Dragon City

by James Axler

  But before Grant’s words had finished, Hassood moved speedily away from the camera—whether he had jumped or been pulled was unclear from the angle—and they heard him scream. It was a hideous sound, hearing a grown man scream like that. It triggered something primal in Grant, something he found he was very uncomfortable with. But there was another sound, too, something like a hard rainfall sloshing in the background. The noise hadn’t been there a moment before, or if it had it had been too quiet for the camera microphone to detect. It hadn’t rained, Grant knew. His team had been maybe 150 yards from this when it had happened; no microclimate was that precise.

  The once-static camera angle suddenly whirled on screen as the radio was knocked from its perch, and for a moment the image flickered and cut, shadow and light blurring into a mist of electronic squall.

  For a moment there was nothing. Just the camera lens trying to refocus, to make sense of the darkness.

  The image reverted but it was sideways now, the familiar arches that lined the wall now running across the bottom of the screen as if that wall was the ground. Sounds of a scuffle, a scream nearby and incessant, cut off as abruptly as it had begun. Stillness on screen, just a flicker of shadow where the tiny lens tried to give definition to the dark walls.

  And then they saw it, and Grant heard Domi gasp behind his ear. It was a shard of silver, like a beam of moonlight snapped off, passing across the screen in a blur. It looked like a mirror in the dark, and for a moment Grant took it to be a blade, either sword or knife passing the lens.

  Then Hassood’s familiar form came hurtling across from the right, which is to say from above them, and he slammed down, face-first into the ground that ran on the screen’s left. His skin glistened with a sheen, silver droplets reflecting the moonlight.

  Hassood turned to face his attacker, looking across to the top of the screen—to his right where the arches were. The silvery line appeared again, stepping in from the top, a white streak across the camera image. The picture blurred as the camera refocused, and then the silvery line shimmered, moving away from the lens. It was a man, or at least it was man-shaped. The figure walked away from the camera, its back to the screen, its movements flowing like liquid. And it glistened as the moonlight played across it, the silver now a series of insubstantial streaks like brushstrokes in the air, ill defined, darkness between them.

  Hassood screamed again, staring up into the thing’s face where its eyes must be. Grant’s team watched as the silvery figure reached for Hassood, grabbing him by the throat even as he scrambled to his feet. It stood between Hassood and the camera, yet they could still see Hassood, not simply over the stranger’s shoulder but through his body, too, shimmering and bulbous as if the man’s image were recast in a fun-house mirror.

  Water, Grant realized. They were looking through a curtain of water.

  On screen, Hassood slammed back into the wall as the mysterious figure gripped him by the throat. Grant winced as he heard that bone-cracking shunt, and Hassood gurgled, his eyelids flickering as he struggled to retain consciousness. It was the same wall where the man-shaped stain was, Grant realized, the exact same spot. Hassood was saying something over and over, the words foreign to Grant’s ears.

  Behind him, Grant heard Rosalia mutter a curse, and he turned and saw her shake her head, wiping something from her face.

  On screen, the silvery shimmer held Hassood in place, a spasm running through the man’s body. It was difficult to see what happened next, the image was so small and dark, and it took Grant a few seconds to notice the change. In front of his eyes, Hassood seemed to be merging with the wall, sinking into it, a shimmer glistening over his face like sweat. Grant heard his own voice come from the speaker of the playback system, calling to Hassood to “respond, please respond.” It was eerie hearing his own voice at that moment, a fragment of time echoing over again.

  Beneath the sound of his voice, Grant heard a dog bark—Rosalia’s pet, urgency and fear in its gruff voice. Hassood was calling again as he sunk into the wall, repeating a phrase over and over as he struggled in the grasp of the shimmering human form standing in front of him.

  Then Hassood simply wasn’t anymore. Where he had been against the wall there was only the dark outline of his shape, the shimmering thing standing in front of him like a mirror.

  “This is where I came in,” Rosalia muttered, recognizing the scene.

