by Garon Whited
I unwove my tendril-screen like a normal person unlaces fingers. I’m glad it wasn’t anything complicated; I was still trying to cope with the surging sense of others inside. Vampire indigestion is not pleasant.
She moved close and kissed my cheek. I couldn’t feel it. Well, maybe.
“What was that for?” I asked.
She smiled. “The thanks of a Queen. Now send me on.”
“One moment. That building, there,” I said, indicating the one Tobias had so recently fled into. “What is it?” A thousand voices inside whispered answers, each in their own way. I did my best to ignore them.
“It is the Plaza at the Edge of the World.”
“What will I find in there?”
“Nothing,” she answered.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I have said. There is a large, open space. The floor ends at the edge of the world.”
I wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to accept that. I was in a terrible rush and was somewhat high from having a city full of ghosts use me as death’s door. If I’d been thinking straight, I might have asked a lot of questions—about the gods, about the city, about the Gate. I wasn’t. Instead, I just held out my arms and spread my tendrils to either side. She came to me smiling and embraced me in ghost-pale arms. I enfolded her with arms and with masses of tendrils, like great wings. Then she was gone, vanished away down black lines of power, devoured by the darkness within me.
In the external silence, I could more easily hear the echoes of all those people filling my soul, like the whispers of the crowd in a stadium. I couldn’t pick out any single voice from the masses, but I could feel them, every one of them. I was an army. No, an army has organization and discipline; I was a mob, but a mob with a definite leader.
I ignored the susurrus of voices, dashed up the avenue between the ruined monuments, and took the broad stairs before the door in three skipping jumps. The door itself was a carefully-balanced block of stone. It stood about eight feet tall and was perhaps twice that in width. Opening it required it to pivot around the center, its balance. Judging by the scrapes along the dusty portico, Tobias had found it no trouble at all. I, however, shoved on each side of the block in turn without result. Maybe he locked it.
I backed off, got a running start, and jumped. I kicked it with both feet, as high up as I could manage. Something snapped in the wall as I hit the door. I came to a sudden halt, thudding into the stone like a cannonball, then fell heavily to the dusty floor. I rolled to my feet awkwardly—Firebrand can be an annoyingly large chunk of metal—and was in time to watch the whole block of stone finish a slow, majestic topple inward. It landed flat with an echoing, tomb-door thud and sent up a huge cloud of white dust.
I was over that stone and past the cloud in an instant, dashing down a long tunnel before the echoes had finished. Directly ahead, far distant, I could see Tobias out in the open air. I came out of the mouth of the tunnel like the bullet from a gun.
The plaza was large. Two football games and a cricket match could have been held concurrently in that space—complete with spectators. The tunnel I exited was at the floor level of a grandly-curving amphitheatre facing Tobias. All of this was scoured from rock and worn by years of use. The floor was also natural stone, cut only to smooth it down and level it. There was no roof at all.
Perhaps a quarter-mile away, the radius of the half-circle, Tobias had his back to me. Shada was lying naked on a slab of rock just beyond him. And beyond her…
The world ended.
I once wondered about the nature of the world I’m in. Is it round? Is it flat? Does it go around the Sun or vice versa?
The world is flat. Sure, it may be round—like a coin. But it has an edge, very real, and sharply defined. I know. I’ve seen it. At least that explained why my compass never found north.
Beyond that edge exists a gulf of yawning blackness, speckled here and there by the distant stars—or are they stars? I don’t know what they are. Maybe they’re just lights on the inside of a great sphere of crystal, or holes in that sphere to an even greater space that happens to be better illuminated. Maybe the stars are really angels with flaming swords and glowing halos.
Maybe they really are distant suns… but I doubt it.
