New Night (Gothic Book 2)

by van Dahl,Fiona

  Exes pour in from two sides, flooding the little valley. After a dizzy minute of watching their rolling and writhing, he makes out a humanoid figure encased in a black, chitinous shell, fighting for her life. By its vaguely feminine outline, he decides that this must be Io. She dodges direct hits when she can, takes glancing blows when she can’t. Very little combat training, but she’s definitely fought before. For the first time, he slightly understands why Drews fears her.

  Which makes the sight of Zechariah so much more horrifying. He barely recognizes his stoner friend of the past few months. The humanoid thing below flickers in and out of the light, appearing and disappearing too fast to be seen clearly. Whatever enemy he darts past inevitably wrenches and tumbles and dies twitching in the grass. His face is a flash of killer’s eyes, dead and empty; his hands are sword and axe and spear.

  Where Io’s blows are jerky but practiced, Zechariah’s movements form a smooth and complex dance. This is not expertise born of training or experience, but of instinct. Lucas searches his memory for any mention of skilled warriors in the younger man’s family tree — duelists, maybe, or assassins.

  An ex whispers past just outside Mjolnir’s range, headed into the fray. “Are you two okay?” Lucas shouts down at them.

  Io barely dodges a stabbing leg, and he sees her gasping for breath. Zechariah focuses his efforts around her, trying to buy her time to rest, but he, too, is growing sluggish. The ground is littered with the chopped limbs and bodies of the sharps, making movement steadily more difficult.

  Lucas adjusts his beam to better light Zechariah’s path — but in doing so, notices the thick matt of black needles covering the ground in front of himself. They coalesce into vines, writhe toward him — strike him with violent déjà vu. Only Mjolnir’s glow keeps them at bay.

  Zechariah shouts in surprise. “The ground—!”

  Lucas looks up from the vines in time to see the younger man vanish into the darkness. Io manages a startled step back from the place where he was standing, and then she, too, is taken up in a blur and gone.

  “Io! Zechariah!” Lucas roars, flying to his feet and starting down the hill, no longer heeding what a danger Mjolnir might be to his friends. “Where are you?”

  The vines retreat east, and he follows hurriedly. But by the time he reaches the top of the next rise, the needles have all either disappeared or been obliterated by Mjolnir’s glow. When he stops to catch his breath, he hears nothing but the alien world’s eerie nighttime silence. The remaining exes have been slaughtered by the same unseen force that kidnapped his friends; the corpses of the entire swarm twitch in the valley behind him.

  Lucas’ heart thuds in his ears. The sky is a black bowl teeming with a trillion mocking stars and no moon. This is not the ancient Terran night under which his ancestors slept; this is Fortuna, and it will swallow him whole.

  Keep running, his instincts urge, but he might be chasing whispers in the dark. He might have already passed the others — or their silent corpses, already healing and resurrecting. He thinks of them lying still in the cool grass, resting, recovering…

  The farther he runs, the more separated they may become. And even with Mjolnir in hand, he knows isolation is dangerous on this unfamiliar planet. In the dark, there’s too much chance of walking up and accidentally obliterating them with the open hammer — or coming upon something that will not be affected.

  Also, he’s exhausted. Sleep is an absurd idea, but— He sits down hard, body wracked with violent shivers. “Adrenaline,” he mumbles, and then his eyes close on their own.

  The hero slips into the restless, dreamless sleep of an exhausted mortal.

  Zechariah and Io move east — are carried east, by force — through a curtain of mystery beyond which buzzes an incoherent static. We go to a place of prophecy. A place, A place, pla-pla-pla-pla-pla

  The wood.

  Io has spent months of nights running down dark paths toward the truth. Each babbling wordmare has brought her closer to the heart of the wood, only to banish her again. Nothing connects. There are few understandings, no satisfactions. She retreats into memory of dreams.

  She and her sister. They shared the dreams. They would stand on the edge of the wood, staring in. Each wore a long gown of white silk and lace. Her sister wore the skull of a buck as a mask; magnificent antlers crowned her, wreathed in morning glories. Io could not see her own mask, but it was light, and changed at her will.