  As if to confirm her point, a dark blur passed over the camera lens from above and Grant recognized it as the wagging tail of her dog. And the shimmering, glistering mirror man dropped, his form seeming to lose its integrity as he sunk into the floor.

  “What the…?” Grant muttered, staring at the screen as it locked on a fixed image of the wall with the stain that had been Hassood marked out upon its surface.

  Then Grant turned back to his colleagues, the four of them as transfixed by the screen as he had been.

  “What happened?” Domi asked. “It didn’t make sense.”

  Grant was about to answer when, in the moonlight that seeped into the roofed passage, he saw silvery lines cutting the air, winking on and off like Christmas lights.

  From the screen behind him, Grant heard his own voice echoing back with barely restrained urgency. “Hassood?” it said. “Hassood? Come in.”

  He watched as another of those silvery lines cut through the air around them, like a knife caught in the moonlight. It was water, pouring from the roof above them, dripping down to the floor where they stood.

  “They’re made of water,” Grant declared, “and they’re here.”

  As he said it, Rosalia’s dog began to bark. Something was taking shape behind its mistress.

  Chapter 11

  Twenty-five minutes later, Kane led a party made up of Lakesh, Donald Bry and Reba DeFore toward the south end of the lodge’s vast grounds. The lodge itself overlooked the sea, a sheer cliff dropping down to the crashing waves of the Pacific, which hurried up a tiny sliver of beach seventy feet below. A weedy-looking fence ran along the edge of the cliff, just two horizontal wooden bars linked by a series of posts, reaching no higher than a man’s hip. The fence was a safety measure and nothing more—no one was sneaking up on the lodge via that harsh cliff face.

  Kane had washed and dressed, though his hair looked untidy where it fell to past his collar and his jaw was dark with stubble that was almost a beard now. He was a tall man, imposing and well-built, his shoulders wide to accommodate his broad chest. He was built like a wolf, a muscular torso and upper body coupled with rangy limbs that could eat up distance with little effort. There was something of the wolf in his manner, too, the way he automatically slipped into the role of pack leader but seemed a loner all the same. He was dressed in black, wearing the shadow suit beneath a dark shirt and denim jacket, the latter frayed at the cuffs and hem. The shadow suit was the same one he had worn when Brigid had shot him less than a week before, and while it still retained its incredible properties to deflect both blades and light gunfire, the scars of that attack remained across its chest. Dark combat pants and scarred leather boots finished Kane’s ensemble, the latter an echo of his days as a Magistrate in Cobaltville, their familiar grooves a comfort in this time of upheaval. Kane’s dark hair was longer than he was used to, brushing at the nape of his neck and whipping around his face in the sea breeze.

  Kane had secreted several familiar armaments among his clothing, including his faithful Sin Eater handblaster surreptitiously held in a hidden holster at his wrist and primed for swift access. Like his boots, the Sin Eater was a legacy from his days Cobaltville, something both he and Grant had kept after their sudden exile from the Magistrate division. Kane had brought one more thing, securely packed in a scuffed backpack hanging between his shoulders. It was this item that brought him and his companions out here on the beautifully kept lawn.

  The foursome
hurried briskly across the trimmed grass, making their way to what appeared to be a wholly unremarkable point a few hundred feet from the line of conifers that marked the property’s boundary. Kane slowed as he reached this spot close to the farthest reach of Shizuka’s territory, sweeping the area with a glance until he spied what he was looking for. There, incongruous amid the neatly trimmed lawn, a patch of burned grass perhaps twelve inches square waited, straw-yellow against the lush green.

  Shirking out of his rucksack, Kane stepped across to the patch of faded grass and placed the scuffed bag down beside it. Then, with a swiftness that belied the care he was taking, Kane reached into the rucksack and brought out a metal pyramid roughly twelve inches square and the same measurement to its apex. With practiced efficiency, Kane tapped in the code at the control panel on its base and the pyramid seemed to vibrate, a movement so slight as to exist only on a subconscious level.

