Battle Across Worlds

by Dean Chalmers

  Perhaps she was waiting for a chance to finish him off herself?

  The bed was large and comfortable, with soft linen sheets and a blanket made from some kind of tawny animal skin. It was an odd contrast to the roughness of the rest of the chamber, which featured only a crude table and a rock ledge that must serve as a seat.

  The shiny stone door to the chamber was somehow self-opening, unlocking and sliding back when the proper crystal key was presented. The guards had used their key, thrown him in the room, and left him there. He’d tried to move the door by leaning on it and pushing, but to no avail.

  So he waited, trying to keep his thoughts empty, irritated by the conflicting feelings running through the back of his mind.

  You surrendered!, sneered a voice in his head not unlike his deceased father’s. Put yourself at the mercy of a woman! You—

  Suddenly, the door hissed open …

  And she entered, gliding in silently. The female general—the brown-skinned, red-eyed witch!—clad only in a linen robe. Her crimson eyes assessed him in a predator’s gaze.

  The door slid closed behind her, and the robe slid to the floor, leaving her naked.

  What was this? She meant to seduce him?

  “What are doing, wench?” he asked.

  “Ka buer yao,” she hissed, tilting her head from side to side playfully as she moved close. “Ka den pauo.” She smiled ferally as she pronounced the last word, and he knew it had to mean something crude.

  Her body was lean and tight, her brown skin taut over the muscles and flawlessly smooth. It was a compact and powerful build, yet the subtle feminine curves were there, part of the beautiful whole.

  He couldn’t deny it. He wanted her.

  Not to possess her, not to humiliate her … but simply to mate with her, be as close to her as a man could physically be with a woman.

  She had attacked him—stabbed him, violated his flesh with her blade, in front of her men!—yet he had no thoughts of revenge.

  That was weakness. That was wrong. And yet, he did not want to hurt her. He wanted something else entirely …

  There was an urgency in his lust. He struggled in his bonds.

  She stepped behind him, and untied the knots that bound his hands. Then her hands were at his waist, loosening his belt …

  He turned his head, looked into her crimson eyes. “Eager, my feisty lady? Well, that’s flattering, but let me lead the—”

  She grabbed his arms and forced him back onto the bed. He tried to push back at her, to lock his legs against the floor, resist in any way possible.

  It was no use. She was even stronger than she looked, stronger than the largest Grenadier he had ever wrestled. That fire in her eyes must somehow run through her body, he thought, power her muscles like hellish engines.

  In an instant, she had him on his back, her hands like steel talons on his upper arms, pinning him down. She leered down at him, and he could feel her breath hot on his face.

  But he would not give in that easily. He thrashed his head about, trying to bite her. Kicked his legs. He heard himself laughing through a pleasant warm haze.

  She reached down with one hand and ripped his trousers open, sending buttons flying.

  He clawed at her with his free hand. She dodged and laughed, kept smiling even when his hand caught the suppleness of her breast and roughly squeezed it.

  She wrenched his trousers down and ripped them from his body, and in a flash he was naked, his lust for her now quite visible and apparent. Then, she was slithering up the bed towards him like a snake towards its prey, the desire in those burning eyes of hers transfixing him.

  There was no point to further struggle. They both knew that now.

  He closed his eyes and allowed her to take what was now hers, feeling the incredible warmth as her body moved over his and took him inside.

  The feeling of surrender was wonderful.

  As the white-hot pleasure spread from his loins to cover his body, he caressed her, thrust back at her, knowing all the while that she was master here. Her forceful tongue probed into his mouth, and he welcomed it. He would never have thought that submission could bring such satisfaction.

  She was strength incarnate. A goddess of war?

  If that was true, then the highest power was to be obtained at her side.

  As they reached the climax of their ecstasy together, the realization flowed in warm waves through his mind.

  He knew what to do! There was no conflict in his mind now. Things were clear again. His life had attained a new purpose. A single, burning focus:

  To serve this magnificent female.