  Her sister’s dream-memory face is hidden, but her hair and the edge of her jaw are lovely in the golden autumn light. A needle strikes Io’s heart. She misses her so badly—

  Dark sky. Stars. Io is lucid again. Something is wrong. She’s being carried.

  She spots Zechariah’s arm hanging limp on her right, wreathed in black vines.

  —the same dream for months—

  Io stands on the edge of a dark pine forest. A flood of hallucinatory babbling washes over her. She fights to keep her thoughts literal, calm, literal—

  Her sister— The needle-person she called her ‘sister’ so Lucas and Zechariah would help her. The two are not related in the human sense of the word, and yet they share blood. They share an undeniable bond. They were infected and then destroyed by the same one. They blossomed in the blood-ichor of the same one.

  And in the dream, he joins them for the first time — bare-chested, his lower half like that of a black dragon, his face and head concealed by a samurai war helmet. Into his right hand he conjures a spear of needles. He is the infector. The warrior. He loved them both and now he is gone.

  Io turns her thoughts away from him. She sucks in deep breaths and blinks her eyes as fast as she can, connecting herself with the pain and nausea racking her body. Despite her writhing, the vines hold her tightly in place, so she focuses on the stars, counting them, drawing out constellations and giving them incoherent names. “Zechariah!” she gasps. “Don’t let it suck you in!”

  For the first time, she notices the pricking pain at her temples. She twists her head around just enough to see Zechariah lying to her right, his head level with her hips. He seizes violently, and his eyes are tiny black pinpricks. His long, blond hair writhes with snakes.

  —vines in her temples—

  —running down paths between the trees, where no foot has fallen in ten thousand years. This wood once teemed with life, and then it was the epicenter of infection.

  Io’s mouth sobs. She stares blindly into the total darkness and feels the vines crawling under her scalp. A few have reached her br—

  Lucas twitches awake, grunts in surprise. Dawn light filters down over him. A mystical blue orb glows mere inches from his nose. He lies on the side of a grassy hill.

  Memory crashes down over him. With a groan, he sits up and looks around for several minutes, desperate to get his bearings.

  No one in sight, humanoid or alien. The wood looms on the eastern horizon.

  To the north is the dim peak of the lone mountain. Io mentioned that there were more portals there, in the grasslands at the mountain’s foot. He could head that way, step across and into the city, and give himself up.

  He shudders. Drews would probably shoot him on sight, just to make it stick. Earth is no safer for him than Fortuna.

  He pulls a protein bar and water bottle from the backpack, consumes them in less than a minute. After a moment’s guilt, he tosses the litter into the valley below. Without it, the backpack is finally empty enough to hold the laptop and gun; he merges the bags together.

  “Truck sure would be handy right now,” he mutters, slinging the backpack over his shoulder.

  He clips Mjolnir to his belt and sets off for the wood.

  Grass and hills.

  Nothing living.

  Nothing for miles.

  The morning is as eerily silent as was the night. No herds or swarms of monsters. No insects, for that matter.

  At one point, he comes up out of the valleys long enough to get a look around, and spots a huge giraffe-shar
p a few hundred paces north. It notices him at the same time, and they stare at each other across the gulf. At least, Lucas stares; the lamprey mouth faces him and goes completely still, but whether it can see him is a question for biologists.

  He waves Mjolnir half-heartedly, knowing he has just as much chance of attracting the thing’s attention as scaring it off.

  It doesn’t move.

  At last, his eagerness to continue east overrides his instinct not to let the monster out of his sight. He continues down into the next valley, then hurries up the side of the next hill. The moment he nears the top, he looks north, hoping to see the lamprey head still staring at him from between the high hills.

  Gone.

  He hurries on.

  The terrain flattens out, though Lucas sometimes comes upon great jagged rocks sticking up out of the soil. The last few hills are half-collapsed, their faults revealing cracked stone worn by the elements. Long ago, there was a violent earthquake here.

  His glance is ever over his shoulder, but nothing follows him out of the hill country.

