“What’s in there?”
“Another ancient shrine—there are at least fourteen still intact.”
“How do I get rid of the mar—” Jerlo stopped and stared at the downward pointing star circumscribed by a circle. The steel blasphemy hung over an altar until Cinder yanked it down. She hefted it testing its balance.
“Yes, it’s a shrine to the Adversary. Keep moving.” Rat Woman propelled him on.
“People used to worship the Adversary?”
“Yes.”
“Why the hell would anyone want to do that?”
Rat Woman shrugged as she surveyed the fraying network of bridges for a way out. Light glinted off the circular three-foot blasphemy Cinder was aiming at them.
“Get down!” Jerlo knocked Rat Woman down onto the pots-and-pan bridge and was surprised to feel supple flesh under his palm. He hooked an arm around her waist and gripped the rope. The Adversary’s symbol struck one of the support ropes, rocking the bridge. But its dull edge didn’t sever it—Thank God.
The steel monstrosity sailed out of this shrine into another one. Enraged her toy had failed to find its mark, Cinder punched through another column as flames erupted from her bare, blocky feet. A white-faced Hadrovel clung to a nearby bridge as its main support toppled sideways. Insect Man grabbed for him but missed. The psychopath vanished into a cloud of plaster dust, and smoke as the bridge collapsed.
But the fall wouldn’t kill him. That fiend would just shrug it off.
“I’ve got to get down there. I can’t let him escape.”
“He won’t. There’s only one exit.” Rat Woman nodded to a dark smudge hot-footing it through the gap. Something big sailed over his head.
Like a giant chakram, the Adversary’s symbol cleaved through the drifting dust heading for the cinder block horror knocking down an adjacent column. Flames jetted out of its downward pointing star as it struck Cinder in the back. Howling, she slammed into the ground cracking it as fire consumed her. The Adversary’s sigil burned on top of the thrashing golem in an eerie reversal of the sacrifice that had brought its maker into this world.
“Do they summon demons here?” Jerlo asked while the bridge bucked like a living thing.
Rat Woman shook her head. “They can’t. We,” she gestured to the flying Insect Man who was trying to steady the bridge, “destroyed the summoner’s book.” She crawled forward brushing her shapely backside against his chest. The former minion wore nothing under her tunic because there was nothing to hide—just smooth skin bereft of hair and orifices.
She’s not human, Jerlo reminded himself. Like an animated doll, she was demon-made for a reason. What purpose had she served? Who was her master now? Was she as independent as she claimed? He cast his eyes away and stared at a tall wraith in an ankle-length cloak. The Kid tilted his head back, so his glowing green eyes met Jerlo’s. He might look like Sarn, but he was another figment of this phantasmagorical place.
“Did you find a book?” the Sarn lookalike asked as he faded out. “I think the summoner used it.” His eyes remained long after he’d gone fixing Jerlo with that intense stare.
Are you trying to tell me something Kid? Jerlo caught Rat Woman’s arm when she rose and turned her to face him. “Did a boy with glowing green eyes destroy your maker?”
“Zail? Yes, how did you know about that?”
Stunned, she stared at him with those eerie mirrored eyes. Only the merest suggestion of a pupil interrupted the twin reflections of Jerlo’s face.
“Because it’s my lot in life to bail him out of trouble.” Jerlo shook his head and followed her into the next temple where he froze.
Of course, he would end up here in the Hall of Memory. It was kismet, and the irony of it made Jerlo turn a baleful glare at the ceiling and the God laughing at him. Shoulders squared, Jerlo stepped off the rickety platform onto another suspension bridge, this one made of washboards. It was penance time.
Rat Woman paused unnerved by the tree’s behavior. “What is that thing?”
“The Tree of Memory, there are groves of those blood-suckers all over Shayari. Didn’t think I’d see one until I was knocking on Death’s door.” Jerlo shivered from more than the cold seeping into his wet clothes.
“What do you mean?”
“It stores memories. Theoretically, if someone knew how to access their network, he or she could view the past through the eyes of those who lived it.”
Rat Woman shuddered. “Is that a common practice?”
