by David Finn
Rachel was arch. ‘You killed somebody for the stone, didn’t you?’
‘No. It pre-dates me by a thousand years. The person I inherited it from probably killed someone for it though. It’s one of our most powerful relics. One of our first.’
Rachel sank back into the couch. She gazed around the room restlessly. Her eyes lingered on the empty stage.
‘I’m going to be really disappointed if this turns out to be a sex cult or some weird coven that sacrifices virgins, and you’re all just sad, old vampires . . . which might at least explain your tastes.’
Demorn laughed. ‘It’s gone on a long time. But I’m not a vampire.’
She rapped her knuckles loudly on the hard desk. ‘This Room is as solid as a rock, to both of us sitting here, talking about our feelings.’
She motioned to indicate the Room. ‘But it’s all temporary, all of it, these decorations, my posters and my books. Even the Clubhouse itself, back in Babelzon. I bought that place myself from my earnings. This is a palace of the mind, a shifting place.’
Rachel’s purple eyes flared as her hands nervously fingered a tat on her neck. ‘I’ve seen your kind. Innocents passed through the portals. They’re all hot as hell, and Goddess-this, Goddess-that.’ Rachel raised her hands. ‘But y’know, I’ve got a snake-charmer for a father, and the only thing he worshipped was the dollar. I’m just not very religious.’
Demorn laughed loudly. ‘Believe what you like. It doesn’t worry me. We call her The Goddess, but she didn’t create the Universe, or even this Room. There have been many things called gods or devils, simply because we do not understand what they really are.’
Rachel laughed shakily. Her eyes were filled with tears and all her electronic barriers were down now. She looked much younger. Her attitude was muted, stripped away.
‘Can the Diamond really make me forget? ’Cause I want to forget . . .’
Across the red curtain came a murky, spectral image of a Pale Sun and Rachel shrank away. ‘It’s the portals, you just don’t know the things that hang out there . . .’
Demorn lightly touched her shoulder. ‘Don’t be scared. Inside the Room, our dreams and our fears come and go like ghosts.’
She held the Jade Pyramid aloft. It was huge now, and the stone’s powerful energies saturated the room.
The Pale Sun faded. Demorn’s green eyes glittered in the magic haze. Her voice was surreal and tinged with terrible truth. ‘I know the Portals. They’re a transition point, between this dimension and others. Filled with travellers and the desperate, they are a grimy place, nowhere to stay.’
Demorn placed her hand upon Rachel’s and the power of the Jade coursed through both of them with brutal strength.
‘But you know that,’ she whispered.
Rachel’s voice wavered and her hands shook. ‘I don’t like hurting people. What if I can’t kill people, will you just shoot me then?’
Demorn spoke softly, ‘Some of our best Innocents don’t kill. My brother doesn’t kill.’
‘Not you though.’
Demorn laughed, and there was a dangerous undercurrent to her voice. ‘No, not me. I’m a Sword Princess. I’m drenched in blood.’
Rachel laughed shakily. Her eyes were filled with tears and all her electronic barriers were down now. She looked very young.
Demorn brushed her hand against Rachel’s temple, murmuring in Asanti. ‘As you stand with our secrets, so you must enter the storm.’
Rachel pressed herself against the window, pulling the red curtain back, as the wild jade magic soaked through her, and her head was filled with visions.
The ocean was angry and wild, the churning waves boiling with burning stars that fell from a dark sky. She screamed to anything that would listen while the magic coursed through her body and bones, her mind and personality blown apart, helpless before the power of this hurricane.
Her final image was of Demorn, reflected in the glass, who had changed to become some dread creature with a long burning sword in her hands, and a tall, spiked crown upon her head, the sheer glass shards glowing with an ominous fire, and nothing but vengeance and death in her eyes.
2
* * *
There was no sense of time and place; Demorn was beyond that. She had been beyond that for so long.
Without conscious thought, she floated from the floor, legs crossed. The candles flickered, and diagrams formed on the carpeted floor.
Her magic eyes sparkled and the air crackled and hummed with power.
