Samnang shook her head, suddenly standing at his elbow.
“I’m afraid not. Nothing is done. Do not deceive him, Ériu. He deserves the truth.”
“I don’t want to do this!” Eerie shouted, pulling on his arm. “Please, Alex, let’s just go! I changed my mind, and I don’t want you to…”
“I have to do it,” Alex said. “Right? That’s what Gaul said. The Church won’t leave on its own, not without you. I’ve got to send it into the Ether. There’s no other way.”
“There are other ways,” Samnang said. “The White Room is still an option, though I do not recommend it.”
“I’m not worried,” Alex boasted, not feeing at all confident. “I know how to deal with losing time. How bad could it possibly be?”
“Bad,” Samnang said. “I can feel it looming above you like storm clouds.”
“I have to sleep a little, then. Big deal! I mean, Rebecca was wrong, wasn’t she? It couldn’t be for that long, right?”
“I don’t know how long exactly,” Eerie said. “I’m afraid you might be, like, old.”
“Old? Or old-old?”
“I don’t know!” Eerie wailed. “I don’t want to do it!”
“Will you still love me if I’m old?” Alex asked. “Will you take care of me?”
“I will!” Eerie said. “Of course I will!”
Alex pulled her close.
“Will you still fuck me if I’m old?”
“I definitely will,” Eerie assured him tearfully. “All the time.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Alex said. “It’s cool.”
“You are a simple creature,” Samnang said, shaking her head. “Still, you have my sympathies, and perhaps even…yes, my gratitude as well. I will help however I can.”
Alex smiled hesitantly, opening his mouth to offer a rejoinder. He was distracted by a crackle of blue sparks about his head.
He dropped to his knees, his body seizing as a point of heat built at the very top of his head. He could feel slow lightning begin to tear a path through him.
His view of the cathedral was obstructed by a swirl of embroidery. Samnang covered his head with her ample sleeves, the cloth igniting where the brocaded silk had passed across his scalp.
“This not a safe place. The Church is already beginning to manifest new Representatives,” Samnang said, her gown rippling with absorbed lightning. “We need to get out of here.”
“How can we?” Eerie gave her sister a helpless look. “There is no inside or outside.”
Samnang’s eyes burned the same shade of toxic green as the characters engraved down her cheeks.
“Then we are already outside. That will make departing all the easier. Let’s find out, shall we?”
The characters on her cheeks illuminated simultaneously, and reality itself groaned with sudden and unexpected pressure.
Thirty-Two
Day Seven
The merger was brutal and abrupt, punctuated by a rolling boom that reverberated across Central and scattered the surviving Horrors across the sky. The Church had neither interior nor exterior, so it was a trivial matter for Samnang to unify those states, but an extremely traumatic process for those caught within it. The Auditors and Operators dropped to their knees, or collapsed on the floor of the cathedral, clutching distressed stomachs and splitting heads. Above them soared the broken arches and ruined frescoes of the Church’s main sanctuary, about them the oppressive colors of the stained glass.
Outside the windows of the cathedral was the scorched meadow surrounding the wreckage of the Main Library.
Through the broken arches of the ceiling, Central’s sky was as black as charcoal.
The Auditors were scattered about, groaning or semi-conscious. Lord North slowly extracted himself from a pile of broken pews, while Michael and Gerald lay against the far wall in a heap.
“You said outside,” Eerie said, grabbing Samnang’s arm. “You said outside!”
“I know,” Samnang said, clutching her head. “It followed us. The Church came with us!”
Mrs. Gimble shrieked like a bird of prey as a bolt of slow lightning erupted from the crown of her head. The lightning branched and climbed, bursting through the glass ceiling and showering those below in fragments of colored glass.
Mrs. Gimble shuddered and moaned, the sound like water forced through a narrow place beneath the earth.
The Church wavered, a signal being overwhelmed by noise, and then it splintered, spiderweb cracks infiltrating the walls and floor of the cathedral.
