by John Hook
“Baron Steel lacked imagination.”
Knightshade’s skin became a highly polished chrome-like substance. The small crystals I was forming couldn’t get enough purchase on the surface and although they were hard enough to scratch it, they were incapable of doing more than that.
He again shot towards me. He was fast, I had to give him that. I managed to move aside, but this time he was ready. I found a metal whip wrapped around my ankle. He pulled hard and I went flying in an arc. He released my ankle and I shot towards the ground. I caught myself before I hit and levitated back up.
I was trying to come up with a way to really catch him up. There were two things I knew how to do. Make molecular changes in inorganic materials, if I had enough of a theory about it. And I knew how to reach out with my energy and merge that energy with other energies in the world. I wasn’t sure what that ability really was. Might be a way of giving up my power, but I wasn’t about to do that. I really had no idea how either ability could be used practically in a real-time battle. As usual, I went for stalling.
“Where are the horsemen, pudgy? They don’t seem to give you much backup.”
“I don’t need the horsemen.”
“Maybe. Or maybe Glinda and the other angels are keeping them for the battle at Antanaria. Maybe you are expendable and they expect you to fail.”
My distraction didn’t work. He used my stopping to mouth off to overtake me and drive a needle-like lance through my shoulder. He was behind me with a steel cable around my throat.
“Haven’t we done the proto thing enough already? It won’t get you what you want.”
He was angry. He really wanted to kill me even though I was pretty sure that he would not make the Idiri happy doing that.
Knightshade looked down and I sensed he was considering the others scattered below.
“You seem to get more cooperative when the ants are about to be crushed.”
He glided down towards Kyo, but as he did so, he released my neck to give him a free arm. I spun on him and kicked against his body to free myself from his lance and then, on instinct, shot towards the mountain. I was counting on him feeling too threatened by my getting closer to the mountain to bother with trying to summon me back by threatening the others.
As I came up over the mountain, I was startled. At the very top, the mountain had a crater with a hole in the bottom of it and down below was a lake of lava. Or whatever that stuff was. I thought at first it was a volcano, a natural association to make. However, this didn’t look natural. It looked engineered. No messy steaming rock and clouds of ash. Just a hole, seemingly cut in the bottom of the crater. The lava was not a lake in the sense of it being contained by the crater. It was something underground, below the crater.
I spun, realizing I had no time for sightseeing, but was too late. Knightshade rammed me like a freight train, his body encased in metal skin. He then clubbed me with both hands. His rage was out of control. He formed metallic cords and literally wove them through my body, avoiding any organ that might cause me to die and turn into a proto. The result was that I was literally stitched to him and, short of tearing my own body apart, there was no quick escape.
“Let’s see what happens to your power when turning into a proto won’t help you.”
He shot down towards the mountaintop and the lake of fire. I realized instantly what he meant. If I was in the lava, turning into a proto, even if possible, would result in the proto being burned up too. There was no escape.
I concentrated on trying to alter the molecular makeup of the cords that held me, but it would take too much time. I was thrashing around with my legs, which were mostly free, when I struck one foot against one of Knightshade’s platforms. It glowed. For just a moment a purple light was starting to crawl up my leg.
Time seemed to slow down again as seeing that struck a chord. I remembered handling the platform in the ancient city with Tweedledum and Tweedledee and having it glow green in my hands. I remember them saying, “You can absorb any or all of them. That is why you are unique.”
I also remembered merging my energy with the door and was betting I didn’t need to actually touch the talismans.
Although I knew we were rushing towards the lake of fire, I turned my consciousness inward and connected with the energy flow within me. I expanded it out around me until I made contact with two other sources of energy, and then I just breathed them in. I opened my eyes as I felt heat increasing. We were right above the lake of fire. Everything started speeding up.
Knightshade felt the platforms fall away from his feet. He had been in the process of pushing me off to send me into the lake of fire and I just went with the motion. I shot out metallic tendrils to grab the platforms, which must have just worked by instinct, and was levitating back up. Knightshade hadn’t quite put together what was happening or why he was so hot. He was panicking because he sensed everything was all wrong, but his rage was clouding his thought process. I had the platforms under one arm and grabbed Knightshade by the wrist with the other. In his rage, Knightshade lashed out at being touched. I hadn’t expected him to fight. The blow loosened my grip and he dropped. He screamed as he realized all at once what was happening. I had no time, nor the skill, to react if I had wanted to. Knightshade, or Gerod, or whoever he had been in the past, fell into the fiery lava-like substance. I turned away as he screamed and the flesh melted from his bones. If there was a proto, it never showed itself. I was glad to be rid of Knightshade, but it was a horrible thing to watch. The scream echoed in my brain and I rose up out of the crater.
I levitated down to the base of the mountain. Izzy, Kyo and Blaise were already there. Saripha was just emerging out of the trees.
