Ice. The stairs and corridor had been so cold because an inch of ice covered every square foot of the cavern in a glittering, sparkling second skin. Icicles as long as I was tall, and sharpened to a needle's point, augmented the vast stalactite collection on the ceiling. Their frozen counterparts looked like stalagmite seedlings about to erupt out of the floor and blossom like their stony companions.
All around the room I saw standing, sitting and reclining shapes that looked vaguely humanoid. Muted fleshtones reflected up through the ice-coats each of the figures wore. The different facets of the ice sliced up and reconstructed their images so the ice-folk appeared to be models for countless cubist artworks awaiting resurrection when that style came back into vogue.
I slid over to the nearest of the figures and crashed the MP-7's collapsed stock against the ice coating a figure's head. The ice shattered and, with a second blow, a big chunk came away. Aside from fragments clinging tenaciously to a few black strands of hair, I managed to clear the ice away from the right side of the woman's face. Peeling off my right glove I touched her but found, as I expected and feared, her frostbitten flesh felt lifeless.
Jytte sank to her knees beside me and touched the woman. She looked up, horrified, then buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with sobs. I reached out and hugged her, but I had the impression that she could not feel me, nor would she have heard me if I spoke.
Crowley crouched beside her, opposite me, and shook his head. "I think this place was kept cold on purpose, by Pygmalion. It would lower the metabolic rate of his constructs so they would go into a hibernation, it was his way of preserving their beauty." He pointed to the diamond-stud earring in the dead woman's ear. "I cannot think he would be so wasteful if he meant to kill them."
I looked around the ice cavern again. "If that is true, and it seems likely to me as well, how did the ice get in here?"
The occultist lowered his voice to a whisper. "This is the High Country, it is winter and within the winter we get storms. There has to be a hole to the surface and enough snow and rain poured in here to produce this."
"But what...?" My question died on my lips as other voices echoed through the cavern. I slide Jytte back out of sight, and Crowley hunkered down beside me. At his signal, I worked my way back toward the left, past Jytte, to a low wall of congealed stalagmites and looked to the center of the room.
I saw two nearly human creatures similar to a couple I had met and killed elsewhere in Arizona. They stood as tall as a normal man and, aside from a slightly grayish cast to their skin and their pointed ears, they looked utterly unremarkable. The clothes they wore made them look like refugees from some low-budget pirate movie and could only have been improved upon if one of them wore an eyepatch and had a parrot perched on his shoulder.
They did not disturb me because I knew they were Draolings. Dwellers in a nearby dimension, an intrepid few ventured through an interconnecting proto-dimension to play little homicidal tricks on humanity. Crowley had suggested Draolings were behind the Donner party massacre and might have been the Zodiac killer in California. With what I'd learned, I was willing to peg a Draoling as the Green River Killer in the Pacific Northwest and even suggest they played Svengali to the likes of Charles Manson, David Berkowitz and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Even with that sort of nasty pedigree, they did not concern me, because I knew how easy it would be to kill them. And how good it would feel to have done so.
What did concern me was the creature standing between them. Actually, standing is correct, but conveys the wrong image, because the massive beast appeared to be more at home in a four-point stance. Its stooped shoulders and crested spine just avoided brushing stalactites as it shuffled forward on little, bandy legs. Mottled flesh with a granitelike color pattern covered it from its toes on up beyond where the massive chest narrowed slightly past the shoulders to form a neck roughly the circumference of a manhole. The lantern-jawed head featured pointed ears, a flattened skull and wide but hardly innocent eyes. Two triangular slits flat in its face served as its nose. It held its mouth open, revealing a phalanx of sharklike teeth.
The creature raised one huge fist and crashed it down on an ice-clad corpse with enough force to send a tremble through the cavern. The blow pulped the corpse's mid-section, tearing it in half. The two Draolings immediately scrambled after the upper body like hyenas fighting over carrion, while the larger creature grabbed the lower body with one ankle in each paw. With a yank that rippled muscles in its chest and thick arms, the monster tore the corpse's pelvis apart like a wishbone and commenced gnawing on a frozen thigh.
One of the Draolings pulled an arm free of torso, spilling his compatriot back in a tangle with the rest of the body, then nibbled on the torn deltoid muscle. "As a snack, frozen is fine, but I much prefer my meat fresher."
His companion broke the corpse's arm off at the elbow and peeled the frozen flesh back as if it were a glove. "Agreed. Snack now, then we can harvest something to be thawed and prepared correctly."
The behemoth just belched and spit a femur out.
The surreality of the whole situation hit me like a runaway train. Hidden in shadow within an artificial cavern coated in ice, I was listening to extra-dimensional creatures discussing human beings as if they were range-fed cattle. What Pygmalion had sculpted into examples of physical perfection like Jytte, these creatures saw only as Purina Draoling-chow. While the credo that suggested presentation was part of the enjoyment of a meal had often seemed silly to me — especially when a meal seemed priced more as art than foodstuff — the Draolings were doing the moral equivalent of killing and eating Best of Breed at the Westminster Dog Show.