Right up near the edge live the Things. I recognized a few from having seen them before. The rubbery monstrosity from the lab in Baret, along with the multi-tentacled creature that tried to eat me outside the gata camp. They had a bunch of brothers with them, along with a whole lot of more distant relations. There were hundreds, no, thousands of the Things in every shape and size imaginable—and many I wouldn’t choose to imagine without serious drugs. They seemed to have no gravity out there. They weren’t a flat crowd, but a wall, extending up and to the sides, as though they were all pressing against a barrier of glass, trying to get in. They were clustered most thickly near Tobias, thinner out away from him. All of them were fairly frothing at the mouth to pour from the outer darkness onto the stone floor of the world. They chattered and chittered, hissed and clacked and moaned. Their sounds were muted, as though there really was a barrier, but there was nothing to be seen holding them at bay.
Tobias was chanting. He had some tools in his hands—I couldn’t tell quite what, but one seemed to be a knife.
I didn’t bother shouting. If the focused echoes of multi-ton block of stone slamming to the ground didn’t break his concentration, I wouldn’t waste my breath. Instead, I ran for him, Firebrand out and blazing. If he killed Shada, I wouldn’t run him through. I would cut his hands off, bite out his tongue, and kick him right off the world for the Things to eat. If I got to him before he killed Shada, he would be lucky; decapitation is fairly quick. I wasn’t about to grab him with tendrils; my indigestion was bad enough. It crossed my mind to torch him with a blast of flame from Firebrand—an idea Firebrand heartily endorsed—but I wanted to have the satisfaction of metal meeting flesh and bone.
Was that hatred or fury? I don’t know. But it was strong, and I gave in to it.
He knew I was coming; he couldn’t have missed my knocking. He didn’t even bother to turn around. He just lifted the knife and gestured with it. The point described a small circle, aimed well to the right. It was as though some sort of invisible barrier beyond the world’s edge was breached for a moment. A couple dozen Things squirted through the opening before the invisible wall restored itself.
Tobias paid them no attention whatever, aside from the one that leaped in his direction. This one he pointed at with the knife, thrusting. Even though the Thing was several yards too far away to even be touched, it wailed; it looked as though it had been skewered completely through. A moment later, it collapsed into a bubbling pool of ichor. The ichor evaporated and the vapors wafted back out across the edge. I made a mental note to not let him have time to aim that knife in my direction.
The rest of the Things, meanwhile, charged me.
Things don’t have any sense of teamwork. They also don’t have much in the way of tactics, aside from an all-out, hell-for-leather charge, claws swinging, teeth snapping, tails lashing. They didn’t try to stay together and they certainly didn’t try to defend themselves. Their only concern was putting holes in my skin.
The one in the lead was one of the extremely fast, spiny, all-angular-lines sort. I grabbed it by a wrist—careful to avoid the sharp bits of bone along its arms—and sidestepped. I braced, turned, and pulled, swinging it around and adding to its already-considerable momentum. Its feet went out from under it and it wailed, thrashing momentarily as I carried it on through a tight arc and released it back at the rest of the pack. Most went down in a multi-limbed pileup. The rest kept coming, bounding onto and over the squirming pile of upset monsters.
I carved into them with a combination of homicidal straight razor and blowtorch.
If I had stopped moving for even an instant, they would have eaten me. As it was, whipping members scored my arms and chest with light cuts—one even marked m
e along the left cheek. None of these were the venomous Things that had given me such trouble outside the gata camp, so I kept going, circling and spinning, moving, moving, moving, never holding still long enough for them to surround me. Venom or no, if they could hold me still long enough to grapple, they could weigh me down and carve me apart. Even an animated corpse doesn’t do so well when it’s rendered bite-sized.
The first few went down quickly; I’m much quicker than these Things and somewhat stronger. Even more important, I have better reach, because my ancestors were tool-users. Firebrand howled in glee as black-blooded monsters charred and crisped all along its edge. For once, the fact that Firebrand is a bloodthirsty killing machine didn’t bother me a bit. It seemed appropriate—the bloodthirsty killing machine dancing around in the hand of the other bloodthirsty killing machine.
I could feel the throbbing of my blood, faintly. These Things were not enough to warrant my rage; they were merely in my way.