“I’m guessing we’re not worried about Knightshade anymore?” Blaise nodded.
“You’re getting pretty good at this magic powers superhero stuff,” Izzy added.
“Yeah, sure.” I said crossly. I put down the two platforms I had picked up from Knightshade. I wasn’t quite sure how to do this, but I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the energies flowing though me. The blue energy I was accustomed to and I easily distinguished it. The other two seemed alien, as the blue energy had felt initially, but they flowed with the blue energy. I really couldn’t tell much about those other energies other than they felt different. So I concentrated on pushing them away, while separating my blue energy and changing how it flowed. I visualized the other energies separating and flowing back into their talismans. Apparently, they did. If a specific energy needed to be in a specific talisman, I had no idea if I got it right.
I opened my eyes. The two talismans glowed just slightly, purple and blue-black, and then the talismans were inert again.
“You put back the energies you absorbed from Knightshade.” Izzy’s voice made it sound like both a statement and a question.
“I still am not comfortable with magic or whatever this stuff is.”
“Seems to come in handy,” Blaise mused.
“Yeah, maybe, but it hasn’t helped me find and rescue Rox. And even though I know where Guido is now, I don’t know how to use it to rescue him either.”
Saripha put a hand on my shoulder. “Trust me, Guido has been through worse. We will find a way to help him.”
“And Rox?”
“I wish I could tell you something encouraging that wasn’t just cheerleading. I have to be honest. I sense her, but what I sense is very confusing. Something has changed.” Saripha seemed to me focused somewhere else for a moment.
“Changed how?”
“You remember the darkness I sensed deep within her?”
“Sure. Gerod encountered it too and it really threw him for a while.”
“What I sense feels more like that dark energy and only a little like Rox.”
“But there’s still something of Rox there?” I could hear the desperation in my own tone.
Saripha didn’t say anything. She wasn’t going to give me a feel-good message that she couldn’t bac
k up.
“We still going into the mountain?” Blaise asked, changing the subject.
“That’s what I came here for. I know one way in, but it would involve some perilous grappling. I’m not confident enough in my abilities to float people in.”
“We’ll circle the base.” Izzy looked up the mountain. “If there’s a constructed entrance it would probably be near the base. However, keep an eye out for rock outcroppings. Could indicate caves.”
We found what we were looking for on the ocean side of the mountain. Actually, seeing the ocean was bizarre. It just didn’t fit my conception of this place. It spread out like a great blue cloak all the way to the horizon. On the other hand, this wasn’t some idyllic scene of crescent-white beaches and soft swells crashing on the sand. The shore was made up of treacherous, rocky cliffs with inlets and coves which had stony projections that would have torn asunder even very seaworthy vessels. The waters were choppy and powerful waves roared in and pounded hard on the cliffs. Trying to either launch from here or land here seemed like they would be suicide missions. Not that I knew a great deal about boats.
“This typical for the ocean here?” I asked Kyo.
“Far as I can tell. Never seen a real beach.”
The rock outcropping was about a third of the way up the mountainside, which was, in general, rockier over here. Further along the curve of the mountain but closer to its base was another opening out of which a flow of underground water cascaded down and over the cliffs. It looked like there was something in the water, a slight discoloration. There also wasn’t much purchase around the rushing water and it looked like it would be hard to get in that way.
In the rock outcropping above there was a cave. There were also signs that rocks had been pushed aside and a path made through the cave. We followed it back and just where the passage turned so that the natural light coming from the entrance would be lost, we detected faint light ahead of us. It wasn’t quite enough to see, so I raised my tattoos again, but it was a source we could follow. The path through the cave wound its way upward until it opened up into a large chamber lit by a great hole in the dome of the ceiling. We were under the crater where I had fought with Knightshade.
Directly in front of us was the lake of fire, as I was calling it. It looked like it was fed by the river of lava Izzy and I had been following. It was slightly below where our walkway came out, sunk into the floor of this very large chamber. There was plenty of room on either side to walk around it. At the other end of the pool was a very large vessel made of metal set just above the lava, almost touching. The vessel was a white-yellow near the base and became more orange and red going up until, at the top of the vessel, it became a dull gray color. The metal could apparently become quite hot without liquefying or losing structural integrity. However, it wasn’t like the clay that formed a barrier to the heat.
Into this vessel, small chunks of what looked like ore were deposited. They came from a chute that was fairly level but vibrated, carrying the small, widely spaced pieces of rock slowly until they fell off into the vessel. From the other direction came a pipe like the ones that exited the towers, which we saw head for the mountain. Out of that came a slow drip of a yellow-green ooze with red swirls in it, also falling into the vessel with a hiss. Whatever was mixing in that pot, it was glowing red.