  Still kneeling on the grass, Kane looked up at his three companions. “We’re ready to go,” he informed them.

  Reba DeFore protested, telling Kane she still felt that this was a bad idea. “If your eyesight should get worse again…” she complained, but Lakesh stopped her.

  “Kane is right,” he said. “This mayday signal is something that we cannot ignore. And he is the only one of us with sufficient combat training to handle the situation should it prove to take a turn for the worse. Even with his abilities compromised, I suspect friend Kane is still far more capable than you or I or Donald here.”

  Bry laughed uncomfortably, nodding in agreement. “This jump will take you right into the heart of the Cerberus redoubt,” he advised Kane, all business once more. “You’ll arrive in the mat-trans chamber as normal, but the chamber itself and the ops room that it leads into it have changed beyond comprehension.”

  “I saw it all—I remember,” Kane growled. “Lot of stone work.”

  Bry nodded somberly. “Just keep in mind that, for all intents and purposes, you are leaping into the unknown here, enemy territory. We believe that the redoubt was evacuated when we left, but it’s not beyond the realms of credibility that Ullikummis or his troops have reacquired it for their own usage. Alternatively, with the security compromised as it is, there’s a chance that someone else may have taken up residence there. They may even be the ones who activated the beacon.”

  Kane nodded. “Got it.”

  For a few moments Kane worked at the base of the interphaser, tapping out a sequence of numbers so that the device could locate the destination point at the Cerberus redoubt. The interphaser worked by accessing specific locations called parallax points, which could be found right across the globe and beyond. While eminently adaptable, the interphaser still required a specific departure and destination points, opening a quantum window between the two points and allowing its user to step through that gateway to a place that may be a thousand miles or more away. Just now, Kane was setting the incredible device to send him to the parallax point located in the mat-trans chamber of the Cerberus redoubt in Montana, roughly seven hundred miles away. Once the interphaser was activated, the journey itself would take just a fraction of a second.

  Kane moved back and watched as the interphaser came to life, an expanding lotus blossom of color emerging, top and bottom, from its silvery frame. The twin cones of light were like oil on water, dark with rainbow swirls glinting in their impossible depths, hooked fingers of lightning firing through the light like witch fire. The gateway was opening, carving a path through the quantum ether to the Montana redoubt.

  Kane stood then, and as he did so Reba DeFore trotted over to his side and produced her ophthalmoscope from her pocket, holding it up to his eyes like a cop’s torch. “Keep still,” the ash-blond-haired physician told him.

  Kane looked at her, staring into the bluish-white light of the ophthalmoscope. “All clear?” he asked.

  “Your left pupil is entirely unresponsive,” DeFore replied matter-of-factly, “while the right eye is reacting slower than normal. How does it look from the inside?”

  “It’s okay,” Kane said noncommittally. “I’ve been worse.”

  Lakesh held his palm out, grasping Kane’s hand in a firm grip. “You be careful, my friend,” he said. “Brewster will be monitoring your Commtact feed and the transponder you carry beneath the skin. If anything happens, you are to return immediately, do you hear me? Immediately.”

  Kane nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

  “If things get hot, don’t go playing hero,” Lakesh warned. “You’re in no condition to do that.”

  Kane looked at him, the steely gray of his eyes cold and full of a repressed fury. “Didn’t you hear? I have it on good authority that all the heroes are dead.”

  Before Lakesh could think to respond, Kane had stepped into those twin cones of light and, in less time than it takes to tell, both he and the interphaser unit disappeared, winking out of existence in front of his very eyes.

  “Godspeed, my friend,” Lakesh muttered under his breath. “Godspeed.”

  * * *

  WHILE TRAVELING BY interphaser was instantaneous, it conversely seemed to exist in a kind of nontime. It was this nontime that had affected Kane on the past few occasions he had accessed it. Now, yet again, he found his brain burning, a searing knife of heat penetrating his frontal lobe.