But it was like avoiding raindrops by running in circles; they were piling into me from more directions and I kept getting cut after cut—never anything serious, but never anything that would close up and heal quickly, either. A dozen, two dozen, thirty or forty slashes… again, nothing that would slow me down or even be more than superficial in a normal human… but there were a lot of them, and they were coming from almost all sides.
Rather than be surrounded, I broke off the attack and ran. They followed as quickly as they could, and they weren’t smart enough to stay together. When I stopped, the fastest and most agile caught up first. Firebrand and I killed it. I ran some more, waited on the next few to catch up, killed them. And so on down the line. One by one, the monsters died, as they had to if I wanted to live. But it took time, minutes of it, and I grudged every second.
The remains of the Things—swirling vapors—blew straight out over the edge of the world, billowing Tobias’ robes. Beyond him, I caught sight of a larger-than-usual Thing. Something vaguely man-shaped, directly in front of Tobias, just at the edge. It mirrored and mimicked every movement, every gesture, aping Tobias perfectly.
Something about the eyes seemed familiar.
I headed for Tobias again. Whatever he did to breach the barrier, it didn’t seem to be a trick he could repeat. He turned to face me. His eyes were wide and staring, his face white and covered in a mask of sweat. His hands trembled, white-knuckled about the tools he bore—a black-glass knife and a heavy, two-tined stabbing fork.
He spoke, and as he spoke, the Thing behind him spoke; I heard them both perfectly and in perfect unison.
“I must kill the nightlord,” Tobias and the Thing said.
Tobias moved away from the altar—I could see it more clearly as he moved to meet me; it had blood grooves in its surface and stone bowls set to catch it—and lunged at me with the glass knife.
I tried to parry it and twist aside at the same time; I’d already seen what that knife could do at a distance. But even as he thrust at me, I realized something was wrong. He was fast—far too fast. Faster than I, certainly. How that could be possible, I had no idea. It was simply a stark fact, as surprising as finding a diamond in an apple—and about as welcome as finding half a worm. The power I saw in him at the Duke’s party was still there, pulsing with his heartbeat, even brighter than I remembered. It was an intensity of energy I had never before seen in a human being, and I can only assume it pushed his body beyond all human limits.
The knife drove into my right arm, sinking through flesh as though it were water. Right in through the skin and muscle, scoring a line across even the unnatural bone of my kind. The point came out the far side and Tobias twisted it. With that wound, I felt a hideous weakening, as though I were mortal again and all my blood were being drawn from my body. Or, perhaps, as though something cold was flowing into my flesh and numbing it. The throbbing of rage diminished markedly, and the whispers of the ghosts suddenly sounded much louder, much more angry and afraid.
It only lasted for a fraction of an instant, hardly the blink of an eye, because the parry I had begun I now finished. Firebrand met Tobias’ forearm edge-on. The heavy blade sliced and seared through human flesh and bone as easily as the glass knife cut me. This tore the knife out the wound, the dead fingers of Tobias’ hand still clutching the hilt as it fell to the ground. Tobias, for his part, staggered back, the stump of his arm smoking and reeking of burned muscle, bone, and blood. My right arm hung at my side—it felt like it was burned with cold, but that was better by far than the touch of the black blade!
I normally held Firebrand in a two-handed grip, but my right hand let go of the hilt when Tobias twisted the knife. I kept my grip on Firebrand with my left hand and swung it around toward Tobias. But before I could take any advantage of Tobias’ injury, he attacked. Nothing human could have done so; the flaming agony of such a burn, the shock of the loss of a hand—he should have been down on the ground and writhing in pain.
He stabbed at me with the two-pronged thing—it reminded me of a miniature pitchfork. I danced back, waving Firebrand between us. My right arm was not working well; the glassy blade had inflicted a wound worse than any demonic cut so far. I could feel it, even move it a little, but it felt cold and dead.
Fortunately, Firebrand was four times the length of Tobias’ weapon and I was keeping the point toward my adversary. Faster or not, he was going to have trouble getting close enough to do me any damage. I thought.
