by Garon Whited
I questioned them a bit further on Byrne as a whole. Yes, they knew Prince Parrin had a magician named Rakal; he was seldom seen, but when he was, he was usually inside the palace. He had a personal guard of some sort of foul-smelling men in full armor; they had been seen outside the city, burying things. Nobody knew what, but the rumor was that they were the bodies of those who had displeased the Prince that day.
Yes, there was a curfew; anyone on the street after dark was to be brought to a guardhouse and held until after sunrise, chained to a wall with a window facing east, then brought to the palace. They had no explanation for why, but I did. If I was trying to sneak in, being exposed to dawn would reveal me. Everyone else would just be rudely awakened by the light and would be safe to drag in chains before the Prince.
On the other hand, I doubted they could successfully drag me into a cell. Maybe it was just to keep me from pretending to be captured?
As for the killing-ground passageway into the palace, they identified the usual murder holes and oil spouts, along with two hinged, metal portcullises—portculli? Portcullises—that could be released to swing down and lock in place. From the sound of it, these might kill a few invaders, but the primary purpose was probably to cut off the vanguard of invaders from any support or retreat. Bronze and I would be under them and past them before the guards woke up enough to drop them. Even if they did drop them, I could cut through them quickly enough that by the time word made it into the palace, we would be kicking in the front door.
I gagged them each when I finished and left them there. I didn’t tell them anything; I just left them to sit and wonder if I was coming back. I figured it would encourage them to sit quietly and wait, rather than attempt to squirm out of their bonds.
“Ready to kick a throne out from under a Prince?”
Bronze nodded.
Can I melt it, Boss?
“I don’t know what it’s made of.”
Can I try?
“Fine by me.”
I swung into Bronze’s saddle and we walked out into the night. It’s eerie to know I’m riding tons of bronze in near-silence. It’s weird. I’m used to the ringing sounds.
Firebrand warned me when it “heard” patrols; we avoided two of them before we made it to our jumping-off point opposite the main doors.
I checked my spells. All in good working order. Time to get the party started.
I reached out with tendrils, working them over to the main doors, touching them, sliding over them, feeling into and through them. Good. Using them as a guide, I sent a silencing spell into the wood of the door, surrounding it with a damping buffer of air to absorb the shockwaves.
I pulled a hammer out of the saddlebags. People spent a lot of time and effort pounding on it; it was a very dangerous chunk of metal. I threw it at the door.
The force my throw, all by itself, was like a thunderbolt. The impact detonated the hundreds of hammerblows stored in it. Inside the silencing spell, the hammerhead came apart with a muffled popping sound. A large portion of the door became either missing or shredded. Splinters flew in all directions, flaming, while several larger pieces disappeared down the passage. Several of the door’s timbers hung askew, drunkenly, around a sizable gap.
Bronze raced into the breach and I held on. She met the weakened door with her head down, neck extended, and the whole thing suddenly got out of her way. Flinders and splinters went everywhere in that weird, magical quiet. It was disquieting.
Distantly, with nightlord hearing, I caught someone on the wall asking, “Did you hear something?”
I called it a success.
We raced down the passageway. The portcullises were down, apparently lowered for the night; my prisoners didn’t mention that as procedure. Oh, well. They probably didn’t know. I had a solution for that, too. Bronze pulled up broadside to the first of the huge, metal gratings and I drew my second sword. It was the work of a moment to cut through all the vertical bars at about my head height. The lower portion of the portcullis fell away with a massive clang.
Oops. Well, they were going to be aware of us soon, anyway…
Bronze leaped forward through the gap and I repeated my performance on the second portcullis. I let it fall with the same resounding clang, too. Why not? The first one was enough to alert people.
We hurried on to the far set of doors. I didn’t bother with a silence spell; I just took the other hammer out of the other side of the saddlebags and repeated the process. The hammer blasted the doors, weakening them—possibly unnecessarily, but there is no kill like overkill—before Bronze rammed through them.
