Balor: Now remember, boy, never, ever resist me again. Understood?
Bral jerked his head in compliance.
Balor: I think you have learnt your lesson and I am merciful. You may rest and take refreshment before finishing the job.
Hael’s head snapped around to look at Balor in horror. The thought took longer for Bral to process in his exhausted state. Once it did his shoulders started to shake as he realized what he was to do next, then he glanced over to the first stockade. The wailing got louder.
Bral picked up his sword and climbed to his feet. He turned towards the thousands of women and children he had been ordered to execute. He then quickly pivoted back to Balor and drew back his sword over his shoulder. He froze before he could complete the motion and throw his sword at Balor. Balor had slammed a Compulsion back into place. Balor’s Nightfeeders materialized behind him, ready to protect their master. He waved them off, having control of the situation.
Mi Balor, Supreme Commander of the Northern Campaign: You all saw that this dog tried to kill me. Again I will show mercy, and he may die rather than be taken to the City to be punished. I look to you, his brother, to end his life.
Hael was shocked. Lucan was going to be pulled into this madness as well. He looked around to see Lucan standing with his other officers. He had expected all eyes to turn to Lucan, but they were all turned towards him.
He looked at Balor and saw that he as well was looking at him, eyebrows raised, waiting.
Looking directly at him, Balor again broadcast his thought.
Mi Balor, Supreme Commander of the Northern Campaign: Fa Hael, I look you, his brother, to carry out the sentence.
Hael shook his head.
This was wrong. He should never have allowed this to happen. Why had he allowed it to happen? It was more than just fear of losing his position.
This was evil.
It was evil for Bral to murder restrained prisoners, yet he had not objected.
He knew it was evil to Compel someone to commit such an atrocity. He had not wanted to believe that one of the Host could be evil, but the past three hours had been enough to make him believe it.
Balor saw the indecision on Hael’s face and reached out to Compel him.
As Hael felt the compulsion start to envelop his mind, he felt something rip deep inside him.
No more.
He pushed the alien influence out of his mind and put his shields in place. The Compulsion rebounded off Hael’s perfectly smooth shields. Balor’s mouth dropped open in surprise. No Guest should be able to withstand a Compulsion from a Host Adept, much less a Host Adept with a Lens at his disposal.
Hael –> Balor: STOP.
Balor was awestruck as Hael’s Compulsion took hold of him. He dropped his control of Bral.
A sword struck Balor in the face. Bral, finding that he was free, had completed his aborted throw.
The Nightfeeders flowed over Hael and Bral.
Hael shot a glance at Lucan to implore him to take no action. He need not have worried, as Lucan stood with the other officers, arms crossed and a small smile on his face.
Chapter 11
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
Where the fuck was Charlie?
Her scream — her far from sane scream — had originated from somewhere below the kitchen, but Rebecca could not find a way down. She leant against a wall and loosened her spirit. It was risky without a pentacle or some other warding to protect her spirit and even riskier without a refuge prepared. There were a number of nasty things that could possess her body if she left it unprotected for too long, not the least of which was Leader. The sense of urgency overrode her sense of self-preservation.
Her spirit quickly started to sweep through the house. She found bedrooms and bathrooms, a snooker room, and she even found the backup generator chugging away on the roof. She was sweeping back towards the kitchen when she felt Leader questing for her.
She snapped back into her body and raised her shields, shuddering at the thought of Leader catching her undefended on the etheric plane. She would need to return to searching the old-fashioned way.
Then it came to her; she had heard Charlie when the power went out. She ran up the stairs to the rooftop generator.
The lights flickered and went out. Charlie’s psychic siren shriek started up again. He clutched at his head and grabbed on to the stair rail to steady himself. He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out his phone, hit the button for his new custom app and made some adjustments. He slowly straightened up, able to function again.
He turned his phone towards the darkened stairway so he could see by the light of its screen and started down the stairs again. He was almost there.
Charlie: HE’S HER FUCKING BOYFRIEND.
Leader: Charlie, calm down, we are coming for you.
Charlie: HE’S HER FUCKING BOYFRIEND. BABY’S FUCKING BOYFRIEND, FROM THE BEACH AT THE UNIVERSITY.
Leader: Charlie, SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Charlie: It’s him. It took me a while to place him, but I know now. He’s her fucking boyfriend, he’s her fucking boyfriend. She has been playing us. He broke me. He hurt me and hurt me and hurt me and hurt me –
She broadcast images of her mutilated body.
Leader tuned Charlie out. Charlie had fucking lost it; she was mad as a hatter.
She turned to Don and Lew and ripped open their minds. She reviewed every millisecond of their encounter with the bully boys on their protection detail. She compared their recollections of Quasimodo to the damage they had done to Baby’s boyfriend on the beach twenty-one years ago. It could be him. But there was no way he could have survived.
There was something deeper happening here.
Perhaps her nemesis had surfaced again.
Once she smashed the generator, Charlie’s presence popped into her consciousness. With the power off, Charlie was a brightly glowing, cancerous star of misery and insanity in the basement.