A pair of monstrous hands emerged from the mouth of the burning Representative, forcing the jaws open from within.
The corners of the mouth were forced open wide. Representative Parson tore free of Mrs. Gimble’s body as if he were removing a costume, shredding and discarding her ruined form as he clambered free.
His new body was larger and even more malignant. Numerous tongues spilled out like ribbons between his serrated teeth, and outcroppings of cartilage ripped out of flesh that stank like uncured leather. His fingers were abscessed stubs, and wedges of sharpened bone extruded from the sores, dripping with yellow puss.
Representative Parson turned his thousands of eyes upon them, rising slowly on frail and tumescent legs.
“None of this – none of it! – is good enough,” he croaked, wiping at the strange fluids that leaked from the corners of his hideous mouth. “I will not stand for it, Ériu.”
“Why? I thought you wanted to stay as you were.”
“You confused me,” Parson said, bones crunching in his distended body with each step he took toward them. “The Church has clarified my position.”
“You want to be your own person, the same as I do,” Eerie said, moving in front of Alex. “There’s no reason for us to fight.”
“I do not want anything. I care not for hats or dances,” Parson said, lurching toward them, leaving a trail of viscera behind him like a snail’s track across the cathedral floor. “Your attempts to persuade me have failed. I will not defy the Church. I have been promoted and replaced Mrs. Gimble. I am now a Senior Representative, and I will escort you to the White Room, Ériu, along with your sister.”
“No way,” Alex said, trying to move past Eerie. “No fucking way!”
“You are irrelevant,” the Senior Representative said, stretching out his barbed fingers. “You will be removed.”
“It’s about time you showed up,” Mitsuru said, helping Alex to his feet. “Are you ready for this?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said, rubbing his eyes. “I thought we won already.”
“You did not,” the Senior Representative said, blistered lips covered in a layer of pink slime. “You have lost.”
“Not yet,” Samnang said, helping Eerie up. “We are still alive.”
“Not for long,” Representative Parson said, undifferentiated tissue sloughing off his body with each step as he advanced. “Not long at all.”
“You sound so sure of yourself, John,” Emily said, joining them from an imaginary direction, stepping from a convergence of impossible angles. “The web of Anathema you built gives you all sorts of options, though, I suppose. It would be a shame if something happened to that, wouldn’t it?”
“You are part of that web, Emily Muir,” the Senior Representative said. “You are mine.”
“You are not the first to make that assumption,” Emily said. “Nor are you the first to be wrong.”
***
There was little reaction when she appeared in front of the Inverted Spire.
There was good reason for that, of course.
Leigh had been a resident until a few weeks ago, and news of her defection was likely not common knowledge. She was with the Anathema, as far as any of the disinterested crowd assembled at the base of the contoured silver tower was concerned.
Then there was the thing with the sky.
The sky was empty.
Not like it usually was in the Outer Dark. There were no stars, obvious
ly, no celestial bodies of any kind, but the sky was not usually empty. There were the Horrors, for once thing, floating in their great shoals, haunting the Outer Dark with their tremulous cries, and there were worse things, too – things that were mostly concealed by the abyssal depths beneath the crystalline surface of the Outer Dark, or the frigid void above. Strange currents carried vibrant flows of dust and volcanic debris through the lower atmosphere, toxic clouds that poured from the adjacent mountains during certain times of the year.
All of that was gone, replaced by a ruddy glow at one end of the sky, silhouetting the mountains like the first signs of an impending dawn.
Leigh knew exactly what that was, because Vivik had shown her the burning garden, inserting one of his windows into her telepathic feed from the Far Shores, a new trick from a boy who was apparently still expanding the boundaries of his cleverness. She had watched the rose bushes smolder while she waited on the apport platform, the special one that Eerie had modified for impossible trips.
