by Jack Conner
Kilian laughed, and in a quiet voice said to the others, “He’s insane as ever—only now he can talk.” He cocked his pistol and said to the lunatic, “So I guess if I shoot you in the head, it won’t make much difference, will it?”
“Not at all.”
Kilian fired.
The bullet struck Kiernevar squarely between the eyes, but the lunatic neither budged nor flinched. A little blood trickled from the hole and was happily lapped up by his writhing tongue.
“Okay,” said Byron. “I’ve had enough. Obviously, the Balaklava never intended to meet us. They sent us down here to meet you. Why?”
“Because they find me amusing, and they think me a pawn. They should beware. A queen in pawn’s clothing can be very dangerous.”
“You didn’t answer his question,” said Kilian. “Why the hell are we here?”
“Because Junger and Jagoda have so few zombies that were immortals first. As you must know, an immortal retains much of his power when he crosses over, and it is this power that my associates find lacking in most of their puppets. Also, they desire a will, and a mind predisposed to the task at hand. In short, they need you.”
“It’s time to get out of here,” Byron said.
“Men,” said Kilian, his jaw set and his voice hard. “We might die in the attempt, but … go!”
They spun about to charge the zombies guarding the exit, but while their backs had been turned, two more score of the rotten things had gathered. Even as Byron thought to try another tunnel, he heard a kingly voice bellow from behind and above him. The Chalgid Kiernevar said, “Charge, my children!”
The sixty zombies drew their blades and guns and descended on the werewolves.
Kilian braced himself. “Sell it dearly, boys.”
Byron and Loirot obeyed. The crew of three fought fiercely, banding together as a unit like they hadn’t in years. The deaders opened up with their firearms first, tearing through werewolf bones and tendons and organs. Riddled, the death-squad returned fire, but even before their first clips were emptied, the minions of Junger and Jagoda were upon them, hacking and slicing with their rusted machetes and daggers and swords.
As Byron finally went down under the horde, his last thoughts were of his family, his crew, but most of all he thought of Cloire. She, at least, would be spared. With a grin on his face, the big man died.
And was promptly hacked to bits.
* * *
Somewhere, as he made his way along the dark, cool passages of the Sabo, Ruegger could hear a steady drip—that was it. All else was silence. The scars of the mud-shark’s gastric juices had long since healed, but he was ever alert for other unwelcome parasites, and he was not disappointed. They came at frequent intervals, but always he was able to dodge them in time.
He was lost. Having no beacon to home in on, he had little choice but to wander aimlessly until he found what he was looking for, which was some sign of the Libertarians’ encampment. For the umpteenth time, he quested out with his psychic abilities, trying to needle his way into any sentient creature in the area; again, none allowed him access.
Suddenly, a noise behind him, as if the earth itself were being split apart. A mud-shark. It cut to his left, as if to charge from that direction. On his right, he saw an archway about ten feet down; he could make it in time.
Instead, he vaulted backwards, over the mud-shark’s fins. Landing, he threw himself down the tunnel the parasite had been blocking. It slipped into the ground again.
Ruegger didn’t smile. It hadn’t been the first time in the last half hour that the Balaklava had tried to herd him in a particular direction, but he hoped it would be the last. More to the point, he feared that the Balaklava had switched tactics, that now they anticipated his counter-measures and led him to think they were herding him directly when in reality they were one step ahead. Maybe they really hadn’t wanted him to follow the tunnel the last parasite had been driving him towards; had, in fact, been counting on him going the other way—as he’d done.
If that was what they were doing. He had no way to tell either way.
His nose alerted him to the smell of sulfur, and he noticed a distant light just as the soft gurgle of a small river reached him. Cautiously, he stepped out onto an old wooden bridge, half rotted, that stood on long wilting legs above a glowing red river. Stung by the smell of sulfur and acid, Ruegger stumbled forward, shoving a hand over his face to protect himself from the fumes that rose from the pit. The narrow bridge creaked underfoot, and he moved gingerly, not wanting to end up in the small but hellish gorge below.
