by Evan Currie
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Brokkr sighed. “If they’re doing this here, then they’re doing it elsewhere . . . and that means someone else has given them their orders. Ser’Goth isn’t the final word, not even here. The orders would have come from one of the originals.”
“You really think they’re involved here? This dimension is the ass end of the universe,” Sindri objected. “Seems likely that someone is just being an upstart.”
“Does it matter?” Jol asked. “Either way, if she gets involved, it might slow things up a little.”
The brothers shook their heads.
“Sadly, no, it won’t,” Sindri said. “This is the endgame. She won’t like it, having to abandon her city and her throne, but that day is coming anyway. I expect she’s already making plans to move on.”
“As should we,” Brokkr said with a heavy voice. “Nothing here for us any longer.”
The two looked at one another for a long time, then spared a sorrowful look to the third member of their little group. Jol felt a chill but said nothing.
What was there to say?
*****
Ser’Goth looked over the reports her generals had brought before her, ignoring the occasional twinge of nerves that could be felt from one or another of them.
These were more in line with what she had expected to see, honest reports of progress complete with the expected setbacks. None that were too out of line, thankfully, but enough that she could tell that she wasn’t being brushed aside with what her underlings believed she wanted to hear.
“Better,” she said, looking up at them. “Now, how do you plan to address the setbacks?”
The group of powerful demonic generals shifted nervously under her glare, quailing a moment before regaining their steel. One might have been forgiven for assuming them to be cowards, but Ser’Goth knew better than that. Facing death was something each of them had done a thousand times over before they even approached their current level.
It wasn’t death she would hand them if they failed her, and they all knew it.
The first squared himself off and nodded once to her, curtly but with respect. The demonic general was taller than Ser’Goth, at just over eight feet, and almost as broad across the shoulders. He was a Fifth Circle demon, but bordering on advancing into the Fourth if he survived for much longer. His black carapace skin glistened in the torchlight that provided them with illumination in the council chambers, the angular features of his face almost attractive, though Ser’Goth knew that he was intelligent enough to avoid getting caught in her . . . charms.
He’d have to be to have reached his current position.
“I have already dispatched additional slaves, as well as another rune-master, to my sector,” he told her. “There have been no reports of any local resistance. Few humans are still in my sector, and none of them are organized. The setbacks appear to be simple construction . . . incidents.”
She scoffed lightly at that appellation.
She was no fool and knew too well that what they were doing went against the laws of nature and the Creator himself. The incidents, as he described them, were the world and the universe acting in a last-ditch defense of their own sanctity.
A futile defense, but one that would be pitched anyway. It was a feral, instinctive thing. If the universe and world had wanted to stop them, they would have stepped in to support the humans when they had a chance of victory. That wasn’t how the universal laws were written, however, and now that the world recognized the danger, it was far too late.
“Very well,” she said, looking over the others. “May I assume everyone else has done at least this much?”
A couple of them looked guilty before hurriedly nodding in affirmation, which she let pass while noting their identities carefully.
When next they made a mistake, as everyone would eventually, she would ensure she got some fun out of them. For now, she would let them issue those orders—however belatedly—and allow them to believe that they had put one over on her.
Punishing them at the moment would be fun but not productive.
“Very well. Does anyone have more to add?” she asked calmly, waiting.
When there was no further response, she nodded firmly.
“Then go; make certain nothing more slows the execution of your orders. The elder come through on schedule.”
*****
Elan paused at the edge of a building, hugging against the filth-encrusted stone as the tall redheaded man and two short men who looked very much alike walked past her.
The security systems had guided her right to him, but now that she had found him, Elan found she had no idea what to do next.
Wordlessly, she watched them move on past her some distance before she pushed off the building and set out to follow. The streets were oddly empty, given that security had registered the area as being one of the most demonically dense parts of the city. She didn’t know what to make of that but figured she could worry about it later.
For the moment, she was more intent on following the trio and trying to figure out what it was about the redhead that had called her attention.
He didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary.
He registered as human in her displays and to her eyes. Neither was exactly foolproof, not unless she could get a lot closer for a much better look at him. She knew that her armor could detect demonic influence, but it took Merlin’s skill to ferret out those details, and he wasn’t talking to her for whatever reason.
Still, the redhead looked human enough.
Really human, actually.
Elan shook her head sharply, wondering where that thought and the flash of heat that accompanied it had come from.
It didn’t matter. She just had to do what she set out to do . . . once she figured out exactly what that was. So she followed them through the streets, hanging back and using the security systems of the old city to keep track of them as the population in the streets thickened.
She was rather proud of herself, following them so easily without being noticed, right up until they entered a spot with no cameras and she lost track of the trio. Elan rushed forward to catch up, hoping to get a glimpse of them again, only to skid to a halt as she came around a corner and ran right into the faces of the three, who were waiting for her with stony expressions.