Like the trip she had just taken to the Inverted Spire, the heart of the tiny inhabited portion of the Outer Dark, the home of the Anathema and the followers of John Parson.
That second part was what had brought her here, while the rest contended with the disaster in Central.
This was the place where Leigh had been grown, and her thoughts weighed on her. The vat where she was decanted from the collected blood of a hundred vampires was probably somewhere beneath her feet, gathering dust in the vaults beneath the Spire.
Leigh pushed it from her mind.
The important thing was the Anathema, and her mission. Perhaps a hundred individuals, and all but a handful were inside the Inverted Spire or gawking at the deserted sky above it.
Every Anathema represented a potential resource for John Parson, another protocol he could borrow, thanks to the nanites implanted in them during their transformations. The Anathema served as a distributed power source for Parson, and Leigh was there to remove it.
This was not a personal affair, of course. Leigh had no appetite for the personal.
She was a perfected vampire and the strong right hand of Emily Muir. John Parson might have been the architect of her creation, but just lately, he was also the enemy of her employer. The Anathema gathered here, just now turning their worried eyes on the advancing vampire, were the source of his power.
Therefore.
Leigh flexed her fingers and her nails extruded, sharp as a barber’s razor and tapered to points.
A man called out to her as she approached.
A woman from the crowd said her name, and smiled hesitantly, as if she expected to be remembered.
Leigh did not bother with words, and she did not hurry.
There was no need for either.
There was nowhere for them to run, after all, and the dead do not require explanations.
The crowd got more nervous as she neared, sensing something from her stance or demeanor. The wariest started for the Spire, hoping to take refuge inside. Walking became running. Muttering became exclamations of wariness and alarm.
A woman stepped from the crowd to meet her, wearing a hopeful smile.
Leigh recognized her by her distinctive shock of red hair and rural Irish accent. She was a technician whose name escaped her, one of the many who had worked on her gestation in the bloody and hermetically sealed chamber beneath the Inverted Spire.
She spoke as Leigh approached, but the vampire disregarded her words.
There was no possible value in the words of a dead woman.
The technician approached with her hands out, open and defenseless.
Leigh struck her as she passed, opening her from her belly to just below her rib cage, taking care to sidestep the blood and shit and intestinal tissues that spewed from the catastrophic wound.
Leigh reminded herself not to go so deep as she leapt over the dying woman to land amid the crowd.
They were panicked now, screaming and yelling for help.
Leigh grabbed the nearest Anathema and lifted him in the air, and then hurled him into the mass of the crowd, bowling them over like hysterical pins.
A man tried to rush past her, out into the indefinite and endless plains of the Outer Dark, and she snatched him off his feet as he passed, smashing him into the ground and then crushing his head beneath her boot.
A woman hit her with a jet of flame that charred one of Leigh’s arms and half her face.
Leigh ignored her burnt skin and smoldering hair, leaping high and hitting the woman in the chest with both knees and riding her down, ribs crackling beneath her as they hit the ground. She drove her thumbnails into the woman’s eyes, pressing them in until the woman stopped gasping and kicking her legs.
Leigh was hit from behind with a length of pipe across her back, nearly knocking her over. She caught the next swing, ripping the pipe from the man’s hands and then striking him in the arm with it. A second blow clipped the top of his head and knocked him over. Leigh drove one end of the pipe into his chest, impaling him.
A gunshot knocked her to the side, piercing her ribs and collapsing a lung. She located the shooter immediately and went after them, bashing through the frantic crowd trying to flee the carnage.
A bullet went through her left shoulder as Leigh wrapped her hands on the barrel. The owner yelped as Leigh twisted the gun from her hands. Leigh smacked her in the head with the gun, felling her, and then battered her until her skull split like a windfall peach in the sun.
The Anathema ran, or cowered, or fought.
It made no difference. The vampire worked her way through them with lethal efficiency.
She gutted a telekinetic who buried her beneath tons of rock and broken crystal. She killed a combat telepath with his own knife.
