There was a loud crunch, like a tree branch breaking, and one of the Unfeeling actually screamed with long-forgotten pain as he smashed against the wall, went partly through it, and died. The other two attackers screamed as well as they were tossed back as if by a bomb blast; their bodies thudded around the wrecked study, dead.
The technique was called “The Iron Shirt,” and it had been explained, somewhat rapidly and crudely, to Maude by Ng Mui Si Tai, a Buddhist nun, one of the greatest of the Daughters, and Leng Ya’s teacher and mentor. At least in this instance, the aftereffects of the drug had been a boon, helping her connect with the great teacher inside the Record.
As she had experienced Ng’s skein, Maude caught a brief glimpse of Amadia and Ya’s lives tangled up in the ancient master’s. The African Daughter had stolen Ya’s lover, but in the end the woman had perished and they had both lost her. The story was washed away as Ng chided Maude for not focusing on the matter at hand. Maude was shown how to feel the energy of her life, her Chi, how to fan that fading ember until it was a raging inferno, a violent squall inside her, and then to turn all the force back on her attackers, exploding outward, using her own life energy to turn her attacker’s destructive force against them.
Maude, bloody, cut, bruised, more than half-dead, stood. The Iron Shirt had splintered and cratered the very floor at her feet with its force. Panting, her eyes hooded with a cold power that gave even Typhon pause, Maude assumed a bow stance and looked into the green eyes of the Father of all Monsters.
“By all means,” Maude said, “show them in.”
“You do not disappoint,” Typhon said. “You truly are the epitome of the Daughters. You clutch to life when all about you is death. Foolish, futile, but impressive. It’s a pity you can’t see how it all ends, or refuse to.” Typhon clapped loudly and Maude sensed more than heard the Sons charging, approaching. She drew as deep and powerful a cleansing breath as she was able with her injuries, her precious Chi spent, and her head awash in the dregs of powerful drugs. She centered herself.
“You stand against life,” Maude said. “We’ll defeat you, just as the Daughters led humanity against you and your children and vanquished you all, long ago. I saw it in the Record.”
“Ah, the Record,” Typhon said. “That explains it. Very impressive. You have no idea how badly I want to slither in there and give my account of history, lay a few eggs perhaps. Maybe with your sweet daughter’s help, I will.”
The walls of the mansion shook and exploded, heralding the arrival of the Sons. There were four of them, and each bore a deformity. One of the Sons had an additional, stuporous-looking face growing out of his misshapen head. One had wicked, hooked, blood-soaked bone blades growing out of his wrists and elbows. The body of another of Typhon’s sworn soldiers had no apparent skin, and was covered in a slick sheen of blood, dark lines of muscle tissue and nerves. The final Son was muscular and nearly eight feet tall. His skin bubbled, rose and fell like baking dough.
The smiling man that Maude and the others had faced on the streets of Charleston, the only Son to survive that encounter, walked in through the shattered front door, dusting off his coat as he did. The sky was lightening behind him.
“Hello, mate,” Rory Danvers said to Maude, “remember me?”
“Last I saw of you was your backside as you ran away,” Maude said, “‘mate.’” Rory reddened, the smile still plastered on his face.
“No place to run for you, this time,” Rory said. “No one to save you. You’re all out of tricks.”
“I don’t think she is, though,” Maude said.
Amadia materialized, flying in out of the graying dawn behind two of the Sons. She wrapped her legs around the head and upper body of the bloody one with no skin, and snapped his neck with a wrenching sacrifice move. She fell to the floor with the body but was in an awful defensive position as the one with the bone hooks began to strike at her again and again with frightening speed.
Maude used Amadia’s appearance to buy her the seconds she needed to slip the dropped fireplace poker under her foot and flip it back to her hand. She hurled the iron poker like a javelin at the Son who was attacking Amadia. The stout metal spear exploded through his chest and the Son fell dead. Amadia rolled to her feet and vaulted over a partly demolished love seat to land beside Maude. The two Daughters closed ranks and stood side by side, ready. The two remaining Sons rushed to engage them.
“You look like hell,” Amadia said. Maude grunted.
