by Galen Wolf
She extended a finger from the hand that grabbed Mehefin and dragged the nail across her palm, making it bleed. Then she brought the cut hand to her mouth and licked the blood from it. Her mouth smeared red while she spoke more twisted syllables and another thing appeared. It was about seven feet high and in the form of a naked, emaciated man, with lank hair and a skin covered in pustules and sores.
"Kill Gaijann," she said. The demon of sickness nodded and walked onto the walkway. Morah and Mehefin saw it snatch at his unseen form and heard a crunch as it latched onto his arm.
"Come," she barked at the wounded Belphegor, free now Gaijann was occupied with the other demon. "The lady needs a lift."
Mehefin looked terrified but Morah pushed her roughly towards the demon. The Belphegor clutched the blonde woman to its chest and dropped off the walkway, plummeting down twenty feet before its wings unfurled and caught its descent. Morah watched to see the creature glide down towards where the Count waited for his daughter. Then she turned back to Severan.
The giant had got up from the ground. The mist with eyes was lying shriveled like a scorched net curtain on the floor but Severan's face was marked where it had touched him. The viscous oily leech still gripped his lower body. It had burned through the armor on his legs and was inserting its feeding tubes into his flesh. The giant was sweating from the effort of the fight, but his blue eye was full of glacial fury and his red eye turned and clicked like a gun. Severan was slowed by his injuries. Morah ducked and ran at him. She even smiled as she went into the attack.
Severan was grievously wounded. Still, he reached down with his cyborg hand and grabbed at the leech and froze it piece by piece, shifting his grip until part froze, then moved to the next, pulling the icy remains apart and breaking them off his body.
He looked up to see Morah attacking. Morah hit him at speed. She kicked him hard, but his bulk was so great, he didn't budge. He attempted to fix his red eye on her, but she was too quick. He snapped his head this way and that as she ducked right, her unsheathed blade in her hand, and turning as she went past, she stabbed him in the chest. The λ-armor held and her blade skidded off with a squeal of metal. It slowed her and, with his human hand, Severan reached and punched Morah in the chest. Hurt as his hand was, he was still strong enough to send her crashing against the wall. While she tried to rise, he finished destroying the leech and, finally free of it clinging around his legs, stepped forward. Morah was vulnerable as she lay winded against the tunnel rock. She struggled feebly to get up. Severn focused the cyborg eye on her, but hearing it click and seeing it whir, she rolled away and the eye burned a gouge in the wall behind her. She looked towards the demon of sickness. It was bent over the prone shape of Gaijann, his stealth cloak damaged and flickering on and off. The demon had him pinned and was prepared to feast on the assassin, getting down on its hands and knees to bring its rotten mouth to bear. But Morah had need of it now. With words of binding, she summoned it to her aid. The putrid figure of the demon lifted its head, like a dog hearing a whistle, stood, turned and came shambling towards Severan.
Severan jerked his head round to register the new threat. Seeing his distraction, Morah rose and jumped at him, knife in hand, but once again she was too slow and he saw her. As she came close to stab, his green cyborg hand grabbed her long black hair, jerking her head back. He squeezed the her hair and the locks froze like strands of black glass and broke off. She staggered free and watched her hair shatter on the floor into a carpet of needles.
Severan's face turned toward the witch, and, in that instant, the pus covered demon attacked him. It shrieked and bit at him with discolored teeth, flapping its hands at him in a flurry of diseased flesh, smearing him with its infected ooze.
Behind them, the injured Gaijann struggled to get up. His arm was broken and his strength almost gone. He got to his knees but then was wracked with coughing. His chest heaved as he leaned on his hands and knees, spewing dark blood. His face had been raked by the infected nails of the demon and already the bacteria were entering his circulation from the filthy wound. He pushed himself up with his good arm, but then his strength gave way and he rolled back onto the ground. Lying on his back, with impotent grief, he watched the demon of sickness take down his friend.