Before Jerlo could answer, a fiery wreck bearing a vaguely human form burst through a wall and knocked over a statue of Genar, the once proud god of memory. Thick clouds of acrid smoke enveloped an angry, dark smudge until Cinder exploded out of it. Her windmilling arms tangled in the ropes holding the bridge aloft. The charred slash of her mouth twisted into a cruel smile as the fire licking her pebbled skin ignited the bridge.
Jerlo fumbled for Vanya’s knife while the bridge swayed under him. If he could just lay two fingers on the damned thing—shit! The knife slid out of his pocket and tumbled end over end refracting the lumir light.
Rat Woman swung down, holding on with just her pale, hairless legs. She pawed at the air desperate to reach the knife before the fire reached them, but she missed by an arm’s length. A black cloud separated from the plume of smoke rising from Cinder’s struggling body. It shot over the grasping minion’s shoulder and caught the knife. The swarm outlined a human shape as Insect Man flew, knife extended, to cut the ropes.
“Hold tight.” Rat Woman firmed her grip.
While Insect Man sawed at the ropes holding the bridge together, the fire raced toward them. Unable to take the strain, the last line snapped just as Cinder pulled all her flaming bulk onto the bridge’s sagging middle. The two halves parted, flinging her into a wall. Her smoking carcass flopped into a fountain destroying part of its basin.
Maybe the hulking wretch had taken all the damaged she could because she lay there twitching amid a stream of escaping water. Flames still gnawed on her torso and the exposed parts of her limbs, but she didn’t get up.
Was the monster dead? Hand over hand, Jerlo pulled himself onto the listing platform that connected to another bridge. Keeping Cinder in sight, he zagged across the long, narrow box of the Hall of Memory to another platform. Rat Woman followed close behind. So did the hungry fire. Insect Man hovered over them beating his wings to keep it from spreading, but his efforts only stalled the inevitable.
“Go!” Rat Woman pushed Jerlo’s shoulder.
“Which way?”
“Take the right hand one.”
The one that zigged over the Tree of Memory, just great. Its blood-sucking branches angled toward the bridge swinging over it offering to catch them. Jerlo hustled past it then cursed. Below, a black substance crawled over Cinder snuffing out the remaining flames. No doubt the vile stuff was reviving her too. Indeed, a moment later, Cinder thrashed back into consciousness destroying another statue of Genar in the process.
“Why can’t dead things stay dead?” Jerlo glanced at Rat Woman, but her face had become more contoured, more human during the chase. The alteration startled him more than her gaze flicking away to hide her reaction to Cinder’s miraculous recovery.
“Keep going. We’re only halfway through.”
Jerlo nodded, but the sight of Cinder rising from the water, charred and seething, arrested him. She was a roasting amalgam of coal on legs as she barreled through a column. Flames geysered up from the ground punishing her for damaging this holy place. But Cinder just cackled at the blue-white conflagration feeding on the black fluid restoring her.
“Is that all you got, you worthless dog?”
Cinder spat then dropped an elbow on a marble altar cracking it in half. She threw the right side at the raven-headed column Hadrovel was rounding, collapsing it and the bridge it supported. Somehow that fiend clung to the swaying ropes and pulled himself onto the next crossing.
“Stop,” ordered a statue of Gen
ar uncurling from his meditative pose.
“No.” Cinder chucked the other half of the altar at the Tree of Memory standing somehow untouched in the center of the room. But Genar’s statue appeared in front of the tree. He caught the projectile and turned his burning green eyes on Cinder. She roared and charged the living statue.
“It’s a golem,” Rat Woman whispered in awe.
Apparently, the old gods had them too. “Let’s go before we’re buried alive.”
Jerlo seized the guide rope as the bridge tipped sideways thanks to an avalanche of sacred stone glancing off it. More rocks fell from the widening hole in the ceiling.
Cinder burst out of the pile dust-covered and smoking. After a moment, those unquenchable flames flared up all over her body again. Since Genar was an earth deity, not a fire god, neither he nor his golem was turning Cinder into a lumbering torch. Was there another player in this sacred maze?
