The Blood Storm (Unwithering Realm Book 4)

by John C. Wright

  Down he fell. I stabbed through his midsection and a strange thing happened. With a jerk, all the severed limbs and heads and wormy bloodstains we had slopped across the room jumped back into place. I mean his head came back to his neck like it was pulled on an invisible string, and so did the arms and legs I’d amputated.

  It should have scared the dickens out of me, but since my adrenaline was already pumping, and I was already screaming my head off with battle-rage, and was already sweating like a pig (fighting monsters is hard work) the additional adrenaline, screaming, and sweating caused by fear was lost in the general background noise. If you hear soldiers or firemen talk about being too busy to feel scared, I guess this is what they mean.

  I jumped back, bellowing swear words, drew a shaky breath, and resumed the Heaven-and-Earth stance, weight on the rear foot, blade erect. The blood on the blade was now streaming back into Rahab's body, flying through the air like scarlet sleet driven by a horizontal wind.

  And then he was back to normal, dressed in nothing but his long hair, with the jutting jaw and lowering brow ridges of a Neanderthal. The bone of his own forearm had gone back into his arm.

  Rahab laughed. “I take your measure. You fall short.”

  I panted, “I won that round and you know it!”

  “You know nothing, you. Look! You gasp! You wheeze! You tire! Boy knows not how to put fatigue from his blood. Rahab, me, I do not tire and tear. I send away the fatigue with a thought. Now we start again and you learn what it is to fight a man, boy. No more breathing for you.”

  Then his chest opened like the doors of a bureau, and he ripped two sharp ribs from it, taking one in either hand. He shrugged, and his arms thickened and grew a layer of integument like rhinoceros hide, then the hide darkened, and he grew a layer of bone atop that.

  His eyes drew backward into his skull, so that he was looking at me through two little tubes of bone, and he thickened the bones of his face and flattened his nose, so that his skull became a helmet.

  “Again!” he growled. “We go again!”

  “Neither of us can kill the other,” I said. I was still breathing heavily, really wishing I knew his trick for wishing weariness away.

  “But I can give you pain. Much pain.” He grinned.

  His mouth began to stretch and his teeth elongated into fangs. The rib-bones in his hands quivered, straightened, and grew and grew until he held two spears. They were four feet long, and the tips began dripping poison.

  There went my reach advantage.

  5. Second Round

  He threw the first rib like a javelin. I turned sidewise to it, presenting a minimal target, and swatted it aside with my blade, keeping my eyes on him. He had twisted his legs backward, so they looked like the legs of an Abarimon. I don’t see how there could be any advantage to speed or agility to have your knees and feet turned wrongway-round but somehow he lunged forward at breathtaking speed, like a panther springing.

  I feinted high and struck low, slashing out his belly. He raised his truncheon to block my high blow, and gagged in shock as his entrails came slithering out like a red apron. Rahab had simply never learned swordsmanship. What need did he have for the art?

  But he had arts of his own. The rib-bone spear which had flown past me, had come to life and somehow snagged my rear leg from the floor. My mail jerkin only came to knee length, so the spear wrapped my lower leg like a snake, and, like a snake, reared back and struck. Only a little bit of venom was pumped into my flesh—but enough so that my leg simultaneously felt numb and on fire, and I lost control of it. The muscles spasmed like a frog’s leg being touched by an electrical jolt.

  I hopped, slid, fell, and the fight should have been over right then and there. But Rahab was screaming and clutching at his bleeding guts, and he fell too. As he dropped, the snakelike bone wrapping my ankle turned into a black liquid and jumped—literally leaped across the air—back into the breast of Rahab. He still had the Abarimon feet when I gut-slashed him, but as he toppled and fell, his feet were normal again. And so was his face. The elaborate bony armored plates protecting his eyes and skull turned black and wriggled and got reabsorbed into his skull.

  “Grant that I may praise thee, O sacred Virgin; give me strength against thine enemies!” I said solemnly and I felt a cool serenity flow through my limbs, washing the poison away. Sensation returned to my feet, and I jumped to them.