“Now who do you suppose this is, brother?” one of the short ones asked the other. “Looks kinda small for anyone she would send after us.”
The other short one shrugged. “Does it matter? Probably a snatch thief, thinking they found easy marks. Jol?”
The big redhead nodded, hefting the hammer from where it had hung on his belt.
“Whatever you say, Brokkr.” He stepped forward, muscles bulging as he brought the hammer up. “I’ll take care of it.”
Chapter 9
The flash of light left Simone blinking as she stalked out of the transport center without missing a beat, heading deeper into the facility as she glared at the very air itself in front of her.
“Merlin!”
Her voice echoed off the corridors, reverberating back and forth until it came back to her, unanswered. She didn’t let that slow her at all, fully intent on finding the blasted apparition that was so full of himself. She was surprised he hadn’t popped up already.
“I know you heard me, you old fool! Where are you?” she snarled again, pausing at a crossway to look down both directions, uncertain which to pick.
The lights went out, both the way she’d come and in all but one of the other options. Simone raised an eyebrow but nodded determinedly.
“Alright, I’ll bite,” she said as she walked.
She followed the lit corridors for several minutes, getting well and truly lost as she started to forget about her ire and started to worry about whether she could find her way out. It was about that point when the last corridor opened up to a large space . . . larger than any she could remember seeing inside in her life. She stared around herself, stunned f
or a few seconds before her eyes alighted on the image of Merlin in the middle of the space, and she abruptly remembered why she had come in the first place.
“You!” she snapped, stalking forward, ignoring the fact that the floor dropped away on either side of her in the massive area, so focused was she on the image of the old man before her. “What did you do to Elan?”
Merlin didn’t bother to turn around—he too was intent on his task—but his annoyed sigh could be clearly heard all the same.
“Why you people have such a low impression of that girl completely befuddles me,” the intelligence said with a hint of exasperation in his tone. “As stubborn as that child is, there’s little I could hope to do to convince her of anything she wasn’t already intent on.”
“Don’t you give me that nonsense,” Simone snapped. “Stubbornness can be turned on someone easy enough, and I have little doubt you’re skilled in it. Even if you’re innocent of that sort of manipulation, you could have held her here, and you know it!”
“I do?” he said, again not bothering to look at her. “Perhaps you’re right. By what right would I have, however?”
“Right? She’s a child!”
“She’s old enough to have killed in your defense.” Merlin finally looked up, his tone growing cold. “Old enough to be one of the few out of your entire group of survivors to truly lift a weapon in the cause of the group’s survival. If she is old enough to serve as your protector, then she is old enough to make decisions for herself.”
Simone drew back, both the tone and the words causing her to pause and consider her position briefly.
Finally she rallied. “I fought, and so did many others. Don’t give me that.”
“Then should you, or any of the others, wish to travel somewhere, I will take pleasure in offering you my aid,” Merlin told her simply. “However, I will not enforce your opinion on someone else merely because you think you should have that authority. You have none over me, and you would do well to remember it.”
Simone balled up her fists. “Where did you send her?”
“Only where she wanted to go,” Merlin said. “However, right now, I believe we have a problem closer to home.”
“Don’t try to distract . . .” Simone paused, looking past Merlin to the images he was focused on. “What is that?”
“Activity near Atlantis,” he said darkly. “Initially I believed it to be of little import, as it seemed unlikely that they would approach the community . . .”
“Those demons are coming to Atlantis?” Simone paled, looking at the numbers of the monstrosities on the screens.
“No. However, that may not save any of us,” Merlin replied darkly. “They’re doing something else. Something worse, I believe.”
“Worse? Believe?” Simone grimaced. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve only been able to translate parts of their runic engravings, but what I can read are bad portents for the future,” Merlin answered. “And they might explain an anomaly that Elanthielle exposed to me earlier.”
Indeed, he was terrified that they did explain the mist all too well. For a brief time, Merlin wasn’t ashamed to admit that he had begun to hope once more. However, now his hopes seemed to be dashed.
He knew well that only an outside power could have so clouded the future. Within an enclosed system, such as an isolated universe, it was possible to predict all things so long as one could maintain all the possible variables. In fact, it was even possible to let the universe itself handle most of the work, which was how Merlin could look into the future as well as the past.
An external influence, however, could destroy that clarity in an instant.
So when he saw the mist, he’d hoped—prayed was perhaps the word—that an outside force had intervened against the demonic forces. Unfortunately, if his fears were correct, then he was looking at that very outside influence in the making . . . and it would not be on the side of the humans.
“They’re opening a portal to bring . . . something through,” he said.
“More demons?” Simone asked, looking sick to her stomach.
“We are not so lucky, I believe.”
She twisted away from the images, looking at the grave expression on the image of the old man’s face.
“What do you mean?” she asked, dreading the answer.
Merlin gestured, and one of the screens changed. It showed a close image of stone with inscribed symbols that he circled with red as she looked.