That was much louder and far more impressive.
We made the turn and charged the front doors of the palace. Someone was already sounding a horn from the wall; answering horns sounded all along the outer wall. A large bell started up at almost the same moment that we plowed through the front doors of the palace.
The remains of the palace doors were too small and widely-scattered to be worth building a fire. Sometimes overkill is too much kill, apparently. But Bronze was enjoying herself and I didn’t have the heart to tell her to slow down.
We checked the throne room, just in case the Prince was up late. He wasn’t, so Bronze breathed on the throne—wooden, with fancy metallic inlay and velvet cushions—and Firebrand tossed in its two megajoules as well. It burned nicely.
Then we started for the presumed royal quarters. We encountered a number of people, most of whom wanted to bar our passage. This did not work out well for them. Had they been trying to stop a horse made of flesh and blood, yes, they could have done it easily. A couple of spears and a couple of brave men… no sweat. Sticking Bronze with an iron spearpoint is like sticking a granite rockface with a pickaxe. The rockface is scarred, possibly chipped. Only, in this case, the rockface is also annoyed and fast enough to run over you.
As I said, it didn’t work out well for them. There might be survivors.
We hit the southernmost wall of the palace and split up. She headed for the stairs in the east tower; I went for the west tower. With Tort and T’yl monitoring any magical transportation out, I wasn’t worried about anyone getting away by that route. I was worried that we would go up one tower to find both the Prince and Rakal had evacuated down the other.
The palace guard apparently hadn’t had time to get defensive spells placed on them. Between tendrils and sword-work I went through over a dozen in half as many seconds and barely slowed. I made it to the second floor, gave each of the rooms a cursory once-over, and was back on the stairs headed up again. Bronze was still on the first floor, unable to climb; the stairs were wooden construction, not stone. She simply set fire to them and started kicking a hole in the wall to give the flames ventilation. In a few minutes, that tower would be an inferno.
At least no one would be going through it anytime soon.
Third floor. Nice chambers. Fancy furnishings. Carpet. Definitely upper-class quarters.
Two palace guardsmen looked at me, spears lowered. Well, they were looking at the rippling distortion and the blazing bar of rippling light. Firebrand isn’t very good at being invisible.
I flashed down the hallway, slapped their spears aside with my swords, and whisked between them, drawing a blade through each torso at once.
The room they guarded had a number of other guards in it. I didn’t bother to count them; I just killed them so they wouldn’t distract me. And I wanted to be undistracted, because, beyond them, seated in a large, padded chair, was a sickly-looking gentleman in a nightrobe.
The chair was in a small alcove, blocked in by a heavy, metal grating. A sort of primitive panic room, apparently. Once I finished killing the guards, I stood in front of the grating and regarded Prince Parrin.
“Good evening,” I offered, while blood from dismembered corpses crawled across the floor to me. He nodded, smiling, and drew out an amulet. Some sort of religious symbol, obviously, but not one I recognized. I didn’t see any power in it, but you never know.
I also didn’t see any sign of demonic possession, but if it was buried under the life force of the vessel, I might not. I don’t know enough about it to be certain.
“You do know I’m going to kill you,” I added, conversationally.
“You’re going to try,” he agreed.
I started to cut through the grating. Electricity crackled and snarled from the grating to my sword. I didn’t drop it; my hand convulsed closed and all my muscles locked as the current tried to fry me. Fortunately, that muscle-twitch by the current also caused me to fall backward.
I lay there for a moment, feeling the last of the bloody remains slithering over to me.
“Ow,” I observed, and sat up. Parrin chuckled.
“You see that you cannot reach me, Eric.”
“I wouldn’t bet on—wait, what?” He called me “Eric.” He called me by my actual name. “How do you know my name?”
“You’ll never get me to talk,” he said, chuckling wetly and drawing the blanket around his shoulders tighter. “And you don’t have time to try and make me.”