That momentary perspective of extra-dimensional morality put creatures like Fiddleback and the Empress of Diamonds in their place, not only were they Dark Lords, but they were from elsewhere and could not view us in the way we viewed ourselves. They were predators, and we were prey, with no rights to be imagined, much less respected. That whole round of thought also made Pygmalion yet more horrible for his willful abandonment of his humanity in exchange for the power of a Dark Lord.
While my whirlwind of thought precluded action, Jytte did not find herself so preoccupied. I saw her out of the comer of my eye as she stepped up into the open lane between our hiding places and the feasters. The rage pouring off her seemed hot enough to melt the ice and the stone beneath it, but she remained rock steady. She held the M-177 at her right hip and flipped the safety off with an snap that echoed through the cavern like a gunshot.
The Draolings looked up with smiles on their faces. "What have we here?" asked one around a mouthful of food.
Jytte hit the carbine's trigger with a mechanical precision that made the rifle seem part of her. The initial three-shot burst sent a trio of cartridges arcing through the air to clink and clatter off a stalagmite's icy sheath. The bullets caught the speaker in the chest, compressing it violently in a lethal Heimlich maneuver that spewed most of his meat-cud out over the floor. Blowing out his back, the bullets sent a spray of bright, arterial blood out to drench the large monster.
As Jytte shifted her aimpoint slightly to the right and let another burst go, my early training clicked in and my mind analyzed her attack with clinical clarity. Because she stood only 25 meters from her target, the 56-grain 5.56mm bullets were traveling well in excess of 3200 feet per second when they actually struck the other Draoling. At that speed, the bullets fragmented the second they hit anything solid. The one that nailed the Draoling in the wrist severed the hand from the body, while the one that hit it in the ribs exploded into countless metal shards that shredded everything in the chest cavity. The last bullet hit the Draoling in the jaw, turning a leering grin into a gape of horror before the head snapped back and the body somersaulted away into the shadows.
Jytte shifted her gun to cover the behemoth, and a curious sensation rising in me forced me to shout at her. "No, don't." Somehow, I knew the creature, and I knew that to shoot it was not going t
o be effective.
I don't know if she heard me or just chose to ignore me, but she tightened her finger on the M-177's trigger. The bullets hit solidly in a ragged line running from the monster's right hip on up to its left shoulder. They staggered the creature and dumped it back on its buttocks, but none of them pierced its hide.
Howling in furious pain, the creature rolled forward and, digging its black talons into the ice, scrambled straight at Jytte. Without giving the creature a second glance, Jytte hit the clip release and slammed a fresh magazine home in the carbine as the first dropped toward the floor. Working the charging lever, she started to bring the gun up again.
Acting without consciously knowing why, I vaulted the stalagmite wall. I knew there was no way I could land on the ice and remain upright, so I never even tried, landing on my left thigh and buttock, I slid toward Jytte and kicked out with my right leg. I hit her in the left hip, knocking her out of the monster's path, then I twisted myself up onto my left knee and drew the Wildey Wolf in my right hand.
The creature charged on, picking up speed. Icicles teased from the ceiling by its back cascaded in pieces down around its shoulders. Ice fragments gouged from the floor filled the air like snow kicked up by a horse galloping through a winter's field. Its bellowslike lungs pumped air in and out, the huffing and puffing of an organic steam locomotive bearing down on me.
Part of me knew, as the musty, sour breath hit me from 10 meters away, I should be terrified. The greater part of me, though, knew that to succumb to terror would be to die. Even as the creature raised its right paw, the black, scythe-blade talons trembling with expectation, I knew I had it. I raised the Wildey Wolf and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet entered the creature's face through the right nostril and immediately sent a blue-black geyser of blood back out in its wake. The creature's gait faltered almost instantly, and the raised paw caught a stalactite, breaking the stony protrusion off. That slewed the body around toward where I had been hiding. I flattened against the floor and felt its left foot brush by barely above me, then heard more snapping and crackling as the monster crashed to the ground and lay still.
Rolling on to my back, I saw Crowley helping Jytte to her feet. She shook her head and blinked her eyes a couple of times, but looked no worse for the wear. Crowley looked at me and smiled. "That was damned cocky, you know."
I frowned and reholstered the Wolf. "Nonsense. The nostril slit was about the size of a large pizza slice. A blind man could have hit it easily."
"I know. That wasn't the cocky part." Crowley's green eyes sparkled. "Shooting only once was."
Jytte stood and looked quizzically at her carbine. "Why did your shot kill it and mine had no effect?" She hesitated for a second, then added, "More precisely, how did you know my bullets would have no effect?"
I got to my feet without help and folded my arms. "I'd seen Draolings before, and Crowley here had impressed upon me how they had been the genesis of some pretty fearsome folklore. Lots of things we've seen in other dimensions are like that."
Crowley gave Jytte a wink. "Many of Earth's heroic legends are based in encounters with creatures from other dimensions."
