by Alan Baxter
‘Good to see you.’
Jarrod looked Alex up and down. ‘You okay?’
‘Kinda. Need a minute.’
They looked back across the lake to the battle in full swing between Armour and the Fey. Shadows shifted to their right and Silhouette stood up into the moonlight. She grabbed Alex in an embrace. He hugged her back. ‘Thanks, Sil.’
She laughed. ‘I did pretty much fuck-all, really. Way too many. I just tried to hamper them a bit.’ She held up her pouch of healing powder, one eyebrow raised.
Alex poked a finger into the glittering dust, took a generous dose and rubbed it onto his gums. Not the same as drinking the potion, but still he felt its healing rush through his body. ‘Come on, we need to move.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s no way this is over. Armour may be engaging the Fey, but the Lady is not dumb. She’ll be …’
Silhouette’s eyes widened and she screamed as Jarrod grabbed her and spun around, hugged her to his huge chest. Alex turned to see as green fire exploded over them, threw them apart with blistering heat and sent agonising electric tendrils through every part of them. ‘You despicable worm!’ The Lady strode forward, still in human form, her dress more smoke than silk. She appeared like an avenging angel of blood, wreathed in swirling colours reflecting moonlight.
Alex rolled to his feet as her magic burned out again. He threw up his shields and stumbled back under the force of her attack, but the fire didn’t get through. He saw Jarrod sprawled across the grass some ten metres away, Silhouette lying half obscured beneath the big man. He refused to acknowledge their scorched flesh and limp, unmoving forms. He turned back to face the Fey woman.
He cursed himself for pausing for breath. He knew the Lady would focus on him at the expense of all else. He felt Silhouette’s powder still coursing through his veins and realised it was all that had prevented the magefire from doing to him what it had done to Jarrod and Silhouette. If Sil was dead now, after all this … Rage bubbled up in him like a volcano.
The Lady raised both hands, fingers crooked like claws, and shifted back to her Fey shape. Her bark-like skin seemed to glow green, her burning amber eyes like tiny suns, incandescent in her fury. She rose up, growing to some nine feet tall, towering over Alex as she stutter-stepped like a dancer in a strobe light towards him. ‘You will not deny me what’s left of my Lord’s heart, you pathetic mortal!’
Alex raised the sword, forced his body to respond to his will. He gathered energy and focused it through the Darak. Fatigue dragged at him like anchors tied to every limb, but he refused to give in now. This was the last chance, the final confrontation. ‘Your Lord’s heart was a fucking abomination in the first place, you bitch! He got everything he deserved and you will never get it back!’
The Lady tipped her head back and laughed. ‘You think us so easily defeated, human? I don’t need you alive any more. I can extract what you stole from me and my people can restore its original strength.’
Alex hefted the sword, tightened his grip. ‘You never fail to under-estimate me!’
‘You dare to face me?’ She circled him as she spoke and Alex realised she was cautious, for all her bluster. Her hands were raised, magesign crackled around her, ready to unleash, but she stayed her attack. Perhaps, finally, she had realised he really was a threat. It bought him some time, at least. But the true threat was the Darak, and always had been.
She whipped her hands forward. Green fire crackled out and Alex braced his shields even as half a dozen Fey burst from hiding and rushed him. Bitch. He should have known better. And he did know her tactics. He ignored the newcomers and ran straight at the Lady, whipping his sword across as he came. The Lady screeched, magefire crackled past him, and she leapt backwards. He kept moving, tried to run her down.
‘Fey rules don’t apply here! You can’t run from me.’ Alex swept the sword back, aiming for the Lady’s outstretched arms.
She whipped her hands away, ducked to the ground and morphed into some animal form. She slipped to the side and Alex had to let her go as the other Fey closed on him. He let his mind empty, let his vision work independent of thought and stepped sideways and back, forward and sideways, the sword sweeping and glittering with expert skill. Everything it touched separated without a moment’s drag. Fey limbs and heads littered the ground. They gathered their magic and magefire arced from fingertips, scorched against his shields. Alex felt his wards weakening with his fatigue and their sustained attacks, felt the burn and electric sear of their assault getting through. But still he danced in combat.