“Master, it’s nearly dawn,” Rory said, unnerved by the sudden death of his fellows. When he had imbibed the Blood of Typhon, Rory’s mind had been expanded to, in his way of thinking, an almost-god-like degree, able to see near-infinite outcomes to each action he perceived in the moment. He could, with time and concentration, parse these outcomes to give him insight into the best possible outcome.
It was a blessing and a curse, because he could not do it instantly, and so it did not help greatly in things like combat. However, standing back, next to his master, Rory’s inhuman brain had calculated all the possible permutations of the encounter with what was now two Daughters of Lilith. He saw failure arise more often than victory.
“You have a coach waiting outside,” Rory said. “We should depart. We have a ship to catch.”
“Ah, thank you, Rory, my good, dutiful boy. I lost track of time catching up with dear Maude here.”
Maude felt her body beginning to shut down. She forced more adrenaline into her blood, but even that recourse was nearly depleted. The dregs of the drug were shredding her nervous system and the injuries were too many and too brutal to ignore.
“Running away again,” Maude called out to Typhon and Rory, as she stopped the two-headed Son’s superhuman punch using both arms. The block held, but she felt her arms quivering as though they were made of rubber. Maude used the momentum to pivot the Son into a position stalling the advance of his giant comrade with pulsating skin. The maneuver gave the Daughters a second to concentrate on the single berserk attacker. Maude managed to hold the block long enough for Amadia to get into position.
The African Daughter jumped high into the air, spinning like a top, completely horizontal, releasing a savage kiai shout as she drove a flying two-legged sacrifice kick into the double-faced monster’s throat, crushing his windpipe with enough force to shatter steel plates. The Son gurgled, tried to keep fighting, but his second face’s eyes widened in fear for a moment, then both countenances slacked.
Maude pushed as Amadia fell. The Son’s body stumbled backward and thudded to the floor. Maude caught Amadia as a ballet dance partner might, cradling her, supporting her full weight with muscles that were beyond exhaustion, spinning her and then lowering her gently. They held each others’ eyes for an instant, feeling a perfect harmonious bond, breathing, hearts beating perfectly as one, and then Maude set her back on the ground. They stood shoulder to shoulder, ready to face the last Son.
“I’m more of a night person,” Typhon said, walking toward the shattered front door. “Just remember, Maude, even if you survive this little skirmish, even if you save your precious Constance, you doom the Daughters to extinction, and grant me victory.”
The giant Son shrugged off Amadia’s Eagle Strike, leaving the Daughter with a badly sprained wrist for her effort. Maude tried a skipping axe kick in unison with Amadia’s blow but neither seemed to even slow the behemoth down. The berserker swept them with his powerful arms and knocked both Daughters across the room. Maude fell toward the hallway to the foyer and saw Typhon and Rory descending the steps outside.
“No!” Maude shouted, climbing to her feet, slipping and falling, then recovering herself. “They’re getting away!”
“Who?” Amadia asked as she, too, got to her feet. The remaining giant Son was lifting the broken carcass of the love seat above his head, preparing to hurl it at one of them.
“Typhon,” Maude said, running, stumbling as best she could toward the front door. “I have to stop him! Keep this on
e busy, I’ll be back!”
“Wait, Stapleton!” Amadia cried, “Maude, if it’s truly Typhon, you can’t…”
Maude was already out the door and down the porch stairs toward the circular drive. She saw a black carriage with a great black mare tethered to it. The sky was slate; dawn was nearly here. Rory held the door for the Father as Typhon began to step inside the dark compartment of the coach.
“Typhon!” Maude shouted. The thing pretending to be a man turned and again, the misfiring synapses in Maude’s brain gave her a single blink, just for an instant, of what Typhon truly was, as vast as human indifference, and endless as man’s cruelty.
“Ah, Maude,” Typhon said. “Look at you, ready to fight to the last.” He turned back toward her and began to walk to her. “You understand, don’t you, I am ‘to the last.’”