I shrugged. "Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I remembered a description of a huge, hulking creature that ate men. I think the cold had something to do with it and, perhaps, your name."
She frowned. "Jytte is a Danish variation of Judith... Oh, I see. Grendel."
I nodded. "Grendel's thick hide could not be pierced by ordinary weapons. I assumed the nasal membranes were not so tough."
"Why not the eye?"
"Eyelid."
Jytte accepted my answer with a grim nod. "Thank you for saving my life."
I pointed at the two dead Draolings. "Thank you for doing what needed to be done."
"Speaking of which, what are we going to do here?" Crowley frowned as he surveyed the cavern. "Clearly, Pygmalion is not watching over this place that closely. If I can find the command center for the dimensional gate the Draolings and this Grendel used to get here, I can set it up to be useless for them."
Jytte looked at both of us. "I know the chances are slender, but will you allow me the time to look for other survivors?"
"By all means. Crowley, why don't you fix the dimensional gate, and I'll help Jytte search this place." I kicked the Grendel's body. "Do you know the dimension that gives birth to these things?"
Crowley nodded. "I tend to avoid it, but, yes." "Good. When we're done here, I want to drag this body off and dump it in its home."
Jytte frowned. "Won't that just anger these creatures?" "Could be," I smiled, "but it should also serve to remind them that Earth is where Beowulf lived. I want to remind them that forgetting that particular lesson is something that can be downright fatal."
Our search for survivors in Pygmalion's cavern proved fruitless, and a grim air settled around Jytte. Wordlessly, she listened to Crowley's simple instructions concerning dimensional walking, then helped the two of us lug the Grendel back to its home dimension. There in Grendelheim, Crowley used telekinesis to lift the dead creature into the branches of a gnarled tree, leaving it like some grotesque parody of the Pieta.
Crowley had left the dimensional gate at the Pulliam estate in a random select mode. "For this type of gate to work, there must be a link between it and the gate at the other end. Gates in RSM do not maintain a connection, and only the sending of a proper unlocking code from another gate can bring it out of that mode and under control."
"So nothing more will be heading through that gate?"
"Right. Oddly enough, that gate was not part of the estate until recently — probably after Pygmalion had abandoned it." Crowley interlaced his fingers and bridged them out in reverse, cracking the knuckles. "Draolings are not good for much, but they do have a knack for setting up makeshift gates. Theirs are of limited capabilities in terms of size and the distance over which they permit travel, but they function for Draoling purposes."
We appeared back in my office in the Lorica Citadel in Phoenix. "You mean they were not using a gate that Pygmalion had placed there?"
The occultist unbuckled his weapon's harness and set it on the table back in the conversation nook. "I saw no signs of other gates there. It may be that he doesn't know how to create gates."
Jytte shook her head. "Is that possible? Pygmalion is a Dark Lord."
"True, but he was a human being until only a few years ago. He might never have been taught how to create them." Crowley pointed toward the window and the red warning lights blinking from the maglev train circuit around the city. "Nero Loring built a dimensional gate without knowing what it was, but only because he was given the plans by an agent under Fiddleback's control. The knowledge of how to build gates is quite limited, both in depth and distribution. The vast majority of gates are little rabbit holes — shunts from one dimension to the next. Fully operational, variable-selection gates are very rare."
I shot him a suspicious glance. "But most of the ones I have seen are of that rare variety. You even own one."
Crowley smiled broadly. "Your experience is atypical because you've been running with me, and I know where most of the good gates are. And, as for the one I possess — a small one with little more than a single-person capacity — I got it as many other Dark Lords got theirs: I stole it."
The occultist opened his hands. "While you've seen a lot of functional gates, there are hundreds more that are dead. They have no control functions, so they can never created a link out to anything. Someone with a working gate can interrogate them and set up a link, which is what Pygmalion doubtless had intended the gate Nero Loring built here in Phoenix to do with a dead gate he has somewhere."
"He came damned close to succeeding."
"Agreed. The trick here is this: Fiddleback has not found an active gate large enough to move him, nor has he been able to transplant the controls and power supply from another gate to his dead one. He's stuck out there unless and until we bring him in."
Jytte frowned. "We have dismantled the controls for the maglev gate here. Does that mean it is a dead gate and could, technically speaking, still function?"
Crowley nodded. "Sure, provided someone has a power source sufficient to open it and move something that large. As we know, those power requirements are not easy to meet."
"That's good, else we'd have Dark Lords stacked up for landing approaches like planes at O'Hare in the morning." I walked around to the far side of my desk and glanced at the clock. "It's midnight now." Punching an icon on the surface of the desk, a roster came up, and I scanned it quickly, "it appears everyone is here from Japan. Bat is operational, Hal is home with his children. Dorothy is also with Hal, but Mickey and Natch are here in the citadel, as well as Vetha, Sin and Rajani."
Fiddleback Trilogy 3 - Evil Triumphant Page 21