  By that time Rahab was also back on his feet, standing in a crouch, his Neanderthal face growling and ugly, his eyes two dark little ponds of hate.

  “So, pain disrupts your Mr. Stretchy trick, I see.” I assumed my stance again, weight on my rear leg, and weapon pointed, blade side up, toward his eyes. “And we cannot get rid of pain.”

  “No,” he grunted, his vicious grimace looking oddly like a grin. “No escape from pain. Not for us. Not ever.”

  “How come all the Undying don’t wear armor?”

  He hooted. “Armor that is made of dead metal? All flesh is ours to command. Armor would but impede us, foolish boy.”

  “Foolish man, if you don’t mind.”

  He didn't respond, but drew in his breath and began to expand. Not just a few inches either. He swelled up until he was at least twelve feet tall.

  Nor did he swell in proportion. He grew stouter and thicker faster than he grew taller, so his legs and feet turned into elephant legs more like those of Nakasu.

  I lunged and slashed at his stomach, groin, jumped back, lunged again, and impaled his chest. The tip of Dancing Maiden scraped against a rib-bone with an ugly noise. It left a shallow cut, and drew blood, but did not penetrate. His whole chest area was now a solid mass of bone. From the way his flesh rippled, I could see he had closed his ribcage like Venetian blinds snapped shut.

  He was thirteen feet tall. Then fourteen.

  He grew a single horn from the center of his brow, and let it swell to a yard in length before ripping it free. Little tatters of his flesh dripped and oozed on the surface of the horn, emitting acrid smells. The horn flattened, becoming like a long-handled ax or pike.

  And now he was fifteen feet tall.

  I lunged and cut at his leg, hoping that all this was just puffing up for show. Rahab could not be pulling extra mass into existence from nowhere, could he? The laws of nature would not allow that! He must be losing density to gain so much volume! He must! The conservation of mass was a law!

  I was expecting it to be like slicing your brother’s birthday cake in half with your practice sword in retaliation for him bisecting all your birthday balloons, including the one with a glow-in-the-dark mouse on it, with his. In other words, I was expecting no resistance, a feeling of immense satisfaction, and maybe getting my butt kicked a moment later.

  Nope. My sword cut into rhino-hide and dense muscle, then struck bone and rebounded. The wound puckered and sprayed blood at me, and made a sardonic spitting noise before zipping itself back shut as easily as a Ziploc bag. It was if I'd never struck him at all.

  I silently cursed him. It looked as if I could not injure him painfully enough to snap him back to his true form.

  Apparently the conservation of mass is more like a suggestion rather than a law.

  Rahab laughed. His laughter was like a gush of a wind from hell, full of cruelty and power.

  I turned and ran.

  6. Final Round

  It was a gamble, I admit. I risked everything. If Rahab merely took the opportunity to turn and throw his poisonous blood and body parts at Penny and the other girls trapped in the chamber, all was lost. But I was gambling that he would think that I was like him, and held all living things in hatred and contempt.

  To make sure he followed me, I threw four shuriken from my father’s belt (which I was wearing outside the hauberk, remember) into the conveniently large face, belly and groin of the giant. So he followed me, not pausing to slay the harem slaves. It is not like they were going anywhere.

  I also zigged and zagged as I ran, a skill I learned as a child r
unning from older brothers with longer legs than mine. The pike of horn smote to my left and right, cracking the marble floor and spraying blood-red gushes of venom as it struck.

  It is not easy running, in forty pounds of chainmail, from a giant who can cover ten feet at a stride. But there is a story about a poker player, Amarillo Slim, luring a chump into a sucker bet that he could outrun a horse in the hundred-yard dash, and winning the bet by having the track set up as two fifty-yard dashes connected by a hairpin turn. The animal with the larger mass could not decelerate, turn, and accelerate as quickly as the animal with the smaller mass. This is also why jackrabbits sometimes outrun wolves. And like those rabbits, I used my ears. The thunder of Rahab’s footfalls, which were shaking the whole darn floor, and the slight change in rhythm, told me when his blows were about to fall, and I would break left or right. Once and twice and thrice he swung and missed.