Maude heaved herself at Typhon. Focusing her last fading energy into a focused kiai scream, she flew toward him, directing every last bit of her Chi into a targeted hit right between his glistening green eyes. Typhon’s head snapped back and he dropped to the ground as Maude went tumbling and landed a few feet from him. She sat there in the grass, barely able to stay upright. Typhon’s head lolled at an impossible angle. He began to climb back to his feet, chuckling as he did. “All these rules you people have to obey and live with: mass, energy, gravity, velocity. It’s no wonder you’re all so fragile. Sometimes, when I’m trying to fit in, I forget they don’t apply to me. Live and learn, I suppose.” He adjusted his head as he stood and reset his broken neck. He didn’t get it quite right. “Another pass? Or are you ready to stop this nonsense now?”
Maude groaned and pulled herself to her feet. She stumbled toward Typhon. She raised her fists. She drove a hard right into his face, a knee into his groin. Typhon stood and took the blows. Maude’s fist felt as though she had punched the ground. Typhon didn’t blink, didn’t budge.
“You see, Maude,” Typhon said, as she continued to strike and kick furiously at him, “there is only so much a tiny, insignificant little human, even one with all the fabulous parlor tricks you possess, can do against the infinite. Do you begin to understand what it is you’re up against?”
Maude refused to stop. She drove a stunning palm-heel into Typhon’s chin, trying to get an opening to his throat, but he hardly seemed to even notice.
“Are you trying to get to this?” Typhon said, raising his head and exposing his throat. Maude slashed at his arteries with her sharpened fingernails. It did nothing.
“I am a dream,” Typhon said. “An endless, deathless god’s dream of a universe fed into a slaughterhouse, of an eternity of death and silence. Maude, you know deep inside you can’t hurt me. All your kind know it, sense it. I am what terrifies you all in the darkness, and I never end until all of this ends. Until Constance ends, until Martin ends, until Isaiah ends, until even poor old Mutt is put out of his misery.”
Maude had nothing left; her knuckles were bloody and in tatters. Her vision was dimming. She stood, barely on her feet, before the Father of Monsters.
“Maude, you’re a mess,” Typhon said. “You weren’t even in this bad a shape when I met you, remember? You were suffering from multiple near-fatal gunshots wounds, as I recall.”
Maude suddenly felt very cold. She was shaking, brilliant flowers of pain opening in her back, in her chest, her arms and legs. The old gunshot wounds Typhon had healed were reopening. Her blood was gushing everywhere.
“Like those,” Typhon said. Maude looked down and touched one of the burning hollows of pain on her chest, near her heart. Her hand was covered in fresh blood, her blood. The world was tumbling drunkenly; her vision was narrowing, like a funnel.
“Always … a … way…” Maude mumbled.
“I told you back in Golgotha,” Typhon said, “I admired your warrior spirit. You told me then you wanted to live, to have your death have some greater meaning. Here’s the secret, Maude, my final parting gift to you: There is no meaning to life, to death. There are only the lies we tell each other and try to make ourselves believe.”
Typhon’s arm was rising, was coming at her, but Maude couldn’t raise her arms to stop it, couldn’t move out of its way. Everything was slowing down.
“I grant you your wish,” Typhon said as he backhanded her, “a true warrior’s death against the greatest monster of them all.”
The force of the slap shattered Maude’s world, fracturing it into jagged barbs of crimson and obsidian. She was flying backward, flying through the air. She felt herself crash through a wall of the mansion, her flesh breaking and twisting to make way, another impact, another wall, then falling and it all stopped. Everything was gone now. Her last thoughts, her last bit of will, drained out of her and spilled on the floor. She regretted not being able to tell Mutt … tell him … everything, to see him one last time. To kiss him good-bye, and say the magic words. She was so cold and everything was dark. There was a sound, like wings rushing, drumming in her ears. It was her own heart. The sound slowed, softened and ceased.
25
The Fool (Reversed)
Somewhere in Northern Africa
November 4, 1721
Anne walked through the tangled forest of dead trees, her lantern casting a feeble halo of light against the pall. The leadwood, as tough as its name implied, seemed to devour the sound of her boots crunching on the rocky soil. There was a clear path into the wood and through the jagged maze. Anne stuck to it. She wished she had taken at least her blade with her, even if Adu had said it would do her no good against what dwelled here.
