For the next few minutes, static moved toward and away from him. Intermittently, he heard a voice like over the radio that spouted nonsense in a language he didn’t understand. Roasted chicken with cracked pepper and sage came from a translucent point of light off to his right. It switched from smelling good to burnt several times before it settled on crispy and faded away. A quiet hum liquefied in his ears and prickled his arms. The runes across his body pulsed from their normal blue to gold and red and black.
The world spun, and a voice, innocent in its intentions, spoke to him. All it wanted—“… Understand.” It came in a whisper, like a child lost in the dark. In front of him, a pulse of light pulled at him, called to him. “Lost… Help…”
Russ opened his eyes, sweaty and disoriented. Night still awaited him outside. He checked his watch. Two hours and twelve minutes had passed. The whispers still came, and the soul stone flared each time they muttered. The voice had stopped making sense, but Russell felt the urgency in its call.
He watched, waiting for the soul stone Lillie had given him to speak again.
It did, in a language he wished he couldn’t understand. “Vanished… Grasp… Guide…”
Russ picked it up, and a tiny whisper, the smallest of warnings in his mind said, What if this is her?
“The game’s already in motion,” came a woman’s husky voice. Russ couldn’t be sure he actually heard it.
The rock tried nothing against his grip, but he felt its thoughts push against the barrier he’d laid upon it hours before. All this time, right here in his pocket, and he’d never questioned it, never let it show him what it wanted.
Russ drew a circle in Light on the desk’s surface and set the stone within it. The rock floated, and he directed Light into its depths.
2
Sweat beaded on Russ’s brow. While he focused, its knowledge became his; so disparate, his mind of the living, the natural world, of the Light; hers of darkness, of disorder and chaos and pain, of the nether. He’d never held the soul of a demon that still lived. It made no sense, caused his mind to clash with the stone’s consciousness.
He now searched for meaning as he pieced together the innards of a demon’s severed psyche, for which he didn’t hold all the parts. Like a fossil that hadn’t all fallen in one place, he found a grunt here, one of her prized trinkets there. The stone showed him freely. He heard her laugh, watched her disembowel a mutant in a quiet solar, and all of it threatened to form a picture if only Russ could sleuth long enough to locate what he sought.
Under the might of the nether’s will or his own hubris, the room around him had darkened, and inky Fel rained like black snow in a cave—
“In a dark forest,” the stone told him.
He saw her, but she couldn’t see him, didn’t know him from a piece of the wall. The master bore herself of a new darkness, alone and crying and flailing, evil from her first breath within that hollow of rock. Dirt under her muculent hide fell when she shook, and what didn’t cling to her befouled her new playground.
The beast laughed when she saw her claws, baring the sabers that filled her mouth, and she skulked for days, thrashing against the walls, testing the limits of this new product. Her scaly hide pierced the rock, her hair-made-of-wire cut through the air when she moved, and her claws and teeth made death of all she touched.
Then she perked up and listened.
“His call,” the stone told him. The memory came to Russ as though he’d lived it himself, of a deep voice that he recognized in his own mind. He felt the fear rise in her. Yet she couldn’t deny Him. Russ followed her to a great cave. She ran inside without question, following the one compulsion she knew.
“Yes,” her new master said. “Come to me. Kill me. Show me what your kind makes of itself.”
Her gaze scattered around, and her nostrils flared, testing the air. Why won’t he show yourself? Russ heard her think when she found the right tunnel.
A being of orange light appeared. “Behold me and tremble.”
Her claws dug into the rock under her feet. She pawed at the floor, tore up a piece of slate, and threw it behind her in a quick lash.
“Yes,” M’keth said again. “Beautiful work, Nil. She and her kind will do great things.”
The beast lunged and extended her front legs toward He who spoke, roaring at Him in deafening rage. She swiped, snapped at His neck with saber-teeth. But her claws, her head, her body, all passed through, and she landed on His other side, where she turned with nary a pause. Her growls filled the cramped room. Her hackles stood on end.
