Gods you’re huge! Ten feet or more to his head; rippling muscles.
Jess admired him; beamed that admiration to him, letting him know how mighty, how incredible he was, how she loved him and how amazing it had been to know him. Erius was a king among horses, and in that moment he knew it. King!
And Jess would be okay.
He remained on his hind legs standing tall, threw back his head and neighed again, surging with it, cycling his forelegs before him as the truth of it rushed through him. She was strong too. With another snort he dropped to all fours and gave a firm shake of his head. He brought his eyes level with hers and looked directly into her face, held her gaze then … was off. Galloping away, showing the world just how fast he could move, proud of his strength, proud that she knew, no more fear for her and running, doing as she wanted, dust and dirt kicking out behind as he raced into the distance. In no time he was far away, overtaking the rolling shadow of the storm and outstripping it, bursting into the sunlight. In the direct rays of the sun and at that extreme range his gray form became white, as if charging straight into the arms of heaven, reborn. Shrinking until he was a rapidly receding dot on the horizon. It was beyond a Hallmark moment; a sappy romance movie come to life, the white horse surging into the light, heading with powerful strides for the prince and the princess and their Happily Ever After. But of course there was no prince. And he was in fact doing the opposite.
He was leaving the princess behind.
A heavy drop hit her on the head. It brought her back to the present. Two more thumped her. She turned from that uplifting image, all the way round to …
Hell.
One of the fires burned somewhere in the cavernous city maze, its licking shadows more visible now, reflecting in the gathering darkness. More drops hit, pelting her with their weight.
She ran. Sprinting toward the city. Sword in hand, arms and legs pumping, racing toward certain doom as fast as she could.
She had to.
For her overwhelming impulse in that moment was to flee.
To call to Erius and make him understand how wrong she was and hurl herself after him and climb onto the sanctuary of his mighty back and get as far from there as she could. And so she forced herself, making herself run, straight for the very thing reason told her to run from, knowing it was the thing she had to do and ignoring all else. Cutting left and right around obstacles in the increasingly uneven terrain, leaping small gulleys and cracks in the ground, whipping through tall grass that had begun to sway dramatically in the rising wind. The storm was picking up, the sky suddenly like night.
The rain fell harder.
Her entire life was down to this.
By the time she reached the first overhang it was pouring. Her head and hair were soaked though she managed to notice the armor did a fine job of sealing out the water. Inside the armor the rest of her was dry. Well into the city she found a deep shadow and stopped, pushing her back against an ancient block wall to catch her breath.
She picked her next destination, another cove across the remnants of what was probably once a street. There was growth everywhere, a curious anomaly now that she thought about it, as the rest of the plain was utterly bare. No trees, no grass, then right outside the city scrub began and there, within the city itself, covering all surfaces, vines and grass and bushes and even gnarled trees; cave-ins, holes and gashed cracks of all sizes, all overrun with weeds and growth. Not enough to have completely overwhelmed all the ancient structures, which had mostly been done in by extreme age, but where anything could take root it apparently did, making the city a complete, vibrant contrast to the surrounding wasteland.
She ran for the next spot.
Another frightening scream echoed from somewhere deeper in. She stayed where she was, sword gripped in both hands and high in front of her. The sword was a lot like a katana, which was in turn weighted and shaped similar to a bokken, the sword she trained with in Kendo as a kid. This one felt just as natural. Too natural, it seemed, even for all that practice, and as she spun it once or twice she wondered at the intensity of her recall. Surely those old classes weren’t coming back so quickly.
Immediately she thought of Galfar, wondering what other things she might be “remembering”.
Had she used a sword like this before?
When?
More screams carried on the wind. More unholy screeches. They were being taken up by a larger group.
Yeah, she thought, trying to find some funeral humor in the midst of her descent into Hell. A larger group of what?
She shuddered and ran for the next random spot. She had no plan, no destination at all. Only to penetrate the city and find Arclyss.
The Despoiler.
On the next sprint she went further, deeper in and having no idea why she continued to hurry, all the way to an intersection of buildings and another point of cover, the strange sense of familiarity almost overwhelming. And not just because it was like the sorts of cities she was used to. More because …
It was like a city she was used to.
Impossible.
There was no way she’d been here before.
Still she couldn’t shake it. Like the sword, she couldn’t shake the feeling of déjà vu.
Chittering wailers cried out not far away. Something new. New vocalizations. Were they the same creatures as the screechers? Whatever they were they were closing on her. Even as she made her way deeper in they were coming out to meet her.