  Perhaps you recall the colonnade where visitors could lounge and look into the harem, a long wall of windows covered with blue glass bars. I ran toward them. I reversed course at the last minute, not caring if I were hit or not, and lashed out at the elephant legs of the monstrous Rahab behind me. It was a shallow blow to the back of his knee, but he bled gallons, and the floor was marble, and his body was as massive as an elephant’s, moving at the speed of a cavalry charge.

  Unlike the law of conservation of mass, the law of conservation of momentum turned out to be more than a suggestion. He could not stop.

  Rahab slipped on his own blood, did a pratfall, and smashed into the bars. There was a crash, and shards of razor-sharp glass went everywhere. There was a storm of dark red lighting all over him. It was what Abby had called distilled essence of pain.

  Yes, Rahab had indeed struck me with his pike as I turned, and I think he broke my spine and both legs when he did, but merely being near the firestorm of pure pain was enough to snap my body back to its true form, unbroken and whole.

  Rahab was back to his normal size too. His limbs were jerking, not in his control. Each time he jerked, another little razor sharp leaf or needle of blue glass would break. The stuff dripping out, whatever it was, would add to the torture he was already in.

  The slave-girls were screaming. Rahab was screaming. I was trembling with fatigue and battle-adrenaline, but I resisted the urge to break stance or lean on my sword. (No one actually leans on a sword when they are tired: it would damage the tip. But I wanted to.) So I was the only one not screaming. I was too tired.

  7. Victory

  Not everyone was screaming. Penny came up beside me, quiet as a doe. She had a jar of water she was carrying on her head, which I thought was a neat trick.

  And from somewhere, she had found her eyeglasses, which she was wearing. I saw she had a small book covered in black shagreen leather in her hand, with corners, hasps and lock of gold, zipped into a plastic baggie.

  She knelt gracefully and lowered the water jar to the floor without spilling it.

  Then she unzipped, unlocked and opened the little book. She unlocked it by touching her tongue to the hasp. The shining yellow pages were mirror-bright, covered with tiny, cramped and intricate cuneiform and hieroglyphs in black and red and green inks, diagrams and pentagrams and woodcuts of angular, bestial faces. Their eyes moved and looked at me as she flipped the golden pages. And, oddly enough, some of the pages were covered in European musical notation with clefs and notes and bars and staves.

  She adjusted her eyeglasses, found a page of music, and started singing.

  The words and the tune were alike lost in the uproar. I did not see any water rise up out of the jar, but I could not shake the impression that I should have been seeing it. That eerie weird-beard sensation I got from Rahab was coming from the jar. I don’t know how I could sense it, but I could.

  Fascinated, I put my hand down to a point in the air between the opening of the jar and Rahab. I gasped. I could feel a cold trickling flow over my hand. I felt water. My eyes did not see any water. My eyes told me my hand was in the air.

  I cupped my hand and lifted it to my face. My fingers were dry. I touched my lips to the hollow of my palm. I did not taste or feel any water, but a sensation of coolness touched my lip and ran down my throat. It was just the sensation of refreshment without the actual water. The spirit of water. I was fascinated, and stepped forward. The cool touch fell across my knees. There was an invisible and impalpable column of water about a foot in diameter writhing through the air.

  Penny scowled at me with her eyes, not ceasing to sing, and waved me angrily to one side. I stepped back, feeling foolish. Note to self: do not interfere with the affairs of witches, for they are sexy and quick to anger.

  From the way the writhing body of Rahab reacted, I could tell the non-existent water stream had flowed about him. Then the broken ends of the shattered blue glass flickered. The non-existent water conducted electricity just like real water, or so it seemed, because at that moment streams and darts of dark red sparks swirled out of the broken ends of the many blue bars, and the air around Rahab, and the floor where he flopped and twisted, all of it, grew dark and angry with crawling sparks. They followed invisible swirls and streams of motion.

