by Dante King
“What in the fuck!” Hana ejaculated.
I must have taken her by surprise—it was a rare day that the Vetruscan bearmancer used profanities like that.
“Only me,” I said.
The three of us hurtled in a tight arc around the edge of the harem grounds, the extra weight slowing my speed considerably and sapping my considerable mana reserves.
“Why the hell haven’t you got out of here yet?” I asked in a slightly strained voice.
“There were too many of them,” Zala said. “Too many catmancers did not believe me. They thought me to be a simple traitor. We got bogged down and then separated.”
“All right, then let’s reunite you!” I said, spying Tamsin, Renji, and Kakra down below. “Then high tail it out of here. I’ll draw off the fucking super Shaykh.”
“That thing is Shaykh Antizah?!” Hana gasped looking back over her shoulder.
There wasn’t time to answer. With all my friends still in the vicinity, I had to get the Shaykh out of the picture so that they could concentrate on getting free of the palace compound.
Chapter 20
I dropped Hana and Zala. The two women plummeted down and crashed neatly into some of the three score guards that were trying to encircle them. In an instant, the whole collection of mancers and guards were a seething mass of magic and madness. Guards screamed as the mancers dispatched them with a combination of clinical precision and overwhelming brutality.
By then, though, I was gone, cutting around in the air to zone in on Shaykh Antizah.
I found him, shouting at a fresh legion of his place guard, trying to convince them that he was their shaykh and that they should follow him into death and beyond. The men and women looked terrified, though, judging by their faces. I think they were having a hard time accepting the fact that this hellish apparition was the once handsome shaykh that many of them had revered as a god. There were a couple of mutilated and broken bodies nearby, which told me that some of the guards had decided that they weren’t going to take the word of some monster and had tried to cut the Shaykh down. Even as I watched, Shaykh Antizah stomped on the back of one woman who was trying to crawl away from him. Even from thirty yards away, I heard her spinal cord snap with the sound of a forty-five going off.
“I am your Grand Master, you pathetic worms!” Shaykh Antizah spat at them in his new bass voice. “You will hear me and obey! You will heurgh!”
The last word was lost in a surprised gulping noise as I flew over at forty miles per hour, looped the chain of my Harpoon stunner around his neck, and yanked his big red ass into the air.
“Fuck, you’re a fat motherfucker now!” I groaned as my arms took the strain.
We flew over the intense fighting in the harem courtyard and out over the palace walls. I wasn’t too careful to make sure that Shaykh Antizah had a turbulence free flight. In fact, I went out of my way to make sure that I swung him into as many immoveable structures as possible—one of the corner guard towers for example.
Roofing slates rained down into the street below, causing pedestrians to look up and gawp, or else run for cover.
I dropped altitude and smashed my struggling, choking enemy through the side of a building I suspected might have been a tannery, if the stink that arose from the busted roof was anything to go by.
Antizah was kicking and struggling on the end of the occult pink chain wrapped around his neck like a fish that had been foul-hooked. Like I had noted, he was much heavier in his new form, but freeing himself was made even harder by the fact that every now and again, I shot a burst of electrifying mana down through the chain that connected the two of us.
His constant spluttering growling would rise in pitch whenever I zapped him and his legs would stiffen and his arms tighten up. It was at these moments that I plowed his ass into a structure of some kind as he was least able to protect himself or fend off it.
They say that all good things must come to an end, and so it proved in my game of shaykh strangling. Just when I thought the bastard dangling below me was going to have the good sense and class to asphyxiate, he only went and ruined everything.
I was at least a half mile from the harem when Shaykh Antizah gave up his tactic of trying to unravel the chain from around his neck and tried a new tack. He suddenly stopped scrabbling at his throat and quickly climbed hand-over-hand up the chain. When he was about halfway up, he let go and let gravity take me.
“What the hell are you doi—” I said.
When he got toward the bottom of the chain, he grabbed it and yanked.
Gravity and the man’s own prodigious strength combined to pull me clean out of the sky.
The two of us fell fast, flailing, and went through the side of a temple like a dud bomb. We crashed through sandstone masonry, shattering blocks as big as garbage cans, sending dust billowing into the night.
Citizens going about their legitimate nightly business screamed and ran for cover. Slabs of stone thundered down into the street, crushing vendors’ stalls as their owners sprinted away. The stained-glass window on one side of the temple burst outward like a multicolored bubble, shards of glass as big as a man dropping into the street, one of which cut an ill-fated and decrepit mule cleanly in half.
I was tough, but I felt that impact. I narrowly avoided quite a headache when a slab of masonry fell toward me as I lay in the street catching my breath. I had to strain my reflexes and strength to the utmost to get my legs up in time and kick it as hard as I could so that it split and dropped to either side of me.
I hauled myself to my feet. I was covered in dust and looked like I had just walked out of a flour factory explosion.
Through the fine particles that filled the street, I scanned for any sign of my opponent.
Something did loom up out of the dust.
A horse drawn carriage spinning through the air like it had been picked up by a tornado.