The night was hot and heavy, like narcotic sleep. It felt odd to Anne, in such an open and expansive land as this, to be filled with a sensation of suffocation here in the wood. She was unsure how long she had been traveling, following the winding path.
Anne paused to look back at the way she had come. Her lantern revealed there was no longer a passage behind her, only a wall of rough, twisted branches. Ahead of her, in the darkness, something screamed, a warbling falsetto that lowered to a guttural bass. Her hand dropped instinctively to her sword. It wasn’t there.
“Ah, lass,” Anne whispered, “you are well and truly tupped.” When she swung the lantern back in the direction of the unearthly sound, the direction she had been walking in, the path had narrowed considerably, seemingly while the lantern was off of it. Anne steadied herself and began walking again. The path tightened more and she began to have to turn slightly to the side to avoid the sharp branches of the trees. She tried to keep the lantern out in front of her as best she could. There was another howl, this one from behind her, in the dense forest.
She walked ahead, the gaps between the knotted trees narrowing with each step. She forced the lamp before her, and its circle of light caught a face opening in the dark bark of the dead tree’s trunk. Burning orange eyes with black irises and an elongated mouth full of dirty needle-like teeth screeched at her as the thing pulled itself from the decayed heart of the leadwood tree’s twisted trunk. Its sinewy arms reached for her. Anne was but inches from its taloned grasp.
“Annnnneeeeeee,” the face hissed. “Come here, come live in the trees with usssssss.” Another of the things grew out of the tree a few feet beside her, its clawed hands flailing at the air, the razor-sharp nails barely missing her face. She took another shaky step. More of the things called Biloko seeped out from inside the tree trunks, snarling and trying to grab at her. “Sooooo much anger, so much pain … You belong with us, Annnnnneeeeeee … you areeee home … you are already one of ussssssss, just give us your flesh…”
The fear vomited up in her, uncontrollably, beginning to fill her mind like filthy bilge water filling a hull. Her heart was a panicked horse. Images were pulled up out of her mind, out of the distant corners that she had banished them to. Anne learned long ago to not spend too much time inside her head; too many monsters waited there to gobble her up. The Biloko’s voices, those glowing eyes, seemed to rip open all the things inside her, all her mindscars that she
had worked so hard to bury, to hide from everyone, especially herself.
The first time she had boarded a ship with her howling pirate mates, disguised as a man, it had been exhilarating and terrifying, jumping into chaos, men screaming, dying, pistols blasting, blades flashing everywhere. Truth be told, the fear made it better, excited her. That night, though, she had trembled under the balmy Caribbean moon like a shivering child, had wept tears alone, in so much pain, and yet that pain had no name, no face for her. She began to get drunk every night to escape the faceless dread, the guilt and terror that visited her unbidden.
She forced her gaze away from the demonic eyes, tried to ignore the voices. She felt like passing out. Anne remembered Nourbese’s warning and knew she would never awaken again if she did faint. A step … forward … another step … turn to the side, between the branches, and the slender grasping hands. Ignore the monsters in the trees, ignore their cries, their clawed hands, almost reaching her. The next step … Anne’s eyes were locked on another of the monsters who tore at her mind as it struggled to tear at her flesh. The orange eyes bored into her mind, knocking over the carefully arranged barricades of denial and repression, pounding at her fortifications of will, dragging her back to one awful moment after another.
The face of the first man she ever had to kill was held up to her mind. His eyes began full of haughty anger, then the anger draining away like water escaping a barrel with a hole as her blade found his guts. The anger gone, meaningless now, sadness, regret, fear, awareness and then, finally, his life. It had been her or him and she was glad it was him. Why did her damn hands shake, why did she vomit like some sickly lubber? She’d forget that look, forget his face dumb in death, she’d forget taking a life. When the memory pounced on her, once again, the wine was there to dull it, kill it, at least for the night. If that wasn’t enough for the growing mountain of memories, there was the opium, sweet blissful oblivion.
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