A plank broke under the weight of his boot. To avoid falling through, he dove forwards onto his chest. The bridge creaked around him, trembling slightly. Ruegger was about to get up when, between the boards his face now pressed against, he spied strange creatures swimming in the red stream below—circling.
“Waiting for me to fall, are you?” he said. “Sorry, guys. Maybe you’ll get lucky on the next one.”
The creatures didn’t wait. Two of them bobbed to the surface, and he could make out pinkish skin and tentacles in a swirling mass of flesh and muscle. The things propelled themselves to opposite sides of the gorge and, on long, skinny, and very quick crab-like legs, scrabbled up the steep slopes.
Ruegger rose to his feet, careful not to upset the bridge. A step at a time, he tried to cross to the other side.
One of the creatures made it first.
Standing on its spindly crab legs, it wasn’t any more than four and a half feet tall, but it certainly made the most of its size. The main body of it much resembled an octopus, but—instead of hanging limply or waving like eels around its head—the bruise-colored tentacles converged in a spiral to form a lance-like point, aimed directly at Ruegger.
The outside of the tentacles looked to be dry and ridged, while the insides (for the brief seconds Ruegger had seen them) seemed soft and aquatic. The thing was an amphibian, with a large conical snout sharp and barbed enough to cause some real damage. Still studying the amphibian’s twisted spear-like nose, Ruegger was distracted for a moment by the eyes of the creature, set on each side of the long ridged horn of its tentacles. They were milky white, and blood-shot, but the strange thing was that each bore two pupils, and all four gazed at Ruegger.
Slowly, so as not to spur the creature into action, he let a blade fall from his sleeve into his hand.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said.
Slowly, it blinked its strange eyes, and advanced a step.
“Okay. Door number two.”
Suddenly, the tentacles unraveled from their cone and stood out stiffly from the beast’s head like flames in a picture of the sun. And, where the stabbing point had been, was the thing’s true snout: a wicked, scaled maw nearly two feet long that opened sideways, revealing two layers of formidable teeth. In the back of its throat, its tonsils spasmed in a belch that blew a lethal cloud of sulfuric gas straight at Ruegger.
The Darkling stumbled back, closed his eyes and raised his scimitar, thinking the squidoid, as he’d begun to think of it, was about to strike.
But no. This had just been a distraction.
The real attack came from behind, from the second creature. It plunged its long barbed beak into his back and lanced him through a kidney. He screamed and stepped forward, trying to get himself off the hook. But the barbs of the horn made sliding off it difficult, and meanwhile the first squidoid was crab-walking his way, its tentacles shaping back into their attack posture.
Ruegger sent his blade straight through its snout to lodge in its head. The point of the scimitar stuck out the back, where blue-tinted blood squirted onto the bridge.
The squidoid sagged to the side but somehow maintained its footing. Ruegger was about to inflict more telekinetic damage when the barbed lance already in him begin to saw side to side, widening the wound. He screamed.
With one hand, he reached around and grabbed the squidoid by its lance, stilling its movements
. It proved stronger than he gave it credit for. Coiling its skeletal legs, it lunged forward, thrusting its stabbing weapon straight through Ruegger, who was dismayed to see a bit of some organ on the tip of the lance’s point. His own blood poured down his belly and the wooden bridge lapped it up at his feet.
He recalled the blade from its lodge in the first parasite, caught it in one hand and severed the tip of the organic lance sticking out of his abdomen. The creature retreated with a squeal, and painfully (at least to Ruegger) removed its outer snout from the Darkling’s insides.
In a movement so swift the beast never saw it, he spun about and cut the thing in half. In two pieces, it fell in wet heaps to the bridge, where he kicked both off into the raging red river.
He wheeled to confront the first one, recalling his second blade as he did so.