It took only moments and the six Fey were down, dismembered, decapitated. And new fire smashed Alex to the ground, drove the air from his body. He rolled, tried to gain his hands and feet, and was flattened by another blast. It burned away his shields, his skin blistered, his clothes incinerated. The shackling magic came again, but Alex’s defence against that held. ‘I’ve seen the shape of your magic and I can resist it!’ he yelled.
Her fire came again. ‘Can you resist this?’ The pain was tremendous and Alex screamed. He gathered all the elements together, blasted the Lady with heat and raging wind, exploded the earth at her feet. She threw out shields, a bubble of magic deflecting his attack as she rose above the churning earth, untouched by all his efforts.
‘I have had enough of you!’ the Lady shrieked, and raised her hands again.
Gasping in the last of his breath, Alex whipped his arm up, threw the sword with all his remaining strength. It spun flat through the air like a boomerang, its edge glittering in the moonlight. Alex pushed air beneath it, kept it spinning flat and true despite the work of physics against it, and it sliced into the Lady’s raised left arm. She screeched as her hand was severed at the wrist and fell to the earth. The stump of her arm sprayed thick, green ichor.
Alex didn’t pause, he knew he had only interrupted her briefly and she would be more furious than ever. He drove himself to his feet and ran past as she blasted at him again from her remaining hand. Magefire seared his back and he grabbed the sword from the ground, dropped and spun on one knee, sliced a deep cut through the Lady’s side, just above the hip. As she screamed, he reversed the cut, came back through under her knee, and again, back through her thigh. Her leg fell in two pieces and she collapsed, wailing, dark emerald spraying into the night.
Her strength was remarkable, even so grievously wounded. She drew magic again, energy danced at her remaining hand. ‘I am eternal!’ she yelled, and threw the blaze at him.
Alex ducked, vision crossing with the pain of previous strikes and her spell burned him, a debilitating heat across his arm and shoulder. He staggered back, fell to his knees, all strength waning.
He was spent, but he had one chance left. The Lady was broken and maimed, but far from dead and Alex could not risk his last effort on her. ‘You need to live long enough to see this, bitch. Here it ends.’
Alex gathered all he could of his remaining strength, focused the Eld magic he had learned and directed it inwards. Drawing it together inside himself was far easier than trying to project it out under any kind of control and he let it build, a focused, destructive force of unimaginable intensity. The sword hung limp in one hand, the other he pressed over the shards of the Darak. He focused his mind on nothing but those hard, glassy black pieces. This really was the end. Of him. Of everything. But as long as he could survive for long enough … He tightened his focus as much as he possibly could and let the magic go.
He arched back, screamed as his chest burst open. Every bit of resilience and power he had ever had, he put tightly through the Darak and the Eld separating magic atomised the three shards. The pain was blinding as his flesh vaporised, his ribs disintegrated, and the Darak became a thousand thousand spinning grains of Fey heart.
The Lady shrieked her rage and grief and Alex drew all the winds from all directions and gathered every drop of blood, every scrap of bone and flesh and every microscopic piece of the Darak and let those winds open to the
world. Air rushed by him as his consciousness receded, blew the Lady onto her back, and the cloud of gore and Darak whipped away, swirled up into the night sky.
Alex’s vision faded, his thoughts began to shut down. He ignored everything except the eldritch hurricane he had conjured, kept it gusting, opening in every direction, carrying particles of his body and the Darak far and wide across the land. He followed the winds with his mind, kept them going higher and wider, into the stratosphere, across the seas, carrying every tiny part of the Darak hundreds, thousands of miles apart. Every minuscule piece of it wanted to join with every other, but the further apart he pushed them, the more their power waned, the more the attraction weakened. The Darak might still exist, but it existed across most of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, blowing out through the clouds to rain down in a million particulate pieces, all far from each other, impossible to find, impossible to recombine.