Jerlo struggled to find purchase. His hands were sliding across a spinning rolling pin. God only knew why Rat Woman and Insect Man had included it when constructing the bridge. Under his dangling feet, Genar tackled Cinder to the ground. They struggled for dominance as she shrieked and punched at the effigy strangling her. Back and forth they rolled until Cinder’s fire-ravaged body ended up on top. Her back slammed into another fountain. Water flowed over her dousing the flames as she laid into the golem under her caving his head in.
Oh shit, the abomination was going to win. Jerlo swung his legs up and wrapped them around a sink. He swallowed the comment that provoked as the smoke wafting off Cinder choked him.
“We’ve got to get out of here before the whole place comes down.” Dirt smudged Rat Woman’s face. Her silver eyes widened in alarm. “Lean hard to the left!” she shouted as part of the ceiling mosaic fell onto the bridge, overbalancing it.
The bridge swung about wildly as Jerlo struggled to hold on, but his legs were slipping off the porcelain sink. Below, the tussling golems slammed each other through walls destabilizing them too. Tiles fell like ruby tears, sparkling as they refracted the lumir glow. They ringed Genar’s golem as Cinder raised him above her head. Her face was cracked, and one side had sheared off, but enough of her lips remained to quirk up in a cruel parody of a smile. She turned, displaying her thrashing captive then slammed his back onto her thigh breaking his spine.
Rat Woman’s hand grasped Jerlo’s calf. “Let go. Only the ground is consecrated, not the chairs. We can use them to leapfrog to the next chamber.” Her silver eyes reflected his fear. “We have to get out of here.”
Jerlo nodded. Thirty-feet away, Cinder stomped on the lifeless body of Genar’s golem. It was now or never.
Without waiting for a verbal acknowledgment, Rat Woman used the guide ropes to control her slide. Still, those ropes had to be burning her bare thighs. Thank God, she still had those gloves protecting her hands.
Jerlo had no gloves, so he kept his hands loose and let his trouser-clad legs do all the work. By the time he landed, Rat Woman was scampering up a rope in the next shrine. Hadrovel and Insect Man must already have crossed over, but he was stuck on the last row of pews staring at a seven-foot gap of foot-searing flooring.
Dust choked the air. Jerlo coughed and shook his head at the distance. He couldn’t jump that far unaided, not with his short legs. So he tilted his head back and appealed to a higher power for aid.
“Lord, I could use some help right about now. Just ignore the demon mark thing. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m still your man if you’ll have me.”
Jerlo pivoted in time to see a soaked and smoldering Cinder crush Genar’s beatific face. The singed eye she trained on him had murder in it until a serrated maple leaf struck it, blinding her. She pawed at the leaf but could not dislodge it before a hundred more projectiles slammed into her body. Red lightning erupted from each of the embedded leaves weaving a corset of electrocuting pain. Cinder flopped and jerked on the ground beside Genar’s destroyed golem, and his hand curled into a fist proving the effigy had some fight left—good for him.
Because one minion was never enough, a puddle birthed a goat-legged, bat-winged man-thing in the middle of what had been a fountain. Water cascaded off the undulating creature as its assets slimmed down to include a trim waist and a heart-shaped derriere that wiggled as the new minion turned. A siren’s song rolled off her lush blue lips until a spinning silver rod sliced through her torso. The two halves of her body fell into the cracked pool, and the rod caromed off its crumbling basin.
Jerlo threw out a hand on reflex and a six-foot tall crucifix settled against his palm. It was the same one he’d lost during Cinder’s earlier rampage. Holding it again felt right, like forgiveness made manifest with a sharpened end for the unrepentant.
“Many thanks, Lord. This will do nicely.” Jerlo rammed its point into the floor and vaulted over the threshold. The glass vial slipped from his pocket and smashed on the ground releasing a silver star.
Andurai corrected an annoyed voice inside his head.
‘Andurai,’ eh? The name tickled the recesses of Jerlo’s holey mind, but it vomited no information from its dark depths. The Andurai star floated over to Jerlo as he landed on a bench. He held out his hand, and the star twinkled on his palm. It waited for something. What was he supposed to do with it?
