“HOW?” I asked, panting as rage threatened to overwhelm me. This wasn’t fair!
“Do you really think,” she slurred through a broken jaw, “that we would put up a ward that would work against ourselves? Come on now, mortal.”
I raised my arm, shuddering and shaking as the motors seized up. My circuitry was rerouting, but it was taking time, too much time as she hobbled closer—
The vial caught her in the back, and red flames roared up, smoky and bright. She ignored it, staggered on toward me, and I backed up.
I knew those flames. Greek fire. They’d keep on burning, regardless of what their victim did.
Judy’s slack jaw twisted into a sneer, and the demons driving her body twisted, chi flashing...
...but nothing happened.
One glazed eye widened, and she reached back, tried clawing her robe off. All she did was burn her hand and catch her skin alight.
She scowled, hurled herself against the tower, trying to smother the flames, trying to scrape it onto the wall—
—and my particle beam caught her in the face.
I hadn’t held back. Her corpse fell to the ground, burning. I let it, sagging onto my rump with a ringing clang.
“HOW? SHE BROKE YOUR NECK—”
“Yes, he’ll be a while recovering,” Gamma said, dropping Khalid’s bandolier of vials back onto his body. “I’m really glad I learned to read Greek.”
“NOT THAT DIRE’S PISSED ABOUT THIS LITERAL DEUS EX MACHINA SAVE, BUT HOW?”
“How do you think he got here so fast? I carried him and ran. Don’t worry, Delta’s in command of Sneaky right now. The bulk of the action’s done, and this city’s about a foregone conclusion.”
“AND YOU DIDN’T HELP OUT EARLIER?”
“With all due respect, she would have broken me like a toy. Well, they would have, anyway.” She looked at the smoldering corpse. “Oh shit, they’re trying to run for it. Hang on.” Gamma jogged over and started stomping on the glowing blue worms that were trying to crawl away from Judy’s ruined husk.
“THEY WERE POSSESSING HER. PHYSICALLY, ANYWAY. SHE IS A DAMNED. HAS TO BE.” I rose again, as my HUD warnings slowly oozed from red to amber to yellow. Still a few minor systems down but nothing I couldn’t live without. “OH SHIT.” The full ramifications of what had just happened crashed into me like a tidal wave, and I realized that we had a big, big problem.
“What?”
“SHE’S DAMNED. YET SHE STILL RETAINED HER SUPER POWERS.”
Gamma froze mid stomp. “Oh.”
“HOW MANY HEROES AND VILLAINS DO YOU THINK HAVE ENDED UP DOWN HERE?”
“I’m more concerned about how the demons have a way to control them.”
“THAT, TOO.” I glanced around at the square. “WE NEED TO HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT THIS ONBOARD BEAKY, IN A MORE SECURE ENVIRONMENT.”
“Right. Shall we get going?”
“NO.” I turned to the tower. Sturdy, squat, six stories tall, it waited for me. It held answers, and I would have them. “WATCH THE JANISSARY. BE HERE WHEN HE REVIVES.”
“There’s no way I can talk you out of this, is there?”
“NOPE.”
“Take it slow, Doctor. There’s no way this isn’t a trap.”
“SHE KNOWS.”
I found the door, found the strength to knock it down. Sensors up to full or as high as I could get them with my circuit damage, I traced not only the dingy form of the interior but the magical symbols along the walls. They seemed restricted to the walls, so I entered, flicking my eyes around, looking for trouble.
The first floor had a high-vaulted ceiling, and iron cages hung from long chains, dangling at various levels like obscene fruit.
And each and every one was filled.
Damned, each dressed like a vagabond, each dressed in a rude caricature of someone from the homeless camp I’d once sheltered in. I could name every single one, name who they were supposed to be, and I closed my eyes as I took in the sight.
Someone wanted me angry.
The problem was, I wanted to be angry, too. This wasn’t the influence of Wrath. This was simple, human anger.
I moved among them, and they cried out as I did. The cages were packed together, there was no way to avoid moving them... and the sides and bottoms of each cage were spiked. I was tormenting them with every step.
“YOUR POINT IS AS HAMFISTED AS YOUR METHODS.” I reached the staircase, winding around the far side of the tower and strode up it. My metal-shod feet rang out with every step, cutting through the whimpers and sobs of the Damned.