But, while he had been preoccupied with the second parasite, the first had advanced several steps. Even as he prepared to begin swinging, it squirted another acidic cloud of sulfur vapor his way, driving him backwards.
“Damn you!”
In a blind fury, he charged it, and despite the stinging vapors managed to slice off one of its tentacles before the other seven wrapped around his right arm. He strained his eyes to see through the mist.
A long, broad, dark shape—the squidoid’s reptilian mouth—bit off Ruegger’s arm at the elbow. Not even bothering to eat the severed forearm, the creature let it drop. Through the settling cloud, Ruegger watched his arm (still clasping the scimitar Kharker had given him) as it fell, almost floating it moved so slow, and then plunged into the red tides and was lost to him forever.
He roared in pain and then had to grit his teeth hard in order to distract himself from it.
Without his forearm to find purchase on, the squidoid’s grasp slackened and Ruegger was able to stumble back.
Mustering his strength, he focused his mind on the portion of the bridge the squidoid perched on, and broke it. With a wet snapping sound, that part of the bridge fell away, and so did the squidoid, joining his arm in the ravine below.
Ruegger leapt across the gap in the bridge and landed on the other side.
Just seconds after he’d managed to hop off, the bridge trembled, gave a last convulsion, and collapsed into the hungry gorge below.
Bitterly, after realizing that there was no way to go but forward, Ruegger whispered, “So you were herding me, after all. Bastards.”
“Ha ha ha,” cawed a peculiar voice, and Ruegger glanced up to see an odd, almost prehistoric-looking bird perched on an outcropping just a few feet above his head. The bird had bright blue human eyes and its teeth, though so large they looked surreal in its long dark beak, appeared human as well.
The quasi-pterodactyl watched him intelligently. “Does it hurt, mon?” As it spoke, Ruegger caught a glimpse of a big pink tongue flashing between its eerie teeth.
“What do you want?” he asked, knowing he addressed the Balaklava.
“You know what we want, Darkling. Surrender or your arm may not be the only thing we take.” Even without lips, the leather-skinned bird seemed to smile.
“Shove off,” Ruegger said.
It tittered. “Did it hurt? Did it, Darkling? Did it huuuurrt?” Still laughing, it fluttered its leathery wings and shot off down the hall.
Ruegger sank to his knees, clutching his bloody stump with his single hand and nearly screamed aloud in pain and frustration. The arm would come back, he knew, probably much faster now he had Roche Sarnova’s blood, but meanwhile the wound burned as badly as hot coals shoved down his throat. On top of that, he had a ragged hole through his lower midsection.
He pushed the pain aside and climbed to his feet.
On the bright side, if the assassins were now forced to play mind-games with him, perhaps their arsenal of parasites was nearly at an end.
With one and a half arms and a hole in his body one could stick a turkey-leg through, he plowed on. It seemed as though hours passed, and more horrors faced him, which he just barely survived.
At last he entered a medium-sized chamber with a domed ceiling maybe sixty feet high and with hundreds of ledges and crags etched along the walls, especially in the higher regions. Torches burned on the lower walls, throwing steep shadows into the higher ones, but illuminating little. There was an uneasy stillness in the room, and Ruegger studied his surroundings. A smell reached him—light and old, almost like bat guano, but drier. Darkness covered most of the chamber, but he heard faint leathery rustlings from somewhere above him.
He sparked a cigarette lighter. Under his mental influence, using powers he hadn’t possessed prior to taking Roche Sarnova’s blood, the lighter’s flame threw more light into the room than all the torches combined.
It revealed hundreds of big human eyes high up on the ledges where more quasi-pterodactyls clustered in great numbers. All stared down at him, with their bright intelligent human eyes and their overlarge human teeth that made them look like grinning skulls. So, he thought, this is where their home is.
He clicked the lighter off and stuffed it back in his pocket. Now that he knew where they were, his eyes found them easily.