“What is it?” asked Insect Man as he flew over to investigate. His compound eyes scrutinized the Andurai from close range while Rat Woman looked on from the middle of this shrine to a forgotten goddess of wheat sheaves. Hadrovel was already exiting this temple for the next in line. Not once did the psycho look back.
“It’s Andurai.”
“What is Andurai?”
Jerlo opened his mouth, but the amnesia holding his early life hostage surged forward and obliterated the word and its import. In the star’s pure light, a downward pointing star in a circle burned red on his palm then lifted into a cloud of ash and drifted away.
A bellow from the other chamber shook them. Cinder staggered through the door, chest heaving, muscles jerking each time the angry red lattice connecting the Tree of Memory’s leaves shocked her. She sniffed the air searching for his scent. When she found it, she pointed.
“You!”
Jerlo brandished his holy staff.
Rat Woman and Insect Man both fumbled for their supply of stakes. They chucked them at the stumbling Cinder, but they bounced off her cinder block chest. Several burned up as another shock lit up Cinder’s body with pain, but she kept coming like a wrecking ball in full swing. Perhaps Vanya no longer needed him alive.
Whatever unreality had made that smoking rock pile look female was gone now. Without hesitation, Jerlo raised his rod and stabbed her in the heart. If such a creature had a heart to pierce. Even rabid beasts deserved mercy.
Cinder shuddered from the blow, but she leaned into the strike, grasped the rod, and pulled it through her chest drawing Jerlo closer to the madness in her blinded eye. A black fluid wept from its shattered orbit. The stench of scorched stone choked Jerlo, but he held on praying for a miracle. Since he held God’s rod, it should give him an edge.
Cinder tipped forward, and those bloody leaves delivered another shock, singeing Jerlo’s tunic. Sensing a living being nearby, those vampiric leaves juddered, propelled by need. He was the magnet, and they were the iron filings attracted to his broken memories. In another moment, they’d pull free of her and embed themselves in his chest. But Jerlo’s hands were locked around the crucifix. Not even thoughts of survival could loosen his grip.
A jagged smile cut across Cinder’s half destroyed face until the cross at the end of the stave flared up, washing them in blinding white light. Before the blinded wretch knew what hit her, white-hot glowing fissures erupted all over Cinder’s body. Like a stricken animal, she’s wailed and shook, showering him with pebbles.
Jerlo lowered his arm and kissed the cross. “Thanks, Lord, I owe you one.”
“How did you do that?” Insect Man buzzed by his shoulder.
They shot out of the rubble and flew to the outstretched hand of Genar’s golem where they spun and glittered like a red tornado of serrated death. The Golem standing at the entrance to the Hall of Memory bowed to Jerlo. Pieces of his caved-in countenance fitted back together reforming a god’s likeness then he was gone to tend a murderous tree.
Jerlo shuddered. Some ancient practices should stay in the past.
“Is it destroyed?” Rat Woman shouted from the next shrine.
Insect Man toed the rubble pile. “I don’t know. None of us have ever been destroyed. How can we tell?”
Rat Woman’s shrugged. “We thought Snake Woman was dead, but she reconstituted.”
“True.” Insect Man conceded.
“We’ll know if she reconstitutes. She’s not exactly quiet.” Jerlo clapped his hands together to signal a subject change. It was a habit that often startled his lieutenants. “So where to now? Do we need to go through every damned shrine? Please tell me there’s a shortcut.”
“There is, and we’re close to it.”
“Good because I think I know where Vanya’s going.”
Concern darkened Insect man’s compound eyes then he flew toward Rat Woman. “That’s what we’re counting on. He could destroy her rider.”
In These Dark’ning Times
Jerlo caught up to Hadrovel at a four-way intersection about a half an hour later. “What did you mean when you said you ‘fixed things so the demon couldn’t ride’—” Jerlo swallowed the apprehension choking him. Saying the Kid’s name to the man who abused him was wrong on so many levels. So he finished with, “you-know-who.”
“What do you care?”
“Since your botched execution, he’s been my responsibility.”
Curse Breaker: Books 1-4 Page 56