How would she get down there? These old buildings were concrete blocks encased in stone. She needed to find the way down.
She concentrated on her right index finger. The distal phalanx of her index finger lengthened and poked through the fleshy covering of her fingertip with a small pop. The tip continued to stretch until she had a five inch spike of bone was protruding. She quickly scratched a pentagram on the wooden floor of the upstairs bedroom she was in. It was not perfect, but it would provide a little protection while she searched for a way down into the sub-basement.
She energized the pentagram and cast out her consciousness again towards Charlie.
She found the room Charlie was in. She was barely recognizable. Rebecca moved on quickly, not wanting to examine Charlie too closely. She moved through the door and found a staircase. Nearing the bottom was Finn. He was completely inscrutable, odd sharp, metallic shields protecting his psyche.
She had thought previously that it was just that he had cut away so much of himself to survive that he was hardly human, but now she thought it must be something else. He seemed similar to one of the Quickened who had shielded himself. But he could not be Quickened; if he was he would not have continued in his damaged shell of a body. He would have healed himself if he were able. Wouldn’t he?
After seeing the images Charlie had broadcast she had no idea what he was or was not capable of.
She followed the stairway in her spirit form to a hidden door in his pantry just off his kitchen. Right where she had started.
“Fucking bastard,” she thought. She snapped back into her body and ran back down the stairs to the kitchen.
As Finn neared the bottom of the stairs he briefly sensed a presence. Someone or something had found Charlie. He needed to hurry.
Holding up his phone to see better, he could see the lever outside Charlie’s cell that would initiate the sterilization process. Above the lever was a box fronted with maroon glass. Below the lever was a red button, the type you expected to see in a bunker designed to launch ICB
Ms, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, for those of you too young to remember the Cold War. In fact, the button had been a gift from a Russian nuclear physicist that he corresponded with, so it could well have had that pedigree.
He pulled the lever.
The number 0:30 showed in red numbers on the maroon glass. Then 0:29. That was good news; he had been worried for a moment that the batteries powering the sterilization sequence were drained somehow.
Pulling the lever started a sprinkler that would saturate Lab B with napalm. The button was an override that he could hit to ignite the room early if that was required. Early ignition would not guarantee full sterilization, but it was better than nothing. If he did not press the button ignition would occur once the room was saturated, when the red countdown on the maroon glass reached zero.
Lab B would become a crematorium.
0:28
Rebecca was barreling down the stairs. Each floor was connected to the floor below by two half flights of stairs. She was moving fast, too fast to completely control her forward momentum. At the bottom of each half flight she would turn her body and, like a swimmer, push off the wall at the bottom of the flight of stairs to launch herself down the next flight. Her velocity was such that the lathe and plaster walls exploded with splinters and dust as her body used them to decelerate and change direction.
As she ran, her body’s healing ability exuded the splinters that penetrated her skin.
The temperature in the stairwell dropped as she pulled in the ambient heat to heal herself and to boost the power of her muscles. Her breath fogged out of her mouth as she ran.
0:25
Thump, thump, thump.
The sound kept tempo with Finn’s heartbeat and was getting louder
Someone or something was coming.
0:20
It was raining jelly in the lab, jelly that smelled like petrol.
Charlie stopped her psychic screaming for a second and turned her face up to look at the oversized sprinklers on the ceiling that were attached to the big white tanks with the red flammable signs painted on them.
The gelatinous rain burned where it touched her skin.
Charlie: GET HERE NOW!
The temperature in the room plummeted as she started to pull in the ambient heat in the room. Frost spread across the tiles flooring her cage. The metal tables grew petroleum snotcicles as the dripping jelly started to freeze.
0:15
Bex got to the kitchen and burst through the hidden door in the pantry and circled down the spiral staircase to the sub-basement.
She could feel Leader reach out to communicate with her. She kept her shields up and, miraculously, Leader could not get through. She had never dared to try and keep Leader out before.
She really was stronger than the others.
She rounded the bottom of the stairs and saw Finn standing in the rough hallway with his hand on a big red button. He was staring intently at a screen that showed 0:12 in red numerals. Then a second later it showed 0:11.
She charged him.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. BOOM. Silence.
CRACK. The door at the top of the stairs must have been breached. Pieces of wood tinkled down the stairs. He could hear someone running down the stairs, three or four steps at a time.
He turned his head from the timer and saw that Bex was almost on top of him. He pushed the button.
Charlie’s mental scream brought Bex to her knees.
Finn stepped forward and pressed two self-adhesive electrodes to Bex’s temples. He then wrapped her head with duct tape, ensuring the electrodes were secured.
Charlie’s mental scream trailed off and Rebecca shook her head and regained her feet.
“Finn, what did you do?”
“I did it for you, Bex, for you and me. I can fix both of us now. I know I can.”
“But, Charlie.”
“Bex, she was a monster. She consumed everything in her path. She and her kind are a plague upon the earth. The only thing useful she ever did was to teach me how to start healing myself, and maybe how to fix you. You’ll see. I will make us better.” Finn pulled out his phone and fiddled with it again. She tried to call out to Leader but couldn’t; she was locked in her mind. “Follow me,” said Finn.