A burst of Forcewave punched it back the way that it had come, and it disappeared into the murk with a rending crunching crash of splintering timber. I followed it and came across Shaykh Antizah picking himself up out of the mess. One of the carriage wheels had looped over his head, but he only had to flex his mighty arms a little to burst out of it with the ease of someone breaking a rubber band apart with his hands.
“I’m going to put you through hell for what you’ve done here tonight, Dragonmancer,” the monstrous figure told me when he saw me stalking toward him. “Then I shall put the rest of your countrymen through it after you.”
I snorted. “I’ve been through hell, buddy.” My eyes burned with a hatred for this thing that had once been a man. “There’s a secret to surviving it; you just keep going until you emerge from the other side.”
Privately, I was racking my brain for anyway to bring this fucking guy down. I wouldn’t say that hope was fading in my heart—it’d be a dark day indeed before that happened—but I was running out of ideas.
“Anyone got any inspiration?” I asked my dragons in the seclusion of my own mind.
There was a chorus of mutterings that I took to mean that they were on the case.
They knew my thoughts, and I was thinking that it would be a real treat just to let them all loose so that they could barbecue Antizah.
So that’s exactly what I did.
All six dragons materialized before me, an array of splendid colors and shapes and sizes. Each dragon let loose with their customary flesh-broiling breath, covering the Shaykh in flames. Together, the six dragonfire combined into something combustible, and there came an ear-splitting explosion.
And what an explosion it was.
The entire street ignited. There was a colossal roaring sound, like ten prides of lions being fed into a rocket thruster, and the very air ignited in an expanding sheet of bright flame.
The shockwave lifted me off my feet and threw me some thirty feet backward into the city square. Hot air buffeted me and dust choked me as the street that the Shaykh had been standing in turned into an
oven.
Buildings toppled into the road. Carts, stalls, pallets, crates, and everything else that wasn’t fixed to anything solid was thrown into the air or obliterated. In that street, night turned to day for about five seconds.
Five seconds.
It felt a lot longer.
When the pall of flame had cleared and the dust had settled, the only thing that could be heard was the distant sound of panicking people, the odd scream, and the far-off noise of something heavy crashing down in an adjacent street after a brief and unexpected visit to the stars.
I pushed myself to my feet with a slight groan.
I was tired. I was tired of fighting for the day. I hadn’t thought it possible, but I was damn well sick and tired of cracking that scumbag, Antizah in his hideous visage.
I wanted him gone, relegated to my past, so that I can get on with the important things in life. Like breaking the tradition of slavery that he had instituted amongst the catmancers. And not having to ever see him again.
I was also keen for a drink. A drink and some time spent with the fine women that I had come on this adventure with. Not to mention the new female acquaintance that I had made: Zala.
I straightened up and scraped my tongue with my teeth. I spat ash, dust, and the gods knew what else out onto the floor, backed up a few paces, and leaned gratefully on the edge of a well that was the focal point of this particular plaza.
My dragons had all been banished back into their crystals a split-second before the explosion. And good thing, too, since I didn’t want to know what would have happened to them had they been caught in it.
I did a mental role call and found that they were all still alive and kicking.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Looking around, I could see that the stacked houses that would have passed for apartments back in L.A. were crammed with citizens craning their heads out of the windows to see what the hell had just happened.
Spot fires illuminated the street as well as the plaza in which I stood. Raising my eyes to the night sky, I could see that there were a few fingers of black smoke reaching up to touch the celestial heights. I guessed if you followed those smoke trails you could trace where the Shaykh and I had had our fight.
Man, I was glad to be rid of that mother—
“Dad…” Brenna said in the back of my head.
There was a tall figure striding through the smoke. It was lit quite theatrically by the fires behind it.
“Don’t be Shaykh Antizah, don’t be Shaykh Antizah, don’t be Shaykh Antizah,” I murmured to myself under my breath.
It was Shaykh Antizah.
I knew Akrit was an exotic place, but there simply couldn’t be two figures in the whole land, or anywhere for that matter, with a face that looked like it could get its owner arrested for indecent exposure if he stuck it out of a window.
Shaykh Antizah did not look quite as composed as he had done pre-conflagration. He was completely nude for one thing, his robe having been burned away by the epic dragonfire explosion. It’s a tricky thing to maintain the same level of awe-inspiring dread when you’ve got your big red ass out on show for the world to see.
The guy was tough, I had to hand it to him. Even the toughest brute, though, was going to be affected by a street-killing explosion. You can’t have that much fire, that much heat, that much flying debris all coalescing on you at once, no matter how big a magical badass you are, without some serious repercussions.
Still, he came limping out of the smoke and dust of the firelit night gamely enough. As he drew closer to me, I could see at a glance that one of his pointy ears had been totally shredded and hadn’t grown back. His left arm also hung limply at his side, the bottom half of it looking like it had been put through a sausage making machine.
Shaykh Antizah stopped about twenty yards away from me and regarded me through eyes that looked like twin pools of tar. His slit nostrils were opening and closing at the end of his bloody snout. His teeth were still bared in a grimace of rage. His one good, red-fingered hand clenched and unclenched, as if he were imagining squeezing my eyes out of my head with every other breath.
He looked, in a word, pissed.