As we came around the vessel, we could see it hung at just a slight tilt. As material continued to be added, overflow drained off into something that looked like a narrow trough. I couldn’t tell what it was made of. It ran straight to and through a wall of the chamber into, presumably, the next chamber. At the far end were two doors, one in the center of the wall near where the trough ran through. It was actually a double door similar to the one’s we had seen on the towers. Some distance away around the natural curve of the chamber was another door with bars on its window. It had been broken and hung on one hinge.
I looked at the others. “What are we looking at here?”
Izzy shrugged. “Looks like a smelting operation. Raw materials coming in…” Izzy pointed to the ore and the green yellow drippy stuff. “…Materials are heated to the point where everything melts together.”
“That makes sense for metals, but what is that drippy stuff and why doesn’t it just vaporize?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’m guessing the ore is what is left after a stage where the rock is crushed and sorted elsewhere in the mountain. The drippy stuff, as you call it, has to be what is being extracted from people in the towers.”
“What is it?”
“Again, I don’t know. Something produced by our glamour bodies when sufficient and sustained pain is induced.”
‘“So the stuff is mixed together and then what?”
“If this is a smelting process, it would be poured, possibly into a mold, and cooled.”
“Which is going on in the next chamber,” Blaise added.
Saripha shivered. “You are right about the stuff coming from that pipe. I can sense some of the same feelings I felt in the pain tower when I tried to make contact.”
“Guess we’d better see what they are making,” Kyo said.
“If this is so important and secret, why isn’t it being guarded?” The others stopped and looked at me. Blaise smiled.
“I got this one. It so secret that they can’t tell enough people or demons to guard it.”
“There is that.”
We made our way to the double doors, but as we approached, my attention kept being drawn to the door that hung askew. It looked like a cell to keep a prisoner in.
“Hold on a minute. I want to check out this other door.”
I walked over to the door. Saripha followed me but the others hung back. The door partially blocked the dimly lit room beyond. I slid it out of the way. It scraped on the rock floor, making a loud sound that echoed startlingly in the vast chamber.
Saripha put her hand on my shoulder.
“Are you sure you want to? You may not like what you see.”
I looked at Saripha but she was unreadable.
“I don’t like anything I see in this world.”
I entered the room. There was little in it. A plain frame of wood to sit down on. Some tightly woven rope secured to hard wooden bars on the wall. On the ground was some cloth in a disarrayed heap, as if cast off. On the wall was significant blood splatter.
I fell to my knees and screamed in fury.
I picked up the cloth. It was what Rox was wearing when we last saw her.
Tears and rage were fighting for ascendance within me. I felt Saripha touch me again. I spun around ready to vent my anger on her, but something in her eyes stopped me.
“Listen to me, Quentin. I’m not sure how I know this, but Rox is not dead.”
“She’s wounded.”
“I’m not sure. She is... different.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not clear, I’m sorry, Quentin. I know how much you hate what you call mumbo jumbo, but I don’t have clear answers for you.”
I started to feel rage rising again, but I pushed it down.
“Is she here?”
“I sense her here. I don’t know if that means she is still here.”
“You’re not just saying she’s alive to calm me down?”
I looked at her. Her expression broke my heart. I almost started crying.
“I wouldn’t.” She said it as two emphasized words, softly, but with both strength and love.
When I could finally get something out, I looked at her squarely and said: “I know, Saripha. I’m sorry.”
She put her arms around me for a moment, saying nothing. Nothing needed to be said.
When she let go I looked at the cloth balled in my fist. I looked at the blood splatter on the wall. I tossed the cloth against the wall.
“We’d better find her then.”
I walked out of the cell and joined the others.
22.
The double doors to the next chamber appear
ed similar to what we had found on the towers but they didn’t form as tight a seal. There was no visible opening mechanism, but there was enough of a gap to get a grip and pull. On the other side we could hear sounds. The loudest was the sound of water. Some of it sounded like rushing water, some of it like dripping and splattering water. There were also sounds not unlike a radiator would make, but they were irregular.
“Water and steam.” I looked at Izzy.
“That’s where they’re cooling the smelted alloy into whatever they’re making.”
Izzy, Blaise and I ended up all pulling at the doors. They were heavy and resisted moving, but finally Blaise pushed on one door while Izzy and I pulled on the other. There was a loud sound of material sliding and then a shudder and a deep pop sound as they pulled apart. Izzy and I staggered back and would have been down on the ground if Saripha and Kyo hadn’t caught us.
Blaise looked at the doors.
“I can’t tell if these doors were really meant to keep anyone out or if they’re just sloppy carpenters. Doors warped by too much moisture on one side, something like that.”
“From what we’ve seen so far, they aren’t too concerned about security.” Kyo looked around. “Then again, the advantage we seem to have had all along is that our kind of rebellion is a new element for them. And every time they send some Shade or whatever to deal with Quentin, it just increases his abilities.”
“No one before Quentin was impulsive or stubborn enough to take on the magical forces here.” Izzy patted me on the back.
“I appreciate that you avoided saying ‘dumb enough.’”