Agony gave way to icy cold in Alex’s chest and he realised he was facedown on the grass. Wind still whistled in his ears, but his mind was numb, everything muffled. Somewhere, miles away, he heard the Lady screaming and then drums. No, fireworks perhaps. Or gunfire maybe. And he let himself go.
31
Cold.
Floating in a haze of ice and pain.
An angel’s voice. Fucking do something!
Movement, buffeting winds and searing pain.
Blackness.
Something beeping like an arcade game in another room.
Visuals like staring too close at a television tuned to static.
A deep voice, panicked, desperate. Too much damage!
Blackness.
Another voice, female, clipped. Contain that ward! We need more medicmages in here right now.
The angel’s voice again, racked with sobs of grief and a burning anger underneath. Don’t you fucking dare! Not you too. Not you …
Blackness.
Thick, cloying, choking. Coughs and stabs of blinding pain.
Blackness.
Floating in a haze of pure light. Pure dark. Total void.
Panic!
Blackness.
32
At a building site in Birmingham, England, an Armour operative disguised in hi-vis vest and worker’s steel-capped boots walked casually towards the footings of the hotel under construction. Deep holes, steel-reinforced, sank into darkness. The operative held a messenger bag close to his hip as he walked into the shadow of a huge pipe lowering over the hole. Concrete began to pour, thick and glugging, down into the shadowed depths. The operative watched the level of concrete begin to rise. He checked around, made sure no eyes were on him, and pulled a thin, pale arm from the messenger bag. It writhed and flexed, the fingers clutching uselessly. He threw the arm into the rising concrete. It squirmed momentarily on the surface and sank.
The man watched a moment longer, nodded and walked away.
A black boat powered through open ocean, hundreds of kilometres from land in any direction. The boat driver checked his instruments, slowed the vessel, checked again. He killed the engines. ‘We’re here.’
A woman stepped onto the deck, wearing the black combats of an Armour Jane Doe. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Mariana Trench,’ the man said, ‘as deep as the ocean gets.’
The woman nodded, used a key to unlock a steel chest at the back of the boat. She pulled out a thrashing canvas sack.
‘Need a hand with that?’ the man asked.
She laughed. ‘A hand with a leg? Sure. Save it from kicking my head in.’
The man grimaced, knelt to hold the flailing sack down. ‘Creepy as fuck, this is.’
‘I’ve seen stranger things,’ the woman said, concentrating as she used chains and padlocks to secure steel weights tightly around the thing. ‘It’s the big chunk of still-breathing torso attached to it that gets me. Okay, help me up.’
Between them they strained to lift the thing and toss it over the side. They watched it sink away from view, still kicking all the way into the darkness.
‘Nearly seven miles deep,’ the man said quietly.
The woman nodded. ‘I hope it’s enough. Come on, let’s get back to Guam. I want to go home.’
A man leaned from the door of a helicopter as it passed over the open, glowing crater of a volcano. The heat buffeted the aircraft as he dragged a sack to the edge. The sack contained a single leg that kicked and bucked in his grip. The man watched it tumble down into the gently churning magma and sink away. He turned to the pilot and gave the thumbs up. The chopper banked and flew back the way it had come.
‘Here we are,’ the guide said.
The operative nodded and pulled a canvas-wrapped lump from his backpack. It swelled and relaxed softly, as if it breathed. Just a chunk of meat, the operative said to himself and moved carefully across the ice to the edge of the crevasse. He looked down, past the white ice, past the blue ice deeper down, into darkness. ‘How deep is it?’ he asked.
The guide shrugged. ‘No one knows. Too narrow for a person to rappel. Who cares? It’s just a split in the skin of the world. What do you have there, anyway?’
The operative smiled ruefully. ‘Nothing. Just something that needs to never be found again.’
‘It’s a long way to come to throw away some garbage.’
‘It needs to be far from anything.’ The man dropped the parcel into the abyss. It made no sound as it fell out of sight. He turned, scanned the horizon of mountain ridges as far as the eye could see. The sky was cobalt blue above, the air thin and crisp. ‘Come on, then,’ he said.
The guide shrugged again and turned, led the way for another four-hour hike back to the base camp and the operative’s waiting transport.