Massive, Russ thought as he beheld the true form of the Beast of Tanvarn, and he marveled at how anyone could have missed her for herself.
What are you? she thought.
“Do you truly want an answer?” M’keth added the correct weight to His words to bear a contract.
She responded simply. Yes.
“Then rise, my queen and champion, the first of your kind.” M’keth held out His right hand, palm side-up, then turned it palm side-down.
The Beast turned in kind and yipped, both in surprise and pain as new power filled her, changed her mind, forced her body into a new form. Her cries turned into a voice, and she fell to the ground in a fleshy heap of ungainly humanity. But she stood with surety. Excitement flowed through her, and she swiped through the air, leaving Fel energy where her nails tore through reality’s fabric. The avatar offered her His hand.
The dirty woman’s eyes, gray and lit, stared up at M’keth, and she took His hand in hers. Frission crawled across Russell’s back, caused the little hairs on his neck to stand on end.
He followed her to Tanvarn, where she set to work at finding the thing M’keth wanted of her.
“Those who know to look for you will, and arresting their sight would prove unwise,” M’keth had told her before she left. She had wrapped herself in unwashed linens that hung from her body, ballooned from her waifish frame. “Travel by nether, but not when one watches you. If you phase while watched, they can follow. Foolhardy would they be, but that has never stopped them before. We cannot allow them here until the right time is nigh.”
The Beast had worked for years, questing and returning, each time M’keth more pleased with her and her discoveries.
Dark clouds resolved into the beast’s birthing cave, where the dirty woman delved into a man’s body with her claws, and her right arm became bloody past her elbow. She carried the sanguine ink to a wall and marked upon it the message her master had told her to write.
“There is only one who will pull him out of hiding.” M’keth spoke inside her mind while she worked, and His speech made her manic in her purpose.
“That’s it!” she said between bouts of laughter. “That’s it!”
When she finished, she phased and arrived on the outskirts of the place she’d been so many times. Mountains hung low to the west, silhouetted by the setting sun. The dirty woman transformed into the Beast. She howled, then loped to the desert floor below and sped toward the city proper, over hill and under, and stalked through streets she called our grounds.
Russ followed, and in an alley, wet and coated with grime behind a quiet lumber mill, he saw her. The stone didn’t understand his elation. She watched from the alley’s other end, waiting.
The Beast skulked, picked intermittently at trash heaps, and raised her front paws onto windowsills to look through their namesakes.
Funny, Russ thought, she almost seems happy here.
“Was,” said the stone. “In our own way.”
The Beast cambered past a girl and cooed—a poor approximation of a sound a dog might make—and disappeared into another side street before the young woman turned. Beyond the little street’s end, the lights of the Upper City shined from across the River Niniphen, and even from here, the monorail rattled, its machination a low rumble against the quiet night.
Lillie had followed her to this street. The Beast lumbered toward the river front, and Lillie reached out as thoug
h to pet it when it passed her. But her hand phased through the demon’s hide, and when she finished her magic trick, she clutched a piece of rock in her fist.
The Beast turned, growling, her gaze searching for her abuser. She gnawed at her side where she’d felt the touch and sniffed the air. Her concentration pulled toward where Lillie stood. D’niqa’s gray eyes passed over her half a dozen times, and she growled, …daring the touch to show itself. My brand is deadlier, she promised. But when nothing manifested, she shook out her mane and continued down the street with a cool trot.
Russ stayed by his wife, who raised her free hand to her forehead, then slid it down her face to her chin and away from her chest. Her dress had ripped on its delicate parts, and her skin had dirtied for her travels, but she appeared healthy otherwise—nothing like she’d been at the cave. She looked upon the stone and whispered to herself between steadying breaths. An orange line traced through it, frantic in its movements against the smooth sides.