Severan struggled with the demon but it was immensely strong. Its disgusting breath was in his face as he pushed its mouth away from him. He tried to throttle the thing with his cyborg hand but the demon did not need to breathe. Even so, it had a flesh of sorts, at least in this plane, and Severan's green hand froze and broke its throat. With his red eye, his fiery gaze burned into the thing's face and it screamed as its flesh melted and sizzled, releasing a foul aroma of rotten meat.
Morah was behind Severan. She had dropped her knife, and it had clattered away out of reach. Instead she found a piece of rock. She lifted it high in her hands while Severan struggled with the demon. Then, with all her strength, she brought it down on the top of his head. Gaijann heard the sickening crunch as the rock smashed bone. Severan's knees buckled and he went down.
"Finish him," she hissed at the demon, but it was too badly wounded to be of any further use. She watched it fade out and return to its home plane.
"Very well then," she said. "I'll do it."
She searched round for her dark hafted knife. She found it near the tunnel wall, took it and shifted it into a grip almost as if she was going to fillet steak. The giant lay unconscious on the ground below her. She could see the slight movement of his chest.
She took the knife and began to cut off his cyborg hand. She severed it high enough so that she recovered enough of his human flesh that a skilled engineer could see how it had been grafted. She held the bloodied object and put it to one side. Then she began to prize out his eye, much as if it were an oyster from a shell. She took out the eye with its long optic wire that connected to Severan's optic nerve and then his brain.
"Should I kill him?" she shouted over to the wounded assassin, dying himself now. She waved the eye from side to side on the optic nerve string. "What do you think Gaijann? He's looking at you!"
The assassin was too badly injured to respond. "Never mind," she cackled.
Then the Belphegor arrived back on the walkway. With its telepathic communication it told her that the Count was about to get what he had come here for.
She wiped her knife on Severan's hair then sheathed it in her boot. Taking the hand and eye with her, she told the Belphegor to ferry her down to where the Count and his daughter stood on the podium that contained the Library's heart and mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The quest revealed
The Belphegor descended gently as a snowflake and deposited Morah on the podium. The Count stood beside the jelly creature that hid in the middle of the Library like a funnel-web spider hides in its web. Morah stood back beside her bleeding demon. She dropped Severan's hand and eye in a bloody heap on the ground. "I got what you wanted."
"Good." The Count gave the items hardly a glance. His attention was captured by the wobbling thing on the podium.
Mehefin stood near her father. She appeared tentative, anxious almost. She went to take the Count's arm in a gesture of affection, but he brushed her off. She stepped back. "I made contact with the Kissag, father."
"Good." The Count nodded without looking at her.
She said, "I fear that many of them are dead. There are perhaps not enough to escort us out of here."
He did not take his eyes from the Library's heart, as if he was engaged in some silent conversation with the creature. Then he muttered. "The dark has already begun to fill up the Library. But it will not mount to this podium. So we shall wait here until it recedes."
Mehefin nodded. "Then, when the dark is gone again, the Kissag will be able to enter and escort us out."
The Count snapped, "I do not need the Kissag now."
Mehefin glanced at Morah who smiled sweetly back at her. The Count swept his hand back to point at the witch. "We have her now." Then
he turned. "And Severan?"
"Dead," Morah said.
Mehefin bowed her head. The Count regarded her coldly. "You seem saddened by that, daughter."
Mehefin's eyes were filled with tears. "I have my duty to you. That comes first, you know."
He nodded and Mehefin turned to look at the jellied heart of the Library. "This is what controls this place?"
The Count nodded. "It draws creatures into the Library then digests them."
"But not you, obviously. You're different." Morah studied him with disdain and amusement.
He went on. " It's a curious procedure. First it crystallizes them with the quicksilver. The metal enters into their bodies and causes all kinds of strange complications. The silver enters into the blood stream and the lymph and multiplies cells in increasingly bizarre ways. I think this is how the Library prepares creatures for digestion. Then it brings these." He gestured to the black snakes which writhed around the podium, now filling the whole floor of the cave and beyond into the tunnels. His tone was like a curt college professor explaining a point in chemistry. "This is the inchoatus that digests what the silver has prepared. And thus the Library feeds."