A tremor went through the Room, disturbing the very air itself. The walls shimmered and dissolved.
Rachel had disappeared.
Demorn’s tattoo burnt savagely. Her heart and soul flowed with the power of the Goddess and the Club.
She could feel the burning power flowing outward into the bodies of the other Innocents, all who had sworn, all who had kept their vows, and those who had broken them.
She felt the touch of minds she had not seen since before she left, she could feel some were stronger, some were weaker and filled with doubts . . . and many had changed so radically she barely recognised them.
Demorn could feel the surprise and rising euphoria in the Club, all those who thought she was either dead or lost in the endless multiple dimensions of darkness and confusion.
And so Demorn floated into the Cavern, the very heart of the Club, for the first time in over two years.
Demorn saw two glistening pods in a dark room.
She walked across the soft, black carpet towards them. Each was a different kind of home.
She was young and playing with the Dead King by the beach.
She was nineteen and in bed with a strange girl in some random city on an old mission, talking about how to her the ocean was filled with stars, trying not to cry, because she felt this was a moment where something true was said — something bittersweet and laced with truth and her dreams.
Demorn got out of the bed, the night air cold on her skin, the girl behind her murmuring as she pulled the blanket across her.
Demorn went to the window, the frost was cold against her hand. She was wishing she could leave this place and be somewhere else. She wondered what the future held.
The window was a mad blur of stars and jade and Demorn looked into it, getting drunk on the visions, before finally going back to bed, into the arms of the stranger.
In the room the two pods glistened.
Her mind blanked out to the black nothingness of dreams we forget as they live so far and so deep in the past.
Rachel stood in a huge cave. Her eyes could not see through swirling smoke and vapours to the ceiling. The air was deathly cold. She looked around, terrified. The stone walls glistened with translucent carvings, glowing in the rock.
Water washed against rock, the tang of hot springs assailing her nose. Rachel clambered up, and saw a shining silver lake over the outcrop. The roof of the cave was open, and in the sky there was a huge shimmering planet, circled by twin moons.
‘Hello, Sister.’
Rachel turned around. She saw the Princess of Swords. A tall, spiked glass crown sat on Demorn’s head, her long brunette hair falling freely on her shoulders.
She wore a long red dress; she looked both magnificent and deadly. A black handled katana hung in a scabbard on her side.
‘Where are we?’ Rachel said in a frightened voice. ‘Is this where you kill me?’
‘The Room is just a dream, a shared figment of imagination.’ Demorn held up the glowing jade stone in her left hand. ‘We’re still in the Diamond, talking.’
Rachel looked up at the high stone walls. ‘So what is this? Another dream?’
Demorn smiled with grim triumph. ‘No. This is the heart, the real core of the club.’
‘I don’t understand. I thought you guys were just like bandits or assassins or something!’
Rachel looked in wonder at the walls of the throne room. A multitude of swords were stuck into the cavern walls like deadly thorns,
glowing with different shades of power. The blades were varying sizes and makes, and Rachel realised with a slowly dawning horror that this cavern was a nest of swords, somehow alive.
Demorn smiled. ‘I guess it is a lot to take in.’
At the end of the room a thin golden throne stood, fragile and beautiful at the same time. It seemed to wash her eyes with a welcome warmth, making Rachel feel at ease.
Demorn grasped a silver blade above her throne, the sword sliding sleekly from the stone. The blade shone brightly in the translucent light.
Demorn’s eyes glittered as she stood up, the red dress glittering as she moved. The blade swung lightly in her hand.
On instinct, Rachel knelt before Demorn, her hands shaking, all her poise and cool gone, leaving just blind fear.
Try as she might, Demorn couldn’t resist the weird surge of pride shuddering through her. She laid a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder.
‘Rachel, if you live through this, I will never ask you to kneel again.’
Rachel looked up. Demorn’s green eyes blazed into her soul. She felt fissions of fear ripple and swallow her.
‘Who the hell are you?’
Demorn waved casually toward the nest of swords clustered around the tall golden throne.