The alley flipped to a mirror of itself. Russ first checked for D’niqa, but he couldn’t find her in the brick-and-cobblestone passage his wife now walked. Lillie peered over her shoulder. The darkness left inky tracings of her body as she moved. Her hair floated behind her like she swam through water. Everything around them looked washed out, almost a negative of what Russ’s eyes expected.
“Hello, my daughter,” an unfamiliar voice said.
Lillie exhaled. “Finally. You decided to come find me?” Dark windows stared back at her, and if Russ stared into them too long, his mind made movement of the gloom within. “How long will you stay in the shadows this time?”
The unseen chuckled. “That depends.” She spoke slowly. Her voice filled the alley with a feminine rasp. “Did you find what I asked of you?”
“Yes,” Lillie said, out of patience. She looked either way down the path. “Now what do you want of me?”
Again, the concealed woman chuckled, then she appeared from behind an invisible curtain. A long coif of scarlet-black hair hung high from a knot on the back of her head, and she wore a crimson corset with dark leather pants. She looked like trouble—one of those women who would have made Russ stammer, robbed him of his words without having to try. “I won’t keep you long”—
“A ghost has held me captive in dreams before”—
“Calm yourself. I’m not a ghost. And I shan’t keep you hostage.” The woman shifted her weight onto her left leg. An innocent expression spread over her face. “I’m kind of sad. Our little partnership is almost over.”
Lillie hesitated, scowling. “Then how can I finish my service?”
The woman perked up. “Good attitude.” She wiped her hands over her thighs. A cloud of black dust came from her pants and reached Lillie, who coughed. “Tell me how you got it.”
Lillie clutched the stone to her chest, guarding it. The scene shuddered as the memory played. “I just wanted it, and I grabbed it. The demon suspected something, but it kept going in the end.”
“That simple, huh? A rare gift to extract a soul stone without its demon knowing, far be it living. Nilrius sees fit to play his games inside of games, like he’s special and exempt from the rules, and this looks like quite the cheat.” She couldn’t hide the coy smile the split her mouth. “We’re going to have to spoil it for him, aren’t we? And He Who Is Above isn’t stopping us, so how bad could it be, right?”
“Spoil—what?” Lillie said. Confusion beclouded her face, yet her eyes sparkled, even here.
“I didn’t come to this nether-place”—she said the word with disdain; her nose crinkled—“for nothing.”
“Then is this at last about my husband? You told me you could get me back to him.”
“In a way,” the woman said, wiping her brow with the butt of her hand. “You know, I hope one day I fall in love, if for no other reason than to figure out what skews your minds to such extremes. You encounter my kind, and your first thought isn’t, ‘Hey can you get me out of here?’ I mean, it was, but my point is it keeps comes back to him.” She narrowed her eyes, shifted her balance to her right leg. “Us, maybe that’s it. There’s something about him.” She looked toward the ground and spoke to herself.
“So can”—
“All I’ll say about the Grand Master is maybe. It’s up to you, and I personally don’t care about him. You humans are imperfect to a fault. The only thing perfect about you is your propensity for imperfection, and your lot could have fucked this up without trying—which is why I needed to come into the shadows for a moment.” She paused. “But as I’ve told you, you can tell no one. Is that still our understanding?”
“Sure, but I’m fairly certain of which one you are by now.”
The woman grinned, wide enough for her colored lips to reveal straight teeth. “Not too far of a stretch is it?”
“No, and in that case, I don’t know why I’m putting my trust in you.”
The woman responded simply: “You don’t have a choice. But do remember, I’m also the goddess of honesty. So trust me when I say that what I’m about to tell you will set in motion a very dangerous game. Say follow, and it’ll take you where you need to be. You’ve been lost in the nether long enough to pick up on how.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lillie. Concern etched into her brow. “How long have you kept me here?”
“Afterwards, get that to someone who knows what to do with it,” the goddess said, ignoring the question. If Lillie’s mood caused her concern, she didn’t let on.
“Why? What can it do?”