  Ahead is the wood, dark and tall, stretching for miles to the north and east. Its mass is black and impenetrable, from its thick undergrowth to its high canopy. Needle vines, he decides, and prays he won’t need to enter the wood itself. Maybe his friends have only been brought to its periphery.

  As he approaches the edge and prepares to skirt it, terror rises anew in the back of his mind. What if he never finds the others? What if he wanders this empty landscape alone until he runs out of food and water? What if the portals have all closed?

  How will he survive? And when he doesn’t, who will ever find his body?

  Zechariah is an animal, fierce and powerful, struggling fruitlessly against his bonds. His body has been broken by his own thrashing.

  Somewhere above him and to the left, Io sobs quietly. Neither of them can move, but are bound to the surface of a stream of black vines. He lies still, but for the occasional twitch. Io has temporarily lost the ability to speak, and he has nothing to say, so they slide along in relative silence.

  The worst are the wires in his temples. His body automatically blocks most of the pain, but nothing can relieve the intense discomfort of their crawling and penetrating between his scalp and skull. A normal human would already be dead from blood loss.

  Lucas.

  The last few years have been hell for Zechariah, but it is only now, with the thought of Lucas bleeding out somewhere in this mass of thorns, that the young man squeezes his eyes shut and prays. Please, God, please don’t let Lucas be here with us. God, I did not know how to respect until I met him. Let me die, God, let me die in his pl—

  You Must Not Wish For Self-Destruction.

  The voice is as deep and rough as an underground earthquake. Zechariah’s teeth instantly taste of copper, and his eyes open, unfocused. Io screams inside his head, in the same place where the collapsing earth just roared.

  Io! Zechariah speaks in his mind.

  Hello? she moans, and he hears her sobbing.

  I’m here, he tells her, and is amazed by the overwhelming sense that she heard him. And then she realizes that he felt that she heard him, and her soul explodes.

  He flinches away, grimacing at the writhing under his scalp. Calm down. Calm down.

  WE HAVE TELEPATHY. I AM TALKING IN YOUR BRAIN AND FEELING YOUR BRAIN. WOW YOUR BRAIN IS NEAT. CAN YOU BE IN MY BRAIN??????????

  CALM DOWN. I’M GETTING A MIGRAINE. Stop yelling.

  I think it’s the vines. This must be the vines. We’re communicating in the—

  Yes. Yes. The vines that kidnapped us are—

  Here follows a tangle of overlapping gibbering garbage and half-starts and interrupting, until Zechariah finally snaps, END EACH SENTENCE WITH ‘STOP’ AND THEN DO NOT TALK AGAIN UNTIL THE OTHER PERSON SAYS ‘STOP’.

  Silence.

  STOP.

  Oh thank God, that was horrible. I’m sorry. Okay, so we’ve been kidnapped by vines. Telepathic vines. I can’t move. Can you? . . . uh, STOP.

  Cannot move a muscle. These head-vines are fucking ANNOYING. Is Lucas back there? STOP.

  What? No. He got left behind. I heard him yelling. That was hours ago. But I’m sure he’s fine. He has Mjolnir. He’s probably right behind us. STOP.

  Where are we going? I’ve lost all sense of direction. STOP.

  Judging from the constellations, we’re headed east-north-east, to the wood.

  Where we were—

  STOP.

  Sorry. Where we were already headed?! STOP.

  I’d rather have arrived on my own power, yes, true, STOP.

  Did it . . . Did it talk earlier? . . . Hello? Vines?

  Do Not Be Afraid.

  The voice crackles through their nervous systems. Io screams long and loud and high. Zechariah clenches his jaw shut and desperately tries to figure out how to fuck up the vines. The god talking in their heads is using the vines to take them prisoner. The moment he has a hand free, he intends to slash his way out—

  At last, Io calms down. Whoooooo, I think they released a buncha hormones ‘cause I feel greeeeeaaaaaat.

  You Are Finally Here, Dreamer.

  And You, Warrior.

  The voice pulses on each syllable, and Zechariah gets the impression that the words are being manufactured somehow. The speaker does not understand English.

  Let us go, he orders, praying that this powerful being is secretly weak and easy to intimid—

  You Must First Close the Ways.