The next floor bulged with a sandy floor, tents looming out of the darkness. They’d been placed exactly as I remembered them... women’s quarters over there, medical tent around the circle from it. They even had a few crumbled walls where the bathhouse had been. I gritted my teeth and moved through it, sand crunching beneath my heels.
Then I paused, as my sight revealed a form in the medical tent. An obese form.
“Oh those bastards,” I swore, screwing my eyes shut. I didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to remember how I felt on that night, so long ago.
But I did look. My old instincts, old regrets came to me once more. I had wanted to save so many good people. I had wanted to protect them. Long before any of this nonsense, I had learned regret, and I could not turn away from the first, most painful loss I had sustained.
On a cloth and metal table lay the form of a fat woman, clad in layers of heavy clothes, with a red scarf at her side, red from the fresh blood dripping from the ruin of her head. A carpenter’s hammer sat next to her. She’d been killed not long ago, brains and skull fragments and blood left to pool on the table.
My vision went red, and I squeezed my eyes shut, turned off my vocalizer, and sobbed.
“Joan,” I whispered. “You deserved so, so much better.”
I don’t know how long it was, how long it took, but the grief left me.
The rage did not.
With a wave of my hand I incinerated the Damned who’d been slain in her place. She’d reform, eventually. It was not truly Joan. The tent burned, and I strode from it, as it illuminated the rest of the cavernous room. There wasn’t that much sand, as it turned out... just enough to replicate the scene, just enough to cover the area of the tents.
I found the stairs again and climbed.
“Dire,” A male voice wheezed, from above me. “Do you hate me yet?”
I knew that voice. And the last pieces fell into place as I realized what he’d done.
“YES,” I replied, taking the last few steps and emerging into the topmost floor. “SHE HAS NEVER STOPPED HATING YOU.”
He sat there on a throne of bone and flesh, bare-chested from the waist up. He had muscles upon muscles, and a blood-spattered white ruffled collar wound around his neck, separated his head from his body. Greasepaint covered his face, white like the pallor of a corpse, save for the black teardrops tattooed under each eye. On his head he bore a conical purple hat. He hadn’t had that the last time I’d seen him.
“HELL HOLDS NOT ENOUGH TORMENT FOR YOU,” I roared, lurching forward and seizing him by the throat, crushing that stupid collar as I lifted his bulky form up into the air.
“Finally, something we agree upon,” said Great Clown Pagliacci.
CHAPTER 12: A DIVINE TRAGEDY
“One area we have improved upon, with the Great Teacher’s permission, is the alignment system. There are simply not enough varieties of evil in the core book.”
--Excerpt from the seventh chapter of the first book of the Chronicles of the Shared Lie
There’s a place beyond anger, beyond hatred. To my shame, I knew it well. It was where the heat became too much to bear, and became cold, colder than the gaps between the stars. A place where morals and ethics were eaten in a heartbeat, gobbled up by the beast that lurks in the back of our minds and whispers to us in our weakest hours.
With my heart cold as drowned ash I reviewed the options for atrocities one by
one, coming to the same realization every time. Finally, I made my choice.
“SHE’S GOT A JOKE FOR YOU,” I said, peering up at the evil clown, his broad face reddening and his eyes bulging from the death-grip I had on his collar. “THE MASOCHIST COMES TO THE SADIST AND WHISPERS ‘HURT ME’.”
I pushed him back and shook my head.
“THE SADIST SMILES AND SAYS ‘NO’.”
I dropped him to the floor, turned, and walked away.
Of course I watched him in my rear-view cameras and saw his face twist in the darkness. Watched the realization sink in and watched his face go through shock, rage... and end in amusement.
“A fitting joke,” he said, standing upright. “But you do not think on the scale you need to, not yet.”
“YOU’RE DEAD AND DAMNED. SHE HAS NO REASON TO PLAY GAMES WITH YOU. YOU’RE IN HELL, AND ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD. GOODBYE, PAGLIACCI.”
I reached the stairs and started down, lips peeled back from my skull in something a fool might call a smile, and the large man shook with laughter, hands pressed to his face, elbows to the ceiling as his back curved impossibly. Then he snapped forward like a rubber band releasing tension, loping after me with long, fast strides.
I turned, raised a gauntlet to him, and turned him into ash.
At least, that was what I intended to do. What actually happened was that three yellow icons on my damage readout flipped straight to red and my particle blaster triggered an emergency shutoff as part of my circuitry shorted.