33
Machines hissed and whirred. Magesign swam in lazy spirals, obscuring his vision. And Alex realised he was awake. He blinked, swallowed, winced at the pain in his throat and chest. He peeled apart dry lips and sucked in a wheezing breath. An involuntary sound of pain escaped him as his chest rose.
‘Alex!’ Silhouette appeared through the haze, her face beautiful. Tears streamed from her eyes.
Something was wrong with her. The flesh of her left cheek and ear was slightly puckered, her hair burned away from the side of her head. A fuzzy regrowth pushed through. She saw his eyes go to her injury. ‘It’s okay, it’ll heal. No scars, they assure me. Just takes a while because the magic was so strong.’ Her eyes were sad, some deep melancholy that persisted beyond the smile she gave him.
Alex smiled back, weakly, the effort costing him a moment’s breath. ‘Alive?’ he managed to croak out. The thought mystified him. How was it possible?
Silhouette laughed through her tears. ‘Yeah, you’re alive, Iron Balls. Fuck me, but you’re strong. You’ve got a cybernetic heart, an Armour magetech special apparently, someone else’s left lung and a new titanium ribcage among many other things. You, I’m afraid, are definitely going to have some scars. The combination of medicmages and Armour tech is quite impressive. They really came through for you.’
Alex chuckled softly, the movement an agony. ‘No. You. Alive.’ He closed his eyes to concentrate a moment on not passing out.
‘Yeah, I’m still going. It’s taken a couple of weeks to fix me up, but I’ll be tip top. So will you, eventually.’
Alex opened his eyes, drank in her gorgeous face. ‘Jarrod?’
Silhouette’s expression fell, new tears. She shook her head. ‘He.’ She took a quavering breath. ‘He shielded me. Took the brunt of her blast. He didn’t survive it. My little brother saved my life.’
Alex felt a new pain rise with the physical hurt. ‘So sorry.’
She nodded.
‘Didn’t want to leave you, Sil. Love you. So much. But had to …’
‘I know.’ She gently brushed a palm across his forehead. ‘I understand. I don’t like it, but I get it. I love you too.’
‘So tired, Sil. Need. Sleep.’
She leaned forward, brushed the gentlest kiss across his lips.
He sank back down into oblivion, struggling to believe he was still in the world.
34
Silhouette pushed Alex in his wheelchair through the corridors of Armour HQ in London. Workers rebuilding, painting, moved aside for them, nodded greetings.
‘This place is looking good,’ Alex said.
‘Yeah, it’s nearly finished. They’ve had six weeks, after all.’ She walked around the chair to knock on a door, pushed it open and wheeled Alex inside.
A man rose from behind a desk, the office all new, smelling of fresh carpet and barely dry paint. ‘Alex Caine!’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I’m John Barclay, head of York. Temporary reassignment here.’
Alex leaned forward in his chair to shake. ‘Good to meet you.’
‘You’re recovering well?’
‘Not too bad. Walking short distances. Should be up and about like normal in another couple of weeks. Thanks to you guys and Silhouette’s special potions.’
Barclay nodded, returned to his seat. ‘And in no small part thanks to your own strength and spirit.’
‘I’ve always been a fighter.’
‘Indeed. First off, let me officially thank you on behalf of everyone for what you managed to achieve.’
Alex smiled crookedly. ‘As far as I could tell, I was just clearing up my own mess.’
‘Not true. You got tangled up in something well beyond your control and you took a hold of it and ended it.’
‘I’ve always hated having no control over my life. Can I ask a few questions?’
‘Of course.’
‘The Lady?’
‘She was very badly hurt by you and took a lot more damage from our people, but a contingent of Fey managed to gather around her and they got to a nearby gate. Whether they’ll survive on the other side is hard to say. She was truly messed up.’
‘She’ll be madder than ever,’ Alex said quietly.
‘Maybe, but she’s got nothing left to fight for. She’ll be a fallen monarch. Broken and defeated as she was, she’ll command no respect over there any more, except maybe among a very few close allegiances.’