Firebrand?
I’m not hearing him like I should, Boss. Something’s blocking me. A spell, or that amulet, or something.
I thought something scandalous and unpleasant. Firebrand did not seem offended.
There was a brief diversion as I had to go back out into the hall and kill a platoon of palace guards, then set fire to the other tower’s stairs. That would slow things down a bit. Then, back in the Prince’s chamber, I regarded the grating. Parrin hadn’t moved.
It didn’t look as though it had a spell on it. It was just electrified, somehow.
“Rakal should be up here in moments,” Parrin observed. “You need to be going. So, what’s your move? Hope you can figure out my gateway in time, or run for it? You don’t have another option.” He dangled the amulet, grinning. “You can’t reach me.”
I tried reaching for him with a tendril. It flicked across the amulet; nothing happened. I touched him with it; still nothing. No protective qualities at all, at least on that level. Was it expended? Was it a sham that someone had passed off on the Prince? Or was Rakal the provider of it, knowing it was a sham? Or did the gods just not care what I did to this guy?
Whatever the reason, he felt like a living being, not a possessed entity. I grabbed him by the soul and yanked him clean out of his flesh.
And that’s when things went seriously wrong.
I recall reading something, a fable or fairy tale, maybe, about a bear that swallowed a porcupine. The bear did not enjoy the experience. I’m sure the porcupine was unhappy about events, but the focus of the story was on the bear. I think it was meant to encourage children to be careful of what they ate, and how.
Mom, I’m sorry. I thought I learned my lesson about chewing my food thoroughly.
The spiritual equivalent of a porcupine stabbed into my insides. It poked holes in everything, felt as though it was growing sharper, longer spines, spreading all through me. It brought me to my knees while I wrestled with it, trying to crush it, to chew it, to shred it, to digest it. It was unlike anything I had ever encountered before. Even eating a dragon hadn’t been like this. This was… something inside me, biting and clawing even as I tried to eat it.
I couldn’t even force it out; its spiritual spines and hooks were set too deep.
Then things got worse.
I stumbled backward into my headspace, dragged in and thrown across the room by the scruff of the neck, tumbling to the floor, skidding up against my desk. I shook my head and climbed to my feet.
I was standing there, looking at me.
My first words were questions, couched in language usually reserved for sailors.
“I’m you,” he replied, smiling. He only had regular fangs, not a whole mouthful of sharp teeth. “I’m the you that should have been.”
“Time travel?” I hazarded, cracking my knuckles.
“No, nothing like that. I’m the you without all those moral and ethical dilemmas. I’m the strong version. Or, you could say that I’m your son, Father. You contributed the best parts of you, and the Devourer was my mother; it helped me grow and become myself, rather than dissipate into formlessness.”
Memory flashed before me. I hung in an empty nothing, devoid of everything, a perfect void, while something dark and terrible fought over me with a blazing wall of fire. There was a tearing, ripping sensation as the darkness called to darkness within me, pulling out all that was hateful and evil. The blackness in my soul, the terrible things that lurk in the deep recesses of the heart, all drawn out, opened up, copied.
And, apparently, invested with power and form, given a kind of life.
“You’re my dark side,” I said, slowly. “A copy of all the evil I have in me.”
“Indeed. And now, I’ll finally have a body that can stand to hold me.” He laughed, a short, brittle sound. “Human forms tend to break down quickly when they house a spirit of my power!”
“I can imagine. Demons don’t do well in flesh.”
“Oh, I’m not a demon,” he replied, still grinning. I wondered if his fangs ever retracted. “I’m much closer to a human soul than that. A half-breed, perhaps—a child of you and the Devourer. Mortal flesh still isn’t durable enough for me, though.”
“And that’s why you’re here.”
“Exactly. I need your body if I expect to be incarnate.”
“You could have just used Keria’s,” I pointed out.
“Would you have settled for that?” he asked, scornfully.