“No, I don’t even know what you are. I can’t decide who is scarier: you or Leader. Why should I go with you?”
Finn sighed and tapped his phone.
She lost consciousness.
Finn had not wanted to knock her out, but what choice did he have? It seemed like he never had a choice in anything; he just knew what needed to be done and did it. It all seemed predetermined.
He picked her up and threw her over her shoulder.
He was feeling stronger, so much stronger.
At the end of the hall a midnight outline coalesced out of the shadows.
Shadow –> Finn: You have done well, my son, as well as you could have. But beware this dark path you are following is perilous … be careful not to lose your humanity. Depend not too heavily on the machines you build, for they are a shortcut but they can also be a dead end.
Finn –> Shadow: I appreciate your concern, but I needed to act; the time for waiting has past.
The shadow bowed in acknowledgement.
Shadow –> Finn: Promise me that you will not abandon your search for enlightenment now you have achieved an approximation of what you could become.
Finn –> Shadow: Fine, I promise, when I have time. Now I need to leave. Do you have anything else to say, Hael?
Hael faded back into the shadows, and it appeared that their conversation was over. Finn opened a false panel in the wall and walked away from his home through the tunnels under the city.
The City, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Bral and Hael knelt in the stone floor, their hands bound before them, heads down.
They were in an anteroom of the Old Prime Temple attached to the Palace. Although the New Prime Temple was not yet complete and would not be complete for a number of years, the City’s citizens had already taken to calling it the Old Prime Temple. It was a massive edifice that rivaled the Palace itself in grandeur. The temple’s architecture, like all temples, enhanced the abilities of adepts, as well as allowing a group of adepts to draw power from any willing participants within the temple, making Prime Workings and Major Curses possible. The New Prime Temple was expected to make even more elaborate and complex castings possible. Officially the temple had been designed by the Emperor; however, everyone knew that one of the Guest had been the one to design a temple that improved on a design that had been mostly static for forty millennia. Times were truly changing.
Old or New, the Prime Temple was magnificent. The carvings that covered the stonework were exquisite and drew the eye in and provided a sense of peace and introspection.
Or they normally did. Hael was having trouble finding peace. The trial was over. He and Bral had both been found guilty of assaulting a superior officer, gross disobedience and, most damning of all, injuring one of the Host. Soon, they would be brought into the Temple, to be paraded in front of the mob and sentenced. The sentences would be stiff, of that there was no doubt.
Bral’s sword had turned as it flew through the air and struck Mi Balor edge on rather than point first. This had undoubtedly saved the Marshal’s life. A Host adept could heal from most injuries; however, a brain skewered by three feet of bronze was not one of them. The edge of the sword had sliced open the bridge of his nose and ruptured his right eye.
The troopers had half expected Balor to unleash his Nightfeeders on the Legion as retribution, but Balor was never one to waste resources. After Hael and Bral had been bound hand and foot, Balor had asked for a volunteer to finish the disposal of the remaining Ferals. Lucan had stepped forward and so succeeded his brother as the Commander of the Ninety-First Legion. Truly, the field of battle was the quickest way to advance through the ranks.
The journey to the City had been extremely unpleas
ant. Balor transported Hael and Bral by pole. That is to say, he passed a pole between each of their bound hands and feet like deer trussed following a hunt. A Nightfeeder carried each end of the pole all the way to the City. Nightfeeders were tireless and Balor merciless, so the brothers were not untied to eat or to void their bladders or bowels.
The first time Hael had released his bladder had been the hardest, although not nearly as hard as releasing his bowel for the first time while being carried. After five days of this mode of travel, stinking and chafed, Hael was almost happy to reach the City and their impending punishment. Almost anything was better than the feeling of coarse ropes rubbing on raw, bleeding ankles and wrists and his stiff breechclout abrading his nether regions. Almost.
He assumed that Bral was also relieved to have the journey end, but he could only guess. Bral had retreated into a catatonic state after the slaughter. He would not verbalize and his mental shield was a smooth, impenetrable shell, which Mi Balor, much to his annoyance and chagrin, could not crack.
As painful and unpleasant as the journey back to the City was, it did offer Hael the opportunity to think, and think he did. He felt as if he had been awakened from the dream that had been his previous life. He had never questioned the status quo. He had never considered that the Host could be petty, jealous or evil, just like the Guest. Now he even started to question why there was a Debt. Surely any debt incurred should be considered paid in full by the Guest through two thousand years of service.
He concluded that the Host were no better than his own people; in fact, they appeared to be worse. It was as if the incident with Mi Balor had removed a veil from his eyes, from his very mind. The fog had lifted, he could see clearly and he did not like what he saw.
The trial had been more like a carnival than a sober exercise of justice. Hael snorted to himself at the thought; he had come to realize that the justice system put in place by the Host was anything but just. The Host had put on games and entertainments to encourage as many of the Guest to attend as possible. Hael and Bral were portrayed as the blackest of villains.
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