  -13-

  Alone alone alone alone.

  They put me here!

  Hate hate hate. Ten thousand thousand years of hate.

  I, Krotan, remember them—dying then—

  Ed Bocke was watching—forced to watch, submerged in the thing’s memory—and he saw them too.

  Countless multitudes of long-limbed creatures with elongated heads and lambent red eyes. Teeming in a city where blue-black crystalline towers rose to the clouds, and floating terraces hovered over avenues filled with—

  Death. They changed themselves too much, remade every aon in their forms. They no longer had a place in the pattern of the universe. Reality rejected them. They started dying. I called it Dissolution—

  Ed watched as hordes of the things writhed in their high towers and down in the streets. Moaning, spasming, their flesh turned porous like thin-sliced sponge over aching organs and brittle bone. He was dimly aware of his own stomach contracting, clutching like a spasming fist—

  Krotan! They pleaded. Great Krotan, aon master, help us! Use your knowledge make us whole again, keep us alive!

  And of course I agreed of course. I made them new vessels, to grow naturally. Evolve.

  Knew we must not tamper too much. Just coax in the right direction, let aon pattern of the new race grow over time to avoid Dissolution.

  Time passed in the memory, a rush that swallowed Ed’s perceptions for a moment. Then, there were other creatures that looked like people now, spreading across the land. Hairy, somehow more beast-like, but human beings of a sort. The demons herded them. The one called Krotan—the thing in Ed’s head!—was watching, in charge. Probing them with silver-tipped instruments of crystal.

  Would change over time. Selection of the strongest vessels by trial of ages. Those that survive breed and make a new form for my people to possess, later. In the meantime, go to sleep, must sleep …

  Ed saw the demon-things crawling into wells in the earth, crystal-lined shafts inlaid with crisscrossing veins of silver. They curled up, slept, hibernated. But their brains were still working on some level, there were whispers mind-to-mind in the dark …

  Locked me away from the others. I, Krotan, the savior of them! For my own safety, vital to the plan, they said. That was the consensus. Or afraid of me? I trusted them then. Trusted!

  In the dark ALONE. Alone alone alone ALONE. Awake in my well, can’t sleep, mind works and works and works and works and works. A thousand thousand years of mind working and no one and nothing and ALONE.

  Until HE comes.

  Ed saw a shaft of light piercing down into the well, a man descending on a rope line. Thin, skin a deep brown shade, hair in long woven braids. His eyes were human, but red—exactly like the Guardian’s eyes!

  “I am Oberkion Culcras,” he said. “I come on behalf of your people, the Krael, to ask for a service. The Krael Consensus needs you and they will welcome you into the sleeping-hives once this is done.”

  He is a Kraelon. The red eyes. I made them, and every five hundred years some of them are born. Lead violence, keep the others fighting, struggling and evolving.

  But he is susceptible to our control, Krael control. They sent him. Need my help!

  “We will plant the seeds in bloodlines in two worlds,” Oberkion said. “Two master aona in close harmony, two souls linked. Two-as-one, da’ta se. Do not ask why. T
he Consensus demands it.”

  Trusted then, so wanted to trust. I made the two-as-one, made the seeds, the aona.

  But betrayed! A year of work, and then—

  The one called Oberkion Culcras stood over the demon Krotan, wielding a bronze knife, slashing him. “You are not my master, thing!”

  But Krotan fought back. Though weakened, he fought. Found something on the floor—one of the rods of crystal and silver, a making rod—pierced Oberkion’s chest. The man staggered, fled.

  There’s a bright light and a whistling-shuffling noise, he leaves—

  Going back, going to them! The gate still open—

  But he did not come again. Did I kill him? Traitor human. Kraelon! Their tool! They sought to use me once more and finish me!

  Now, eons of time and suffering flash by Ed’s perceptions before focus returns suddenly, violently.

  This now is a painfully recent memory, only hours old instead of centuries or millennia:

  A black pyramid rests on the pedestal in the cavern.