Mehefin said, "I fell into the silver, father."
A look of intense curiosity appeared on his face. "Tell me what it was like. Subjectively?"
"I felt myself being dissolved; my identity and my spirit grew lax and started to fall apart."
"Hmm, I see." Then he smiled. "You see, the Library digests not just your body, but your spirit too. What we might call the qualia of your life." Then he looked up. "I am glad you survived, Mehefin, but how?"
"Gaijann saved me."
"Gaijann is the black one?"
"Yes. The assassin."
"And now?"
"He's dead too," Morah hesitated. "I'm pretty sure he's dead. I'll go back up and check later."
"Ah good," said the Count. "I never needed him."
Mehefin gestured to the thing that trembled and quivered, the black seeds inside it pulsing as if it was responding to their talk. "Is it intelligent?"
"Oh yes. It is intelligent in ways beyond our understanding. We have a limited rational intelligence which is created by, and constrained by our physical brain. Its intelligence radiates into hundreds if not thousands of dimensions we can't perceive." Then he frowned. "It enjoys suffering and is cruel beyond our comprehension."
"I doubt that," Morah said. She was stroking the Belphegor's leather wing.
"I must take care to always be cleverer than it so that I can get what I want. For example, I have asked it to give me the power that I know it can."
Morah raised a beautifully shaped eyebrow. "And that is?" She said it with a tone as if she wasn't really interested.
He looked at her. "I don't suppose it hurts now for you to know what I came here for."
"No." She smiled. "How could it?"
He nodded like a kindly uncle. "I want the power of a God."
Morah grinned. "Ah, that old chestnut. You know, I've heard that desire a thousand times from the mouths of psychopaths and fantasists."
He frowned. "But this is different. The Library of Xaolin can make me one."
The witch said, "You want to be a thousand feet high and throw thunderbolts? Make everyone build little temples to you and sacrifice goats?"
He shook his head, irritated. "I want to be immortal and all powerful. All my studies, all my long life has brought me here today. All my knowledge shouldn't be lost. It would be a crime to the Universe if I were to die, so I shall live as a god."
Mehefin moved closer to her father. She put her hand out and held onto his arm in a gesture of solidarity. This time he allowed her touch.
Morah looked unperturbed. "So tell me, what form does this 'engodment' take?"
The Count smiled. "I have asked the Library to turn me into a virus."
Morah threw her head back and laughed.
The Count raised his voice, trying to talk over her laughter. "Because I will be immortal. I will infiltrate all living things."
"And then you'll kill them? Sounds like you'd be shooting yourself in the foot."
"All parts of me will contain my memory. Together we will form a host - a whole greater by far than anything that has come before. We will infect the Universe and the Universe will do my will."
"You are in fact insane," Morah said.
He kept talking. "As an intelligent virus I will control all men and all organic life forms. I will mutate faster than any antigen. I will suborn every attempt to create an anti-virus. I will be God; the only God."
Mehefin dropped her hand from her father's arm. She was looking at him with sudden fear and disgust.
Morah said, "So you are going to ask the jellyfish to turn you into a 'flu bug, and it will?"
The Count's bulging were wide. He lowered his voice. "Yes, but as I said, the Library is wicked. It wants a gift in return." He looked at Morah. "I need you to restrain Mehefin."
Morah didn't move.
"Morah," said the Count firmly. "Remember what I promised you. I will give you power second only to mine."
Still Morah didn't move.
Mehefin shrank away from her father. She stepped backwards down the podium stairs until she was within a foot of the squirming horde of black tubes that filled the whole of the cave floor and piled over themselves like maggots in the tunnels beyond.
"Morah, take her. It is imperative."
"I see: sacrifice your daughter, or you don't get to play with the jelly brain?" Morah said.
He stared at her; full of anger and resentment mixed with hesitant fear that she wouldn't do as he said and he would be robbed of his prize.