  On and on she sang, and the sparks thickened and darkened into a liquid cocoon of pure pain. Rahab could not stop shaking and twitching, and so he could not rise to his feet, or even inchworm away from the broken glass, and neither could he warp his flesh into any new shapes or sizes.

  Then the shivering mass of dark red sparks flowed over his head like a plastic bag, and entered his mouth and eyes and nose. Having that stuff up your nose and down your throat must have really hurt, because all Rahab’s muscles locked up with agony, shivering and tense, and the sound of his shrieks turned into a gargle. I assume the unreal water must have created a sensation of drowning. Rahab made all the noises you’d expect from someone whose head was underwater. It sounded awful.

  I threw back my head and laughed long and loud, the laughter of the Host who Yearns for Death in Vain.

  “Water bending!” I grinned down at Penny. “Cool beans, Katara!”

  The water left in the jar before Penny looked odd. It was de-natured, and would not create a sensation of drowning even if you were drowning. An amphibious girl might convince even a suspicious guard that she had granted him the ability to breathe water.

  Penny, kneeling on the floor with her well-shaped arms aloft, now smiled, but the silvery flow of song from her throat did not cease, nor did she take her eyes from her book. Then I realized why she looked worried.

  Penny dared not stop her song, lest her spell drop. I assume a professional singer can keep up a tune for a long time, but everyone runs out of breath eventually.

  I sat down next to her, got the kit out of my father’s belt, and started cleaning my sword.

  Quaffs Blood Like Wine

  1. Time to Clean

  I used a sheet of rice paper from the cleaning kit to remove all oil and blood from the blade, carefully holding the scalpel-sharp edge away from me.

  “Penny,” I said. “You look anxious.” She looked lovely too, but I did not tell her that. She had left aside the silk bedsheet in which I’d wrapped her, so she was now just in the lowcut sleeveless white tunic bound at the waist with a black wide belt, and a black collar like an evil version of a necklace locked around the white skin of her throat.

  “Don’t worry, I'll brush my teeth before you give me that kiss you owe me. Because I did defeat him”

  She angrily rolled her enormous emerald eyes at me over the top of her little book, but she did not stop singing.

  “You think I am an idiot—which, I admit, shows that you are a good judge of character. You are probably thinking that, as soon as you run out of breath, our pal Rahab is going to stand up, shake off his pain, turn into a whirlwind of bone fragments or something, and just rip me to shreds, and torture all the girls here to death.”

  I started to tap the powder ball softly, each tap two inches apart, along the
length of the blade. I worked carefully, dusting the blade very lightly with the polish. It must be done precisely and rhythmically, so there is something almost soothing about the task. I was far enough from Penny that there was no danger of her inhaling the powder, even when she drew in a deep breath between staves.

  “But looks can be deceiving! There is one other thing that can defeat an Undying One. I know, because it got me the first hour I was here in crazyland. And I just found out less than an hour ago, that the same thing can kill living metal, because it happened to the cunning metal weapon sticking through me at the time. And Abby told me all these magical, shape-changing metals operate on the same principle.”

  I used a cotton cloth to polish the blade.

  “As to where we end up once I get you and the other girls out of here, that I do not know. At this point, I am thinking any place is better than this. See? It will all work out.”

  She squinted at me as she sang, and I don’t know if that meant she figured out my plan—which was not all that complicated, really—or if she had not, and was still filled with doubt.

  I turned the shining blade to the other side and started tapping it with the little ball of powder.

  2. Time to Pack

  I turned my head and called to the other slave-girls there. “Hey! Young ladies. If they gave you anything more sturdy to wear, put it on. Shoes? If you have any possessions, gather them up. We are all getting out of here.”

  There was a little cooing and murmuring among the teenagers. I could not make out the words, but there were notes of doubt.

  “Ladies, ladies! I defeated the big bad abomination, did I not? There he lies in a lump of pain and not one of you even has a splinter! Now get a move on!”

  One of the girls stepped forward, knelt and bowed her head to the ground, so her generous cleavage was well displayed a moment before her lovely hair was on the floorstones, and her hips, round and pink as the lobes of a peach, were hoisted aloft behind.