  Suddenly, it erupts with white light.

  The demon Krotan claws the ground, screaming—

  They are trying to come, coming for me! Close the gate, block the gate—

  Would kill—would betray, HAVE betrayed—

  Alone but now must be alone—all I have is HATE.

  HATE HATE HATE HATE.

  They’re against me, would destroy me—All against me now!

  #

  “Against me,” the youth whispered. “Against me now. Hate.”

  In the shadowy basement laboratory, Guardian Crandolph watched Ed Bocke, studying him. Strapped inside the upright wooden circle of their crudely built aon amplifier, his hands and feet bound by silver manacles, the youth was in another world: the realm of the Master’s thoughts and desires.

  The young Constable’s face glittered with sweat in the pale ambia light that radiated from a slit in the silver cylinder on the floor. He was clearly suffering through an ordeal, the Master’s perceptions and memories burning his mind … But there was no visible change yet, no remaking.

  When it did come, Crandolph wondered if it would be as bad as it had been with Reverend Mott. Would the refinements in the process work? Or would all the subjects emerge looking like worm-eaten corpses? He looked to Mott, who stood nearby, mumbling to himself and grinning his deathly smile.

  “Is it happening yet, Sir?” Crandolph’s servant, Mr. Starks, asked. The bearded man stood nearby, biting his lip apprehensively.

  “No, Mister Starks. It will take a while, I presume, as it did with the Reverend Mott. But he can’t fight forever.”

  “At least he’s stopped that awful retching,” Starks observed.

  The Guardian nodded. “Physical reactions like that come from fighting the process. Once he accepts his fate, things will go quickly.”

  “Excuse me, Sir,” Starks asked, “but what if he doesn’t accept it? Can he win the fight?”

  The Guardian reached out and touched Bocke’s damp forehead with a fingertip, allowing himself to be distantly sympathetic to the boy’s plight.

  “He can’t win,” the Guardian explained. “Being merely human, he stands no chance. No chance at all.”

  -14-

  “I’m very cold, Jack,” Ralley said.

  Jack Chestire had been absorbed in his piloting of the flyer, caught up in the subtle vibrations of their passage, listening to the whistling of the rear jets and dreaming of where such a craft might take him. He had to shake himself back to alertness when he heard Ralley speak.

  He turned to look at his friend. It was obvious that the “fire” inside Ralley had gone out yet again. The youth was pale and trembling, hugging his chest.

  “Let’s see if there’s something to cover you up, friend,” Jack said. He would have offered his coat, but that was still back on the landing field, presumably in the hands of the guard who had unwittingly snatched it. But there might be something else …

  He found a long, narrow, basket-like container tucked beside his seat. Opening it, he discovered a folded woolen blanket, as well as a long bronze knife, a copper bottle of what he presumed was water, and several small satchels that might contain rations.

  He gave the blanket to Ralley, who quickly wrapped himself in it.

  “Better, Jack,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Can you still feel your lady, Ralley?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I can feel her pain and sense her weakness. But I know she still lives.”

  Jack glanced back and saw Ralley rocking in his seat, his eyes half-lidded. He was humming again, as he always did when distressed.

  “We’ll get her. Soon,” Jack told him, trying to sound reassuring.

  “Jack?” Ralley asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you …” he paused, cleared his throat. “Do you think I’m weak?”

  “Weak?” That was an odd question. Especially after what Jack had seen back in the valley, where Ralley had slain half-a-dozen foes with his rapier. And then there had been his incredible leap through the air from the bridge …

  “I don’t feel at all well, Jack,” Ralley explained. “At times like this I’m sick and fearful, and I doubt my ability to do what I must to free her.”

  “Everyone feels fear and doubt, Ralley,” Jack told him. “Even the best of soldiers. It is what we do in spite of those feelings that really matters.”

  “You think it was foolhardy of me to throw myself from the bridge like I did?”

  “Well,” Jack admitted. “You did give me quite a scare.”

