gavin braced himself for the next wave that he knew was coming, could feel the ground tremble and hear the slobbering growls approaching. They came like a swarm of rabid locusts.
His arms got so heavy from swinging his Quaranai that he found himself relying more and more on his magic, which was getting dangerously low. His Wellspring—the vessel within all Magi containing their craft—was on fumes. Only rest, food and meditation would fill it. The darts of silver-blue that cracked from his fingertips were getting weaker and less brilliant. And having less effect.
“What’s it waiting for?” Tarsidion whispered.
There was a lull in the attacks. A surreal, desolate silence followed while each of them watched the Spectre.
“For us to get weaker,” Cirena said, panting. Her armor was smeared with black-green and scarlet. All of them were splattered.
With the break, Gavin listened for the voices of the others but heard nothing. He even dared a glance over his shoulder but could see only darkness. The mere thought that Amanda might be hurt or dead turned his bowels into soup. They had to get back.
“Slowly,” he said to them. “Back to the pit.” He kept his words perfectly neutral, suddenly superstitious that any emotion or sound would summon another wave. “Now.”
He took a step backward, Quaranai in his right hand, a simmer of flame on his left. His boot came down on the outstretched wrist of a skeletal arm and crunched it into a puff of black dust.
That one little, tiny, insignificant distraction was all it took. The Spectre attacked.
* * *
The plop of dripping water sounded the same in any world. It was his first sense to come back online, followed quickly by a whiff of cold, dank air, dust and the smell of death. Skip struggled to sit up but dropped as a white-hot finger planted its tip right in the center of his forehead and pushed him back down.
Le ouch.
“He lives,” came a raspy whisper that seemed completely at home in the dark. Without shifting his body, Skip turned his head and saw Donovan sitting calmly on a large broken rock as if he were lounging in a park with a cigarette, the samurai sword lying unsheathed across his lap. Lying next to him, unconscious and with a bandage around her left leg, was Amanda. Pyrk sat on her shoulder, devastated and haunted. Rubble lay all around them.
“What happened?” Skip asked in a hoarse whisper, still on his back.
“I saved your life. Again.”
Skip crinkled an eye at Donovan. “Aw, don’t give me that shit, really?”
“Really.”
“Man. What about her?” Skip asked, indicating Amanda with a glance. “How bad?”
“She’ll live.”
Skip maintained eye contact with Donovan. There was no way he was a human
being. Something close perhaps, but nobody had eyes like that.
Skip gathered his splattered thoughts and tried to assess. All he came up with was pain. “Where’s Dwensolt?”
“I’m behind you.”
Carefully, without lifting his head, Skip turned to his left and saw the Druid sitting a little off from them, studying Donovan with calm, suspicious eyes. His staff, or at least what was left of it, was clutched in his right hand and the golden-sickle head shined through the columns of his fingers. All that remained of the shaft was a short spike of wood jutting down into his lap among a puddle of broken wood fragments.
“’Sup, Big-D? How’s it hanging?”
The old man looked very different. There was a sheen in his eyes that had not been there before, like Halloween eye contacts, and parts of his face had split, leaking blood down a neck and chin that had taken on a greenish pallor. A couple of veins Skip was pretty sure hadn’t been there before wriggled through his left cheek.
“There is battle above us and I hang nothing. I sit on this stone and await the Shardyn. Your banter is as cryptic as a D’worven spell.”
“So I’ve been told,” Skip said through a momentary crescendo of pain in his skull. When it receded, he resumed his thought. “All I remember is falling.”
Dwensolt looked at Donovan again. “He should not have been able to do that.”
“Do what?” Skip asked.
“Nightshades are the wandering souls of evil beings, defeated only by the most powerful of magic. Their touch alone can freeze the blood.” He flashed a stare at Donovan. “Only the most powerful of magic or purest of faith could ever hope to keep such things at bay. Your friend Satan destroyed three of them, single-handed, possessing neither.”
Somebody’s been hanging out with Amanda too long...
“We’re not friends,” Donovan rasped. “But you are indebted to me, Everett Walkins, Chief of Police, Rolling Creek, Montana.”