Tobias kept coming at me, sweeping at Firebrand with the metal haft of his weapon to give himself an opening, then closing to try a thrust at me. The action kept exposing his good hand to heat from Firebrand, but he ignored the blisters. I just kept backing away and counter-cutting to keep him and his stabbing fork away from me. I played for time, as much as I could get, because my right arm was slowly beginning to recover usefulness.
He did not give me time. Catching Firebrand between the tines of the fork, he pushed with an inhuman strength and forced both weapons out of line. I felt Firebrand grunt at the impact and the fires died suddenly. I wondered what sort of weapon could give a flaming sword a hard time—and decided I really didn’t want to experiment with it. I wish I’d just torched Tobias instead of trying to slice him apart; I regretted the missed opportunity. I doubted that Firebrand would be up to a flame job anytime soon.
These thoughts flickered across my consciousness in no time at all. My hand moved, circling Firebrand away and outward, freeing the blade from the tines. Tobias surged forward, getting inside my guard, and brought his weapon up in a short, vicious stroke.
If I’d been able to use both hands, he couldn’t have done it. As it was…
He scored a hit. It was only a shallow gash, not a deep, penetrating wound. The reasons for this are twofold: first, I kicked him in the groin as soon as he lunged for me. This lifted him a good two feet into the air and helped spoil his aim. I’m tempted to say that rupturing one or both of his testicles might have hurt him a little too, but I don’t think pain or shock were factors at that point.
The second reason: after I kicked him, I fell backward and attempted to roll away. It worked in that I didn’t get a solid hit from his mini-pitchfork, but it slowed me down enough that he stayed right on me. I was on my back, continuing my backward roll, when he was there, around me and in my way, fork in hand, stabbing. Nothing human moves that fast—hell, I don’t move that fast, have never moved that fast. I doubted anything human, under any sort of spell, could do it.
I managed to bring Firebrand up in time to present Tobias with the point. Tobias didn’t care. He let the blade run through his abdomen and out his back. He shoved himself farther down the blade, toppling off-balance to land on me and nail me with that magical fork.
It wasn’t pleasant. I recall the feeling of Sasha feeding on me. When it was a mutual thing, it was quite pleasurable. This, however, was all one way, and it was painful to boot. Whatever the thing was, it drained people like a nightlord would—and I could see the flow of that power surging
into an amulet or pendant hidden under his robes. In use, it glowed like condensed lightning to my night-eyes. It was linked to Tobias, pouring power into and energizing flesh that should have been dead already. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough that it would not allow him to die.
Great. Just great.
I twisted Firebrand in his body. It didn’t help. I pushed him up by my grip on Firebrand, lifted both legs, planted my feet against his chest, and shoved. Firebrand was torn from my grasp as Tobias went sailing through the air—he might be stronger, but he was also a lot lighter and had no leverage. He was also less coordinated; he bounced a couple of times on the stones before he stopped and picked himself up.
He had left his vampire-sticker in me when I launched him. I jerked it out quickly and threw it down; the thing had gone on mindlessly draining me even when it wasn’t being held. The drain was minor compared to when Tobias wielded it, but any drain was going to be bad for me. I was feeling the effects of this fight already; my right arm would still barely move, I had dozens of small scratches, and now a deep double-hole in my left ribs. Worse, I was now disarmed and tired. Tobias may have taken more actual damage, but he was obviously pumped up a lot higher than I was to begin with.
Tobias pulled Firebrand out of his own guts. Of all the things I’d seen in the fight so far, that impressed me. Firebrand didn’t like this; Tobias’ hand was wreathed in flame. He still came after me, blade high, sprinting all-out. He seemed a little slower than before; I think his wounds were finally beginning to be serious, despite the magic in him. I rolled to the side and his momentum carried him on for a few paces. That was fine by me; I just wanted to lay my hands on his dismembered one. The one that had the knife.
Given a choice, I went for the knife. True, the fork was closer, but it didn’t seem to be feeding him like the vampire-fang-fork thing. I didn’t want to risk handling it if I had a choice. I grabbed the knife.