  “But I knew I would make it, Jack. Just like I knew I could handle those soldiers on the stairs. When I’m like that, when I’m in that fiery state, everything seems clear and my mind works so fast … I can see the correct course of action, almost as if it is drawn out for me.”

  “But you don’t feel like that now?”

  “No. After the danger is over it fades. And I feel like this, like my old self again. Full of too many thoughts and worries. Except—I can still sense her.”

  Ralley suddenly gasped. “Jack, we’re getting close. Not sure how much farther, but we’re getting very close.””

  “We’d best go lower,” Jack said. “That will make us less visible.”

  He pulled up on the harness and brought the flyer close to the ground, barely twenty feet above the trackless yellow sands.

  There still was nothing to be seen, despite Ralley’s certainty that they were close. A few desert plants, a rock here and there—but not much else to break the monotony of the arid waste.

  Then, suddenly, an object stabbed up from the horizon, a red-brown shape like a jagged blade poking above the sands.

  As they drew closer, it revealed itself to be a high rock outcropping like a gigantic wedge of red stone. Other, smaller formations of stone surrounded it, and the sand below their flyer was soon dotted with little islands of rock.

  “That’s it,” Ralley said, pointing towards the tall outcropping, which rose steadily in their view as they approached. “Finally. That’s where she is.”

  The reddish rock outcropping looked like a skinny mountain to Jack. Perhaps it had once been a real mountain, the surrounding stone blasted away by centuries of wind-driven sand. He looked for signs of fortification, any hint of human habitation, but could see none from this distance.

  “I don’t see anything,” he told Ralley. “But we’re probably too far away to—“

  Jack went silent as something caught his eye. It was a sparkle high on the tower of stone, like metal glinting in the sunlight.

  Perhaps the metal of a gun-needle?

  “They’ll have guns, or cannons maybe,” Jack worried aloud. “Or whatever they use in this realm for defenses. And look-outs posted very high up, so that they can see for miles around. We may have already revealed ourselves.”

  Jack flicked a few levers and took them into a bearing so that a large rock formation stood between them and the
enemy tower, then lowered the flyer until they were barely a man’s height from the ground, and applied braking jets to stop their approach. With the whistling of the forward jets, the craft slid to a stop as they were jerked forward in their seats.

  “Ralley,” Jack told his friend. “I must be honest. I don’t know how safe it will be to get much closer right now. I’m clearly out of my depth, but to hazard a guess … It would be better to wait for nightfall.”

  “Nightfall? No, I don’t …” Ralley’s voice trailed off as he shivered in his blanket, hid his face in his arms.

  “Ralley?” Jack asked, reaching back to tap his shoulder.

  When his friend looked up again, his face was no longer pale, and his eyes had a determined squint.

  “No, Jack. We can’t wait.”

  Ralley pushed aside the blanket and leaned forward to stare out the front of the craft at the stone tower. “We need to get there, NOW.” That resonant tone was back in his voice; the fiery state had returned, and Ralley was strong once again.

  “You’re feeling better, I see?” Jack said.

  Ralley nodded. “The moment is here, and I can’t afford to squander a second of the time she has left.”

  Jack could feel an itch under his own skin, as if his friend’s impatience were rubbing off. But his soldier’s instincts and years of training told him to wait, stay hidden and survey the situation …

  “I wish we had a spyglass,” Jack said. He fumbled in the basket beside the seat again, wondering if such an item might possibly be amongst the survival gear that had been provided.

  Two of the leather pouches contained food, as he had suspected: one some sort of jerky, the other dried fruit. A third held a crystalline rod tipped with a silver shaft—hadn’t he seen lovely Tesha with a similar tool?—and inside the fourth was an odd ring of bronze and silver.

  “That’s your spyglass,” Ralley said.

  “What?” Jack couldn’t understand. The outer bronze part of the ring turned independently of the inner silver sleeve, but there was no lense of any sort. Still, he held it up to his eye …