‘I’m the Princess of the Swords. Surely you can see that now.’
Rachel got up unsteadily. ‘The throne scares me. The swords scare me. The crown freaks me OUT. It’s spooky, this whole room is SPOOKY.’
Demorn eyed her carefully.
Slowly, she took the crown off. The glass sparkled in her eyes. ‘Of course the cave is spooky,’ she said. ‘It’s filled with ghosts.’ She whispered, ‘Many thousand of miles did Asanti wander, into this city of gems and lies . . .’
‘What is that?’
‘A poem I learned from a dead king, long ago.’
Rachel sighed, confused. She walked over to the water, away from the gleaming throne. She skimmed a pebble over the smooth silver lake, watching it bounce and then fall beneath the hot, steaming water.
She ran her hands through her short hair. ‘Dead kings. Weird poems in languages I don’t know but suddenly understand. I don’t have magic powers, I don’t kill people for a living. I don’t get what it means, I don’t know what I’m doing here!’
Rachel suddenly saw her glowing face, reflected in the shining pool. She was unmarked, every tattoo upon her had been wiped away. ‘I’ve lost my tats. I feel . . . so naked, so damn weak . . .’
Demorn followed her over the outcrop. ‘It’s the magic of the ceremony, the magic of this place. It strips us away, leaves us naked and pure.’
Rachel looked at her miserably. Her voice felt very small and removed from her body. ‘I hate being naked. I’m scared of your ceremonies, Princess.’
Rachel looked up at the shining twin moons in the dark air above the silver lake, circling a huge shimmering world.
‘Wow, I don’t even know what the hell that is.’
‘Asanti. My home-world.’
Rachel turned. ‘You’re an alien?’
Demorn sank the silver blade into Rachel’s breast, her loud screams wracked with pain, echoing all through the wide cavern. She pushed the blade in deep. It was a bloodless cut, but filled with pain.
Rachel howled in agony, her eyes clouding with the brutal pain. In her chest, Demorn felt the same searing pain that Rachel felt, every heartbeat of it.
That was the price of being the leader of the Innocents. Only her training and her willpower prevented her from crying aloud herself.
Rachel, dying as she gazed into the searing eyes of the Sword Princess, knew that Demorn felt the same pain, the same things. Without the electronic tats, there was no hiding place. In that final moment, every secret she owned belonged to Demorn, all her life.
Demorn’s mind felt the cold of the portal jump-station, the desperation of the hustlers, the horror of home life with Daddy, the terror of the ice cavern. Moments of vivid joy strewn through bleakness. Disconnected friends, a boy with a pretty face on repeat, slowly fading into distorted, test-pattern memories, bittersweet childhood songs.
Demorn withdrew the silver sword in one motion and threw the shining blade into the silver lake.
Rachel’s body was spasming with pain. The dying young woman pointed with shaking fingers.
Demorn looked over the steaming water. Two figures, dressed in white, stood in the shallows of the lake, white cowls drawn over their faces.
Demorn’s mind was still hooked into Rachel’s, and she could hear her terrified thoughts, Are they angels? Are they angels?
Demorn warded her fingers in a protective gesture.
‘No, not angels, they are evil things.’
Demorn’s magic eyes focused. She could see the thin, corrupted skin beneath their robes. They were Pale Suns all right, appearing ghostly in the caverns of the Club.
But then, they both drew back the cowls and she gasped at their beauty. They were like no Pale Sun she had ever seen, faces untouched by their corruption, truly beautiful to gaze upon. But nothing could hide the naked greed in their eyes.
Demorn saw it. She knew corruption lay beneath the beatific visages. She knew their evil.
Anger surged through Demorn. ‘Leave this place, it is not yours and never shall be!’ She placed a hand upon the katana, and the water churned, steam frothing from the surface.
They vanished, flickering away like virtual ghosts, disquiet on their perfect faces.
‘Why? Why did you do it?’ Rachel spoke with an anguished sigh, every word an effort.
Demorn held her like a broken doll.