“This symbol is one that your ancestors knew of, but only because even the demons who were masters of this art seemed to fear its use,” he said tensely. “It is the runic word for elder.”
Simone shook her head. “I’m missing something?”
“Likely more than one thing,” Merlin said with a dry tone. “However, that is for another time. Elder is a term with very specific meaning to the demons. It’s their equivalent of . . . well, demons. Beings of power, legend . . . and horror.”
“That should be good, though?” she asked. “If the demons are afraid, wouldn’t that be good?”
“Simone, think,” Merlin chided her. “If it were good, why would they be building a stone summoning circle to draw them here?”
“Oh.”
That was a point she couldn’t deny, as much as she might have wanted to. Certainly Merlin was right on that point, if nothing else at all. The demons wouldn’t call something to the earth that would not benefit them in some way, and anything that benefited them would be bad for the inhabitants of Atlantis and every other human on the entire world.
“What can we do?” she asked softly, eyes now glued to the displays.
“I am honestly uncertain if there is anything that we can do,” Merlin admitted. “Avalon does not have the weapons to combat even that demonic group, to say nothing of a new interdimensional incursion. Atlantis doesn’t have the forces to do the fighting, even if Avalon could equip them.”
Simone slumped, closing her eyes.
“I get so tired,” she said as she rested her hands on the rail in front of her, head bowed. “I get so tired of losing. We lost everything we had, over and over again . . . and now, as we claw some tiny fraction of it back, we’re going to lose it all over again . . . aren’t we?”
Merlin sighed. “Life is loss, Simone. One does not live without losing.”
“There are limits to the loss a person, or a people, can endure.”
Silence reigned between them for a moment before Merlin responded.
“Indeed there are. You cannot lose more than you have,” he said. “And some things cannot be taken by force but must be surrendered freely. Perhaps it is time we ceased surrendering.”
Simone glared at the displays, where the monsters were constructing whatever it was that they were constructing, and nodded slowly as her lips curled into a silent snarl.
“In that, you old fool,” she said with a dark laugh, “we’re in agreement. If they want what we have, they’ll have to take it . . . and if we die, we die on our feet, not on our knees.” She paused, then shot another glare at Merlin. “But don’t you think this gets you off the hook for letting Elan go running about some demon-infested hellhole! If she doesn’t come back, I will find a way to make you hurt.”
“If she doesn’t come back,” Merlin said somberly, “you won’t need to.”
*****
Elan stepped into the blow that was coming, surprising the big man when she caught his arm on the downward swing and stopped it cold. His muscles bulged, first as he tried to force the hammer through anyway and then again as he tried to pull away, neither motion gaining him anything. She just held him until his free hand went to his belt and she caught a glimpse of reflected light as he drew a small blade.
Elan stepped back and twisted, pulling him along with her, and casually tossed him end over end down the alley as she tried to figure out how to get herself out of the mess she’d just bumbled into. She could just run, of course, but she needed information, and these th
ree seemed as likely a source as she might find.
Unfortunately, now that she was in close, there was a clear demon taint to the air around them, though she couldn’t tell if it was one or all of them at the source.
While Elan was thinking about that, the others had gone on with their own observations and decisions apace.
“Interesting,” one of the short men said, sounding genuinely amused. “More than it appears, this one. Maybe she did send it?”
“Maybe. Either way,” the other said, “best to deal with it.”
“Agreed.”
The two stopped talking as they advanced on Elan with more speed than she’d expected from either of them. The first came in from her left side, hard and fast, an axe appearing in his hands from nowhere, which Elan would have boggled at if she’d had the time.
As it was, she was barely able to bring up her arm in a block, wincing as she felt the strength of the blow translate right through her armor. She kicked out, catching him low in the hip, and earned a grunt of surprise from her target but managed very little else otherwise.
A flash of motion in her periphery caused her to duck and twist, another axe blade flashing over her head as she put her torso behind a solid punch that dug deep into the second little man’s belly with depressingly little result aside from another grunt of surprise and maybe a bit of a lift and stumble back. Elan scrambled out of the way of a third blow, from the left side again, and backpedaled to disengage from the immediate fight.
She didn’t have time for this, and Elan found herself looking for ways to withdraw from the fight. A motion in the direction of one such way was instantly blocked by one of the little men, who grinned widely at her as he ran his thumb over the chipped blade of his axe.
“Going somewhere?”
“I don’t want to fight,” she said finally, looking around.
“A little late for that now, isn’t it?”
Elan took another step away from the two, clearing a little room as she swept her cloak off her shoulder and went for the sidearm perched on her hip.
The two men’s eyes widened, and they rushed her as one as the sidearm cleared her harness and started to come up. Before she could draw a target on either, the closest was inside her guard and had thrown the haft of his axe into her wrist. The shock of the blow broke her grip, and his follow-up blow sent the sidearm flying into the air.