I stopped grinning and braced for impact. Pagliacci slammed into me, still laughing, and bore us both down the stairs. Hissing through my teeth I twisted, wrestling with him, trying to smash him against the steps. But he was fast, so fast, and the best I managed was to break his left arm, catching it between my hip and the stone stairs during one bounce. Then we were on the empty floor below, laying side to side, and he was smiling into my mask, tears running down and blurring his greasepaint.
I opened my mouth, but he spoke first. “You do not yet understand Hell. And you will not without my help.”
That gave me pause.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT, FOOL?”
He smiled, showing bloody gaps where the fall had popped out several of his teeth. Eyes that were all pupil sought my mask. “I want to be unmade.”
I considered his request, nodded. “SHE’LL GET BACK TO YOU ON THAT.” I reached over, grabbed his face, and bashed his brains out against the floor. Then I rose, threw him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and made my way downstairs and out of the tower.
I halted before I left, peered out from the darkness into a scene of carnage. Gamma stood, coated head to toe with blood, next to a heap of demonic bits and pieces. Around her and the rest of the tower a legion of demons ringed us, each bearing the gouged-orb symbol of Lady Eyeblight on their hair-tunic livery. As I watched one of their officers started barking orders, getting the next wave ready.
Behind Gamma, Khalid sat clutching his skull with both hands, looking for all the world like a toddler who’d just discovered brain freeze. It would have been hilarious if I hadn’t just seen his neck snapped like a twig.
“Come on,” Gamma beckoned. “Charge me again, and I’ll use my sorcery to destroy you!”
I saw fear in their eyes, and I stifled my laughter. She’d bluffed them into thinking the tower’s wards were her own magic. Sure enough, as the demons charged forward, she started waving her hands, shouting nonsense words. And as the wave got within fifty feet, they detonated one after another.
“Beautiful!” I whispered through the vox. “Dire is so, so very proud of you!”
She straightened in arrogance, put her hands on her hips, and let loose one of those high-pitched laughs you only get from noblewomen scorning peasants. But through my channel she whispered; “Thanks, Doctor.”
“You’ll run out of essence sooner or later, witch!” The officer roared. “We have a Legion!”
I weighed the possibilities, and decided to intervene. Fun as it was, we had places to be, and if they kept at it they might figure out what was really going on. So I stepped out of the doorway, amplifying my voice as I tossed Pagliacci’s carcass to the side. “YOU HAVE A LEGION. SHE HAS DIRE. GUESS WHO WILL WIN?” I pointed at them then curled my fingers into a fist. “SPOILERS; IT WON’T BE YOU.”
The officer, a spiky-looking beast with a dog’s head, shut his mouth so quickly that his fangs tore a chunk of his lip off. “My Lady Dire,” he said, offering a bow. “We thought your treacherous minions had betrayed and slain you.”
“WELL, THEY DIDN’T.”
“Lying,” First Whisper sung through the vox channel.
“Duh,” I whispered back.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Purple light flared in the distance. From the parapets of one of the farther towers of the castle, robed figures pulled down strange energies and flung them into the twenty-foot-tall siege demons that Eyeblight had brought along for this last stage of our assault. I watched the Council of Worms make their last stand and saw them get picked off by hails of musket fire from flying snipers. Their wormy bodies gave them a lot of resilience, as I’d found from my duel with infested Judy. But those muskets fired really big rounds, and there were a lot of them.
“OBVIOUS IN HINDSIGHT, REALLY.”
“What?” The officer literally barked.
“NOTHING. GO TEND TO THE REST OF THE CASTLE. DIRE HAS SECURED THIS TOWER.”
It tilted its head, considered me, then waved a spear in the general direction of the siege. The legion of demons followed as it loped off. I diverted all repairs to my gravitics and leaned against the wall. “A LOT IS MAKING SENSE NOW. BRING THE STRIGES TOGETHER; WE’LL NEED A MEETING.” My gaze wandered down to Great Clown Pagliacci’s corpse, with his head already looking a little more intact than it had minutes ago. “AND RESTRAINTS. REALLY HEAVY RESTRAINTS.”
Amazingly, Punching Judy was the first to recover. I was there when she woke, sitting in the fleshy chamber that we’d set aside as a jail cell. We had figured it wouldn’t be pleasant when she finally woke and had taken what I thought were adequate precautions. Still, this was a huge risk, and so I waited to greet her.