He started across the room and halted when he heard a general rustling of old dry wings. He glanced up again, but the parasites had not moved; still, their colorful eyes peered down at him, their gazes laden with some emotion he could not read. Hunger? Sympathy? Hatred?
Cautiously and deliberately, he edged forward, gauging the birds’ reactions. Some shifted restlessly. Some opened long beaks, revealing big cow teeth, and yawned, their big tongues flashing out and then back in before their mouths snapped shut with a sharp clap.
“I come in peace,” Ruegger said.
Laughter, high above.
He took another step, now almost in the middle of the room.
Almost lazily, one of the winged parasites leapt off its perch and started flying. Several others joined it, and soon, scores more. Within half a minute, hundreds of the things circled Ruegger, pinning him in place in the center of the room. This had been their intention all along.
The roar and wind created as they swept past him nearly forced him to the ground, but he struggled to remain standing.
All of a sudden, out of every prehistoric beak in the chamber, came a voice: “Die, die, die!” the parasites chanted. “Die, die. You will die!”
They laughed horribly, and their circling of him grew tighter so that the tumultuous cloud of claws and beaks and leather increased in density, stifling him. Some of the birds even dared to brush up against him, but he knocked them away, feeling bones break beneath his one fist.
“Die,” they chanted. “You will die as you watch us gnaw on your entrails.”
A sudden suspicion crept over him; the Balaklava did not want him dead. No, and they wouldn’t promise to kill him unless they meant it; on the other hand, a promise of death would certainly inspire fear in most people, and what being would profit from such?
“You’re the Sabo,” he said.
“That we are called.”
A bird raked his shoulder with its filthy talons. As it retreated back into the swarm, Ruegger grabbed it by one leg, flung it to the ground and stepped on it. Its blood spattered his boot.
The other birds cawed in mocking laughter.
“You don’t scare me, Sabo,” Ruegger said. “I don’t know why you can think for yourself now and why you’re not controlled by the Balaklava, but I know you live off fear, so go find your meal elsewhere.”
Snickering, all about him, from maybe three or four hundred giant bird-like things. It was hard to tell just how many were here, and how many more still resided in the dark crags of the room.
“If you feel no fear, you are of no use for me. Still, I think I can manage to give even you a fright or two; you didn’t lose that arm by accident, now did you?”
The birds tittered in amusement.
“No,” Ruegger said. “Junger and Jagoda took it, using your own parasites.”
&
nbsp; At this, the birds made no verbal sounds, just flew around him in dizzying sweeps.
Continuing, Ruegger said, “They killed you, didn’t they? And resurrected you afterwards, to serve them.”
The big-eyed birds cawed angrily among themselves.
“Well?” he said. “Is it true?”
The Sabo, through its birds, made a derisive snort that echoed about for quite some time.
“Yes,” the Labyrinth conceded. “But they didn’t bargain for my resilience. I am too much for their limited minds. It would be like a human trying to possess God.”
“So why are you able to think and act for yourself now?”
“Tee hee hee,” cawed the birds, their patterns of flight becoming more intricate and elaborate as the Sabo grew impassioned. “Because their efforts at controlling me have taxed them, and they’re spending time to recover. Soon, I fear, they will be back, and unless I can feed before that time I won’t be strong enough to resist.”
“I thought you were a god.”
Several birds swept down and clawed at Ruegger, but he couldn’t help but smile. Not quite omnipotent, are we?
“I need to feed,” the birds said. “I need to feel the taste of fear. Cannot you help me?”
“Do you remember Roche Sarnova?”
“Of course. He has been one of my only outside friends in the years I’ve spent in this mountain.”
“I’m his friend, too. Please, get your birds closer; you can probably smell him in me.”
After following the suggestion, the Sabo said, “Yes. You’ve had his blood, I do smell it. And, more, now I stretch my mind ... yes, I can touch him, sense his approval of you.”