“Maybe you have a point,” I agreed. “I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in someone else’s skin.”
Without warning, I grabbed the desk and spun, sliding it across the floor like a runaway freight train. He jumped straight up, avoiding it as it crashed into the wall, but I was right behind the desk and slammed into him anyway. He bounced off the wall with me and I was on top of him, on top of the desk, beating him with my fists. His head rocked back and forth as I bloodied my knuckles.
He got a foot braced on the wall and shoved, propelling us both off the slick surface of the desk. We landed sideways on the floor and he got one leg up between us, shoving us apart. I tried to roll with it and come to my feet, but he was just as fast, maybe a trifle faster than I. I barely made it to my feet before he sprang.
We wrestled and fought, punching and gouging, clawing and biting, two monsters locked in a life-or-death struggle. He managed to get me in a chokehold; I broke two of his fingers as I peeled his hand away. He gouged me in one eye as a reply and we separated, circling, bleeding from a dozen clawed wounds.
“You’re stronger than I expected, Dad.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What’s the matter, Dad? Not proud of your firstborn son?”
I came in, then, low and fast, and slammed him into the wall. He brought both hands down on my back to claw, but I brought my fist up between his legs to distract him. Monster or not, I know that still hurts. He clawed up my back pretty well anyway, then I rammed my own claws into his abdomen, under the ribs, and lifted him.
He kneed me in the face, then kicked when the recoil gave him room to do so; he came off my claws and rolled backward while I staggered the other way. We circled each other again, watching, wary. We seemed pretty evenly matched.
“Give you this, Dad,” he said, still circling with me, “I never had trouble like this from the princes of Byrne.”
“Which one gave you the most trouble?” I asked.
He looked thoughtful for an instant, and I was ready for it: that fraction of a second when his attention was divided. I rushed him again, shouldering him into the wall one more time, but this time I seized his right arm. His left came around, slashing and tearing from one shoulder to the other along my back, but I twisted his arm and brought it down, brought my knee up. It cracked like a green branch and he howled.
I jerked away from him, yanking on the broken arm as I did so. He staggered as I pulled and I ki
cked his nearest knee. He fell, or would have. Instead, I turned his fall into a swing, still holding him by the broken arm. Around once, twice, three times, accelerating the whole way, before I slammed him bodily into the edge of my desk. Things cracked inside him.
The rebound made it easy to swing him the other way, so I did. Into a wall. Then I threw him into a corner and he landed in a heap.
For several seconds, I simply stood there, breathing hard and wondering why I needed to. For that matter, why wasn’t I regenerating? My guess was that I was a mental presence, not a physical one, and this was all mental exertion. Maybe I wasn’t regenerating because the damage was psychic, not physical. It sure hurt like real wounds.
My doppelganger laughed softly. He lay in a heap on the floor, hardly moving.
“Enjoy it,” he gasped. “That feeling of victory. It won’t be for long.”
“This, coming from the broken heap,” I observed, massaging my shoulder. I straightened with effort; my back felt as though it was on fire. “What’s going to happen to you when I toss you out, I wonder?”
“Nothing,” he replied, lifting his bloodied face to look at me. “You can’t get rid of me anymore. I’m in you. I am you.”
“You never were,” I spat. “You were never anything more than a copy—and a flawed copy, at that.”
“If you say so, Dad. A copy can’t compare.”
“Exactly. Time to go.” I stepped forward.
“A copy, yes,” he said, grinning, “and now added to the originals!”
His one good hand slapped the floor—almost; he seized the bolt of the basement door, yanked it back. I surged forward, but was too late. The door flew open and a boiling, flapping, seething darkness came up from the depths like an eruption from my own private hell.
Which, considering what lives down there, it most certainly was.
A wave of dark and terrible things swarmed up, swamped my mental study, filled it to overflowing, and sucked me down into the darkness.
Above me, I heard a terrible, sickening laughter.
It sounded just like me.