Morah glanced at Mehefin who stood there, her white silk robes stained and torn. She looked beseechingly at Morah and then with terror towards the Belphegor. She took another step backwards. She was close to the black maggots and they sensed her proximity, beginning to boil and writhe. One more step and she would be in them, even if she didn't mean to - she could so easily trip and fall. She halted at the edge. "Please, father." Her voice shook.
"It's not what I would have wanted," he said in the tone of a father telling his teenage daughter why he left her mother. "But it's the price the Library wants me to pay." He even showed his hands, palm up, half-beseeching.
Mehefin stammered, "I'm your only daughter. Your only living relative."
The Count clasped his hands behind him like a kindly preacher. "I know. That's why it named you. It pleases its sense of cruelty. It knows how much it will hurt me to sacrifice you."
Morah laughed again. "Oh, I can see that. You're all tears."
He glared at the witch. "How dare you suggest I don't care? I will regret my daughter's death for the rest of my life. Now take her."
Morah gave a long last look at the Count and then at Mehefin as if considering her options.
"Give me a star system," she said, "and I'll do it."
"Done."
"Your own - Helios IV. And I will kill every living creature on it."
Without hesitation, he nodded. "Yes."
Morah waggled her finger. "I mean it."
He said, "If I am prepared to sacrifice my only daughter, don't you think I would sacrifice my planet?"
Morah exhaled in disgust. "You're too fucked up even for me. I'm going to leave you here to rot." She moved to the Belphegor which folded her to its breast, then, with a slow flapping of its wings, ascended skyward.
CHAPTER TWENTY- FOUR: Torina fights
Morah and the demon flew up to the walkway above the Count and his daughter. She alighted where Severan and Gaijann lay in broken and bleeding heaps some yards apart. When the demon put her down, she strolled over to Severan and prodded him with the toe of her boot.
She sucked her sharpened teeth. "Still alive, I see." She mused. "Could do it myself." The Belphegor watched her with its yellow eyes. Out loud, she said, "I used to enjoy killing things personally, then I got lazy and let you do it al
l the time. Maybe time to get back to the shop floor."
The witch reached down and drew her black knife from its sheath in her boot. She took it out and examined its edge. Then she knelt down on one knee beside Severan. She examined the angle of his jaw and drew one finger along the line of his carotid artery as if marking where to cut. "Pity you're not awake to feel it really. Because let me tell you, your pompous righteousness always pissed me off."
Severan groaned. Morah sighed again. Then shrugged. She had the knife in her hand. Then there was a small noise from behind. The Belphegor looked and Morah turned, following the demon's gaze to see a slight figure emerging from the dark of the tunnel. The blonde woman emerging from the passage looked aghast, an expression of pure heartbreak on her petite face as she saw Severan's broken form. It was Torina.
Morah stood, the hand holding the knife dropping to her thigh.
Torina screamed, "What have you done?"
"It wasn't all me." She pointed at the Belphegor. "He did some too."
"You fucking bitch." Torina's tears streamed down her face. She ran to Severan and fell to her knees, sobbing as she hugged his broken body.
"Hey!" Morah stood above her. "You've lost your bag of healing tricks." She was grinning broadly.
Torina's body shook as the sobs wracked through her. She cradled the giant's unresponsive form in both arms.
Morah looked at the Belphegor. Tiredly, she rubbed her white and red eyes. "Kill her," she said to the demon. "And, because you've been good, you can eat her afterwards."
The Belphegor stumbled across to Torina. It did not appear to be in a particular hurry - as if it was certain of its kill. Torina glanced up as it approached. Her hand went to her holster, but the pistol was long gone.
Morah smirked. The demon was taking care of Torina, so she could finish Gaijann. She thought about killing him then, but thought it would be more fun to let Torina see her do it, but Torina's attention was currently all on the Belphegor. She nodded at the demon. "Just cripple her first. Then we'll let her see me gut her friends. I may do something more elaborate than I'd originally planned now I've got an audience. I've always liked putting on a show. I should have been a dancer really, but I liked killing things too much to practice my plié."