“Well,” I said lightly, gesturing south of his waist, “I see that as fucked up as you are, you at least still have your cock and balls.” I gave him a cheery thumbs-up. “That’s something at least.”
The Shaykh said nothing, but I heard that Harley-Davidson Fat Boy rumble start up in his throat again—a sure sign that I was standing on his last nerve.
“This is only going to end up one way if you hang around here, Shaykh Antizah,” I said loudly, so that my voice carried to all those citizens of Akrit who were hanging out of their windows, watching the scene unfold. “You’re going to die. Even if you were to best me here, and let’s face it, that’s unlikely, your subjects aren’t going to put up with any more of your tyrannical shenanigans, are they?”
The Shaykh opened his fang-filled mouth and barked, “They will endure whatever their Shaykh asks and requires them to endure. That is their purpose! That is why they were brought about—to serve me!”
“Sweet deal,” I replied in a blasé voice, “for you, that is. Funny thing is, I’ve always thought that a ruler’s duty is to serve his people. was your function and responsibility, Shaykh, to earn the love and loyalty of your citizens. Not to coerce them into obeying your every whim. not to force them into slavery!”
I shouted this last word angrily, and only partly so that all those listening would not miss it. I was angry. You couldn’t just go around taking peoples’ God-given right to live the lives they wanted. We all only got to go around this world once—as far as anyone knew. No one person should ever think they have the power and right to take another person’s life and use it as an extension of their own.
“It is the way that I have decreed it,” the Shaykh snarled, “and my word is law!”
“Law!” I spat contemptuously. “Law is easy to jot down on paper. But it’s a much harder thing to actually govern.”
“They will look upon me, in my new form, and they won’t dare to countermand my orders or disobey my commands,” Shaykh Antizah roared at me.
“I think they’re more likely to look at you and throw up in their own mouths,” I said.
“I will be able to put Akrit under a control the likes of which it has never been put under before,” Shaykh Antizah continued in his deep bass voice. “Everything in its proper place. Every man, woman, and infant doing exactly what they should be doing, when they should be doing it.”
“According to you.”
“According to their revered and venerated Shaykh,” the demon-faced Shaykh replied harshly.
“You’re basically ticking all the boxes required to be a fucking A-class tyrant. You know that, don’t you?”
“I am their protector!” Shaykh Antizah bellowed at me, taking a step toward me.
He’s close, he’s right on the edge, I thought to myself. Almost right where I want him. On the cutting edge where I can bleed him.
“That’s the classic thing all tyrants say,” I said. “They always come across as the great protectors who rid their people or land of something or other, and then you know what happens? They turn out to be fucking worse than whatever scourge it was that they convinced their people that they helped them out with.”
The Shaykh took another step.
“You’re nothing more than an asshole who’s good at doing his own public relations campaigns,” I said. “Let me guess, you’re going to try and defeat me and my friends and then blame this whole shitshow on us? Huh? And then you’ll invite your Shadow Nations pals over and that’ll be that—Akrit ruined. And now look at you, you’ve taken the first step down the road to Balls-up City; you’ve fashioned yourself into the semblance of what you think some godking looks like, isn’t that it?”
Shaykh Antizah snarled at me. His top lip was quivering, like a dog that’s seconds away from sinking its teeth into the meat of your calf
.
“I’m telling you, dickhead, your good people aren’t going to stand for it. And now that me and my friends have freed the catmancers, there’s no way you’re going to be able to hold onto your power.”
The battered and bloody Shaykh let out a great slobbering, howling roar of ire. He launched himself at me, his one busted arm swinging behind him as he loped like a greyhound across the space that divided us, his bright red torso ravaged by fire and magic. His gleaming all-black eyes were wide and mad.
I let him come on.
And he leapt at me, as I knew he would. His one good arm was outstretched, his long red fingers reaching for my throat, the black claws glinting like nine-inch nails in the firelight.
And I used Blink to teleport backward, onto the other side of the well that I had been leaning against.
Shaykh Antizah dove into space, the madness not leaving his eyes for a second. He hung over the midnight-black hole for just a second, and in that second, we exchanged glances that told one another that we would hate and despise one another until our dying days.
Not too much longer, in his case.
The seven-foot demon shaykh dropped into the beckoning abyss of the well. He didn’t scream or anything, but he did let loose an enraged snarl like a hyena that’s just been kicked out of a butcher’s shop.
He fell away from me into the darkness and disappeared.
I looked down into the impenetrable blackness. Far below, I saw sparks erupt and the sound of tortured stone drifted up to my ears.
“Thought so,” I said to myself. “You can’t keep a good psycho down.”
And I conjured two Entropic Mines into my hands and dropped them into the well. The two discs, wreathed in an ethereal silver-black mist fell into the darkness. Down, down, down they went, heading for the scrabbling, clawing, snarling in the dark below.
Then they went off.
I watched for as long as I could, but there came a point a couple of seconds in when I was compelled to step hurriedly backward from the well. It was as the mines started sucking in the very interior of the well itself, liquidizing and crushing the bricks down, compressing them into a far smaller mass than they were ever intended to take on—along with the late Shaykh Antizah.