  The portals, Io manages shakily. It’s all tied together — the dreams, the wood, the g-guardian— Are you the guardian of the wood? My sister and I have dreamed about you for months, but we never saw—

  I am Guardian of the Wood.

  The creature opens its concept to them a little. Before their mental eyes unfolds a white spider, nineteen-legged and built of pale knives.

  You’re acicular, Io realizes. You’re made of needles, like the rest of the animals on your pl—

  Tainted Ichor Sustains My Body.

  So, In Turn, My World Was Infected.

  Now There Is Another Wood.

  So, In Turn, Your Bodies Were Infected.

  Now There Is Another Guardian.

  This Plot Has Repeated Across a Billion Universes.

  Io gets excited. Now you’re talking my language! Tropes, myths, clichés—

  The Hero Travels to the Source of Infection and Finds His Analog Among the Infected.

  Tell me more! Where do we fit in?

  The Rest Is Whatever We Make of it.

  The Rest Is Whatever I Decide to Make of it With You.

  Zechariah catches glimpses of the wood to his left. They’re being carried along its edge. The sun randomly shifts position in the sky until his eyes cross trying to follow it.

  Is this the south end of the wood? Io presses. Where are you taking us?

  I Will Help You Save Your World.

  I Am Taking You to the Source.

  They come up over a ragged ridge. The landscape forms a miles-wide bowl, and they are on the southern lip. To their left, the wood stretches north and east, infested with black vines — nothing can live inside its miasma of corruption. Their kidnapper’s vines stretch out from within those infected trees like the hand of the wood itself.

  Not a bowl, Io whispers across his mind, drawing his attention forward again. Even as she says the words, he sees what she sees and understands.

  They are held prisoner at the lip of an impact crater. At its very center, the ground falls away into a pit miles deep. Whatever impacted there millennia ago immediately dug downward, infecting the planet before the dust of its arrival even settled.

  From that seed grew a spire, razor-straight, now covered in rust. As the vines carry them toward the sucking blackness of the pit, their eyes are drawn up the red and crusty side of the tower. There’s a platform at the top, large enough for several people to gather, albeit without handrails.

  Io suddenly lau
ghs. Oh, my God. I just got it. Talk about tropes! She senses Zechariah’s bafflement and asks: Have you ever read ‘The Two Towers’? Or at least seen it? STOP.

  What? Is it about 9/11? ST—

  No! What? No! Tolkien! Doesn’t this scream ‘Merry and Pippin are carried by Treebeard to witness the desolation surrounding the tower of Isengard—’

  Are you speaking English?

  The white spider reappears in their imaginations.

  This is the Source.

  You Must Close the Ways.

  Zechariah remains bound in place at the edge of the pit, but Io is lifted out over the blackness, toward the platform. Wait! she yells psychically. Does this tower control the portals? I have no idea what to do with this thing!

  You Will Interface With It.

  The vines set her down on the top platform and retreat, except for one still slotted into the skin over her left temple. She crouches low on the platform, no doubt dizzy with vertigo at the drop below. Zechariah senses her searching for controls, finding none — frustration mounting.

  How do I work this thing? And even if I figure it out, I can’t close all of the portals yet! We have friends on the other side, and we have a friend who would be trapped on this side! Anyway, we don’t belong in your world — can’t you let us back through and then close them yourself?

  Stupid question, Zechariah chides her. If it could have, it presumably would have by now.

  There’s a pause; they can almost hear the intervening translator crunching. At last:

  You Have the ‘Signature’ of Your World.

  You May Close the Ways.

  Io shakes her head. A month ago, I would have done it, and damn the consequences. But I have to rescue my sister! Do you know what a sister is?

  You Will Close the Ways.

  She looks helplessly down at Zechariah.

  I’ll do it, he tells them.

  No! Vines reach out for Io, pluck her from the platform with ease. Think of Lucas! He’ll starve if he’s trapped on this side!

  Every minute those portals are open, more humans are put at risk. If the guardian won’t listen to reason, we might as well take the option that kills the least number of people.