Seven plans I’d readied for her, with varying degrees of loss and sacrifice.
They all went out the window when she woke, looked at me from her restraints, and slumped in relief.
“Oh thank fuckin’ God.”
“NOT THE REACTION DIRE WAS EXPECTING.”
“Lady, I’m a Queensguard, even if I’m a deader. Worms in me head makin’ me a superzombie is bloody Tuesday.” A shadow crossed her face. “Was bloody Tuesday. Please tell me we got that Maestro cunt.”
“DIRE DOESN’T LIKE THAT WORD.” The sentence escaped me before I could stop it.
Judy snorted, and then we were both laughing at the incongruity. Finally she calmed down. “I’m British, ent I? Cunt isn’t as bad as when you Yanks say it.”
“FAIR ENOUGH. GOING TO UNDO YOUR RESTRAINTS NOW. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM ANY SUDDEN MOVEMENT.” I had my forcefield amped up to maximum level. Anything but slow movements, including the quick motions she used to control her chi, would ground out painfully against my shield.
Judy didn’t strike at me. She sat up, looked around at the raw internals of the Strix. “In the belly of the beast?” She asked.
“MORE LIKE THE LUNGS. WELL, THE SIDE OF THE LUNGS.”
I backed off, giving her room to stand, and she took it, kipping up to her feet with a head-over-heels flip, ending up standing on point like a ballerina. While bare-footed. And bare-everything-elsed, for that matter. “CLOTHES ARE OVER THERE,” I pointed at a few hair shirts and leather garments, left over from a few of our Damned crew’s ongoing efforts to kill time by crafting useful things.
She looked them over carefully, pulled a robe free of the bone hooks, and eased it over herself. “Not me first choice. But the chi flows more easily this way.”
“SERIOUSLY?�
��
“Yeah. So is the Maestro nicked?”
“DEAD,” I told her. “MANAGED TO USE A LAST-MINUTE TRICK TO DUMP DIRE, HER CHORUS, THE LAST JANISSARY, AND VECTOR INTO HELL WITH HIM. A SAD, SPITEFUL SACRIFICE PLAY FOR A SAD, SPITEFUL LITTLE TURD. HE DIDN’T LAST LONG AFTER THAT.”
I didn’t tell her I’d chucked him into a lava fumarole. Heroes got weird about that sort of thing.
“Won’t shed no tears,” she concluded. “So am I free ter go?”
“YOU DON’T PLAN ON ANY BOUTS OF VIOLENCE OR VENGEANCE AGAINST DIRE, OR HER PEOPLE?”
“You got them worms out of me head. Why would I ever want to go and do you dirty?”
“Truthful,” First Whisper spoke through the vox.
“The Cat concurs,” Vector confirmed.
“THEN YEAH, YOU’RE FREE TO GO. ALTHOUGH DIRE WONDERS, WHERE PRECISELY WOULD YOU GO?”
Judy sighed. “Find a place upstream, some empty spot to hide and not do no one any harm. Sort meself out and atone.” She rubbed her eyes.
“THAT IS AN OPTION. BUT BEFORE YOU DO, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD TALK WITH SOME PEOPLE WHO TRIED IT BEFORE.”
“Yeah?”
“YEAH. COME ON. STICK AROUND AND SEE WHAT WE’VE GOT GOING BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO HEAD OUT.”
I lead her back to the control room, explaining our flying ‘lair’ as I went. The idea didn’t seem to sit well with her. “Right, this is just gross.”
“GROSS BUT EFFECTIVE.”
“Up ’til the point someone brings enough firepower to crack ’em open. Then yer boned.”
“IF WE’D PUT ALL OUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET, SURE. BUT WE’VE GOT THREE OF THESE THINGS.”
“Right, because anything tough enough and ’urty enough to take down Beaky is totally going to stop after just killing ’im.”
“NO PLAN’S PERFECT,” I shrugged. “BESIDES, THOSE OTHER STRIGES AREN’T THE FULL RUN OF THE PLANS—”
The membranes to the control room parted, a high-pitched squealing filled my ears, and a metal body blurred past me. Almost quicker than I could register Punching Judy flipped backward, then gave out a whoop and dove into the speeding form.
DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6) Page 17