‘I can’t take traitors in, not a single one. They would kill the Club.’
Rachel laughed bitterly, her whole body aching, inside and out. ‘Did I pass? Or am I a traitor?’
Demorn tossed Rachel into the steaming water, her body light as a doll. The lake heaved at her arrival, waves rolling high and heavy in the cavern, smashing against the rocks, steam and spray billowing into Demorn’s face.
Rachel looked up at Demorn, still moaning with the pain. Her clothes were ripped. She felt for her chest and there was a angry, fresh scar above her heart.
‘I’m so fucking scared of you,’ Rachel whispered. ‘Did somebody betray you really badly once?’
Demorn smiled her scary smile. ‘Of course they did.’
Rachel coughed into the water, woozy and punch drunk.
‘Is that your excuse for being such a psycho bitch?’
Demorn took the Jade Pyramid from her jacket. It was now a neat triangle, burning with green fire.
‘You know, in the urban legends they pass around in Babelzon, I weigh up the soul. I make the final call on whether you die or join us. Maybe you’ve heard the whispers.’
The Diamond shuddered in her hand, the light streaming from it. Rachel’s face was tight with terror.
‘The truth is much more simple than that.’
As she spoke, the Jade Pyramid lit up to a magnificent level of brightness. Rachel staggered back as the colour blazed through her mind, terror tore through her heart. Moving fast, Demorn caught her thin body before she fell back into the water. The girl’s clothes were in tatters, literally torn away by the power of the Diamond. Not a single electronic tat remained on Rachel’s face.
She opened her mouth in a silent shout, feeling all her angles shatter and her shadows thrown into the searing light. I’ve never been so open . . .
Her eyes widened as she suddenly beheld the true aspect of Demorn, the shining Diamond lighting up all her mysteries. The girl in the comic book t-shirts was just an image, an illusion. Rachel saw past all that, she saw the shimmering Princess, floating inside and out, wearing her cruel, tall spiked crown of glass.
Demorn wore a sleek blood-red dress, a lithe body surrounded by a shield of spectral swords, circling with perfect menace. And her true face was one of Death and Justice intertwined, a fluid shimmering skull-face flickering to bizarrely rotted flesh.
How they cannot know that, how can they not know . . .
The Princess said nothing as the power of the Jade flooded Rachel’s mind, cleansing everything, bathing her in a raw, pure magic.
She was in the room of an old friend, listening to the crescendo of old Beatles songs. She was singing along and smiling. She was filled with a feeling of incredible freedom, there was no boundary, no sadness, just this trembling, heightened emotion that she was in a huge, happy crowd, singing to ‘Hey Jude’ as the skies themselves trembled before the power of the song.
The vision flickered, away from crowds and beautiful songs.
Darkness, hot steam, the cavern. An aching head. Silence. Rachel groaned. She was drenched in the hot water.
She looked up. A legion of ghostly faces shimmered around the Princess of Swords.
The faces stretched back to the beginning, into the deep darkness beyond the shining Princess, they were women and men, humans and alien, gathered around the cavern’s depth, an army of soldiers and magicians, wearing so many different banners . . . the beginning was so long ago and far away, she couldn’t even be bothered remembering it.
The lake vanished and they were lying in a room with thick white carpet. Rachel’s mind felt like a great, empty desert.
Demorn sat in a comfortable chair. Her legs were crossed delicately. She wore a Wrecking Ball t-shirt, and flowing harem pants.
Her hair was shorn short, the long brunette locks gone. She wore her battle-mask, the disfigured, insane skull-face shifting restlessly across her features. On a coffee table next to her, lay the tall glass Crown, almost casually thrown aside.
The Jade Diamond lay in her hand, shrinking. Rachel watched as it miniaturised into a tiny pyramid.
Demorn carefully placed it upon the thick golden necklace around her neck.
‘Will you kill me?’ Rachel said softly. ‘Is that what you do when you can’t be sure?’
‘You’re close to the edge, it’s true.’
Demorn took off the mask. Her eyes were green fire. Ghosts danced around her.