  Within his eye, within his mind’s eye, something was stirring, history replaying itself like ancient video footage, the images flickering over and over. He watched now, a spectator to his own thoughts, as his hand—which is to say, the other’s hand—reached for something lying in the sand. It was a blade, short and curved like a scimitar, finished in glorious gold that shimmered in the bright sunlight pelting toward it from above. The hand grabbed it, and Kane saw that the hand—his hand?—was ridged with rock, like an armored glove cinched over his fingers.

  There was sound now, too—music. It hurried to Kane’s ears, a series of notes played without breaks, like one note, rising and falling, the sounds like rushing water.

  Kane—or whoever’s vision Kane was witnessing—lifted the knife, judging its weight, turning it over in one hand. Then he looked up from the ground, and Kane saw the arena around him like a gymnasium, targets and weights and beds of spears arranged along its walls, its sandy floor open to the elements. Off to the left, at the edge of a roughly marked circle, sat a creature dressed in simple robes, its skin coarse and scary and ridged. The creature sat in front of some kind of harp, propped upright in the sandy dust of the ground, its frame lined in pearlescent seashell, its taut strings the red of blood. The creature, an Igigi slave, plucked at the strings of the harp with its fine hands, claws running along the side in a swishing motion, creating not a tune really, but just a pleasing sound, running along the octaves with the fluidity of liquid, no rhythm other than the harpist’s own. Beneath the harp, where the dust had sprinkled against its underside, Kane saw the tassels at the bottom where the strings were tied through the frame, bloodred twists like scabs hanging in the air.

  He turned, and Kane felt a sense of disorientation, even motion sickness, as the vision swirled around. There, pinned to a large target shaped like a hexagon, rested a woman, held upright, arms and legs splayed. She was naked, tears running down her cheeks as she watched the proceedings, but she made no noise. Her long dark hair fell to almost her waist, clinging to her neck and shoulders with sweat, strands brushing her olive breasts as she breathed hurriedly in and out, in and out. Her dark eyes glistened with tears as she watched the figure with the sword—Kane? Was it Kane?—take a step back, holding his empty left hand up to judge the distance more clearly. It was forty feet if it was an inch, maybe fifty feet; Kane couldn’t get his bearings. It was like a magic act, the magician’s beautiful assistant waiting on the target as certain death approached.

  Then Kane felt his balance shift, felt the long knife hanging behind his he
ad, held low in his hand for a moment as he readied to throw it. The girl whimpered, the noise distant and quiet like a creaking floorboard expanding in the heat. And with the swiftest of movement, the right arm came forward and the blade cut through the air like golden death, spinning over itself in a long, beautiful arc as it raced unerringly toward the human target.

  There was a shock of blood then, and Kane wanted to turn away. The girl didn’t even cry out; she was dead as soon as the blade struck, her heart cut in two, an eruption of blood spurting from her chest, bones visible like teeth amid the redness.

  Kane’s viewpoint—forced as it was, unable to turn away—stayed on the girl as she sagged against the target, the deep crimson of her life’s blood running down her torso and between her legs, vomiting over the sand at her feet. The golden scimitar remained in her chest, sticking out like some perverted crank handle that might grant her life if only she could wind it.

  The eyes Kane looked with went closer, examining the butcher’s work on the young woman’s body. There were cuts on her body, Kane saw now, and bloody marks on the target here and there where others had presumably died. Kane wanted her to say something, to beg forgiveness, even though he hadn’t thrown the knife, only been a party to its deadly toss, mute witness in the body of the thrower.

  “Good work, my son.” The voice came from Kane’s right.

  Kane turned, or the figure he was now turned, and saw the speaker, recognizing him immediately. It was Enlil, his burnished red-gold scales rippling with the breeze as he watched from the side of the training area, a red cloak wrapped across his shoulders. He reached out then, holding his lizardlike hand in a gesture that Kane—or the thing Kane now was—recognized as a salute. “Well done, Ullikummis. The speed of your improvement staggers even me.”

  Ullikummis. Visions of Ullikummis.

  * * *