“If everything’s made right with it, that stone could kill the thing you took it from. I cannot overstate how important that is.” She looked at Russ, and a roguish grin spread across her mouth. Russ watched her see him. “Consider this a correction of sorts, a rebalancing of the game, one that the King of Gods has been playing unfairly for a while. Your story now has everything to do with getting that stone back to the bitch. It just needs augmented. You’ll know how. That you’ve made it here means you’re doing a good job.”
The goddess turned on her heel and disappeared with an audible pop.
“Wait!” Lillie yelled. Her footsteps pealed when she ran to where Acin had stood.
The moon hung high overhead and slanted light onto a wall high to Russ’s left. He followed his wife through the nether-scape, the soul stone unspeakingly pulled to itself as they passed between light and darkness, past junctures where only a single person could slip through at a time. A cargo ship a hundred feet high sat at port to their right, its portholes’ lights soft suns when Russ saw them through the slum’s gaps. Old electrical lines ran across the buildings’ faces, doubling and tripling for the nether’s aura.
Lillie finally stopped near a dumpster in a wide stretch of the passageway, where she consulted a piece of wall upon which Russ saw nothing important. A hoary air conditioner hung out the window of the building at its end. Its calescent fumes dissolved into the midwinter night.
His stone floated through her while he observed.
“No,” Russell said through gritted teeth, and he jostled in his seat back in a future-Tanvarn. Here, his hand swiped into Lillie’s back. She gasped and turned, her eyes wide and searching.
Short-winded, she said, “Hello,” in a quiet voice.
What took you? Russell wanted to ask. What keeps you here? He could smell her—at least the approximation of her within the stone’s memory: the coziness of fall, of cloves and orange and blanket-warmth, close enough to reality to not fret the difference.
“Answers for another time, Grand Master,” the stone said, echoing the words it had heard the night after Cups.
Lillie rolled the stone in her hand and swallowed. “Just say follow, get the stone back to the bitch. But purify it—how? She said I’d know how.” She stared at the ground, pacing a slow circle. Russ had never seen her like this: determined beyond reason to find a solution to a problem well outside herself. Yet she seemed almost comfortable here.
The stone
balanced on the back of her hand, then she rolled it across her fingers. It bounced between her palms, and as she paced, it stopped making it to either hand. Eventually it hung in the air between them. Quiet rushed into the alley as Lillie raised it to her lips, and after a second’s pause, she whispered, “Follow.” Her face became an expectant mask while she waited.
A tepid breeze brushed through the back street.
Nothing else happened.
“Gods damn it!” she shouted and chucked the stone away. It hit the alley’s other wall with a surprising tlink and landed on the ground, where it didn’t roll, it just stopped. Lillie watched it happen. “Oh.” Russ didn’t get out of the way quickly enough when she stepped toward it, and her shoulder grazed his chest. Again, she looked toward him, but she paid the novelty no more than a moment’s attention this time before she turned and picked up the demon’s soul. She raised it again to her lips.
“Follow,” she said—in the Demonic tongue—and disappeared.
The scene shifted to days later by what the stone told him, and the dirty woman stood on a dead finger of bough in a forest. M’keth watched through her eyes as D’niqa stared at nothing, yet a presence familiar to Russell faced her. He gladdened for it; at the same time, he hated it.
“Russell,” Lillie said, peeking at the dirty woman from behind a tree, worry sketched across her face. “Where are you?”
“This is not her,” said M’keth. “Send the sight to me.” The demon lord took the vision elsewhere, and the scene laid dark for a few seconds, save for the light coming off the dirty woman’s eyes. Even inside the soul stone, Russ misliked them, how they saw and searched and calculated.
A chunk of white filled the air, jagged and implacable. The dirty woman stepped into the nether and swarmed to it.
“Another!” she cried, trying like hell to pull herself through. The passabridge had met with its end, and the memory of a man named Trent coming through its other side played.
A trickle of felt on rock knocked off to their right. The dirty woman twitched her head toward the noise and left the suspended man alone when she ran to it. Lillie dashed, and the stone’s projection jittered when she got near.
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