Another telepath tried to take control of her body. He was still struggling with her implanted mental shields when Leigh broke his spine across her knee.
She took a fleeing woman from her feet with a lariat, and then kicked her head in. A man yelled incoherently as he attacked her with a fire axe, catching her in the left arm with the blade and cutting her to the bone. Leigh tore his throat open with her teeth and left him to gurgle and die.
She felled one Anathema after the other as she worked her way toward the entry to the Spire, sparing no one, and showing no regard for age, gender, or resistance.
Most died in the typical fashion, but some turned to cinders, or liquified, or transformed into clouds of colorful gas. Leigh paid no mind to them or their efforts at reconstitution.
Even if they did come back, she could just kill them all over again.
A handful of Anathema clustered at the sealed entrance to the Spire, trapped outside when fleeing survivors shut the gate. Leigh tore through them like a sharpened blade through reeds, cutting them down in turn. Blood splashed across the metal steps up to the gate, and the door dripped with fleshy detritus.
Leigh grabbed the door handle and pulled experimentally. It bent, but it held.
The vampire set her feet, shook out her hands, and then took a firm grip.
Leigh strained and the metal warped. She bent her knees and pulled again from a lower angle. The door groaned, and then the handle ripped free, taking a chunk of the door with it. Leigh tossed the handle over her shoulder, and then took three steps back.
She gave the door a running kick, and it bent, and the hinges rattled.
She stepped back, and then Leigh launched herself against the door a second time, her heel striking the center of the door. The hinges gave way and the door toppled. Leigh advanced into the Spire to finish the job, dripping with gore and tasting blood when she swallowed.
***
Mitsuru launched herself at the Representative, her blood blazing beneath her skin like mercury. Lord North waved his burning whip, the plasma arcing through the cathedral and scoring great furrows in the stone floor. Michael’s skin rippled and glowed with energy, the swirling designs of his tattoos blinding beneath his illuminated skin
.
The Senior Representative swept Mitsuru aside and then lunged for Michael, grabbing him by the throat and lifting him from his feet.
Michael put his palm on the Representative’s sternum, and then a bolt of violet energy tore through him, leaving a behind a crater in his chest. Parson dropped Michael, cursing as he deflected another bolt with a wave of his arm.
Henry snapped his whip, and the corded plasma wrapped around one of Parson’s wrists, fusing his flesh to the bone beneath.
The Representative gestured at Michael. Mitsuru shouted as she climbed back to her feet, and Alex flinched helplessly.
Nothing happened.
“Oh dear. Did something go wrong?” Emily smiled as she tapped at her phone. “You’ve lost your Anathema, Representative. You’ll have no abilities but your own to rely on.”
Henry tugged back on the whip, and Parson’s hand was severed from his skeletal arm. Mitsuru opened fire with her sidearm, riddling his chest with hollow points.
“What did you do?” Rebecca grabbed Emily’s arm. “What happened to the Anathema?”
“What you should have done a long time ago,” Emily said coolly, pushing Rebecca away. “This is life or death, Ms. Levy.”
Michael fired a sustained blast that pushed Parson back, crushing the Representative against one of the standing walls of the Library. Henry lashed him with the Salamander Protocol, his whip searing through flesh and bone with ease. At a gesture from Xia, the smoldering wounds leapt into flame. Mitsuru activated a downloaded telekinetic protocol and cut the Representative’s ragged legs out from beneath him. Alice stepped out of the shadow of the Representative and put her revolver to his head.
The gun discharged.
There was a moment of intolerable brightness, an awful white that seared the corneas. Everyone was forced to cover their eyes.
It took several seconds of blinking and squinting for Alex’s vision to return. When it did, he groaned.
The Senior Representative stood, his form stretched and elongated to tower over them, his jaw dislocated to accommodate rows of teeth shaped like hypodermic needles, leaden blades extending out from his malformed fingers.
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 85