Come and get me, she thought grimly, amazed at her ongoing failure to succumb to the fear. It was there, the fear was undoubtedly there, but her core was now fully in charge and it was as if she could not be unhinged. This was a haunted house on an epic scale, an entire haunted city—a real haunted city—and she was the only paying customer. There were no ride attendants and there was no exit. It was World War Z, it was Walking Dead, it was Resident Evil—it was every scary apocalyptic death trap ever imagined and it was real. These monsters would not take off their masks and smoke a cigarette. Yet there she stood, by choice, more curious than afraid at what she might find. Or, more correctly by the sound of it, what might find her.
A roar came and that one did shake her, but the ripple of potential terror passed and she was steady in its wake.
She took a deep breath. The dead metropolis had its own unique smell, almost like a weak kerosene backed by the acrid stench of burning wire and wood, overlain with the strong, cool air of the torrential rain. The whole place was filthy. The rain was washing away only the topmost layers of grime; it was a filth so deep it would take hundreds of such rains to strip it clean.
Then she saw the first of them. Fleeting figures, crisscrossing gaps in the distance. Like that scene from every scary zombie movie when you got your first glimpse of what was coming. She swallowed.
There were lots of them.
Her eagerness of a moment before, her desire to accelerate this encounter, suffered a setback. A fresh spike of terror threatened to collapse her tenuous resolve—it was just too much—but she saw at once the futility of that—there were no options now, no way to turn back or decide against this—and so she crushed the fear with as much force as it tried to grip her.
No chance, she told it as if it were an entity unto itself. I’m in charge. She recalled again the Astake maxim: A warrior need only be master of his fear.
She vowed to be.
She strained her hearing over the downpour. It beat off the hard surfaces, echoing loudly in the small space where she stood for cover, back against the wall. The thunder had ceased for the moment as the heavy rain fell. For now it was just a downpour, the early morning sky shrouded in the prospect of grim destruction. She listened. No more screams for now.
Keep moving.
Cautiously she shimmied along the cracked and broken wall, all the way to the nearest edge and around the corner, deeper into what was probably once a hallway or a corridor off the street. As she stepped into the dank passage, more fully out of the rai
n, she began to have the thought that maybe closed spaces were not the best place to be. Staying on the move was good, yes, but somehow it might be better out in the open.
Then she noticed the writing on the wall. Literally. She’d seen it as soon as she turned the corner but, so used to seeing notices and signage on city walls, it did not at first catch her eye. Now it did.
It was written in Kel. Kel, which she could read.
Many reactions fought to be heard. This was obviously an ancient Kel city, something before the Great Wars, and had there been any doubt of that it was now solidly removed. Then there was the shock of the ordinary, the completely mundane nature of the writing. These were simple directions, telling of an entrance to transport lines, where they connected, where you now were, where you could get from there and so on. Then, of course, the cascading reminder that she was on another world, a whole other planet, in a city that had been dead a thousand years, standing near what had probably been a subway, looking at everyday signage in an alien language she could read.
She waited a moment as her head finished spinning, then came closer. Curious at the wording, and even a few painted arrows and faded maps, she followed along, ignoring her own impulse to stay in the open, making her way down a set of cracked and overgrown stairs and out to an underground platform. It fronted on the remnants of a monorail system, no derelict train cars in sight; just empty dark tunnels leading off in either direction. There was practically no light down there, only the weak ambient light filtering down from the entrance above.
The Wormways.
One of the Brotherhood at the party the day before had mentioned something they called Wormways, and how the hated Scourge used them to travel. Great distances, in some cases, and the Wormways were an ongoing bane for the Fist.
Wormways.
It was a subway. The arteries of an advanced civilization.
As she was marveling at this the first attack took her by surprise. Coming at her from the darkness.
They were human, and it was that, perhaps, which made them that much more dreadful. Up close she saw it now, their gaits all wrong, speed phenomenal, naked and swollen but not quite the absolute monsters she’d imagined. Human eyes and features, lunging from the deep shadows and hurling themselves at her. She had only a split second to raise her sword and hack the first awkwardly, stumbling back with the force of the impact and throwing up a hand on impulse, knocking the screaming body away with a wildly aimed telekinetic blast.
The next two were right behind and she swept her hand along a staggering arc as she continued her stumble and lost her balance, swiping them with another off-center wave that nevertheless sent the two forms tripping to either side. She swung the sword, twisting at the waist desperately to get her balance as her heels caught—and saw another horde of the disfigured humans edging down the stairs behind. Following her, coming in from the gray-light of the storm above, looking tentative as they watched her first moves.
They came alive. Erupting in chopped, bloodcurdling screams—like messed up war cries—along with a larger roar from somewhere among their masses. She turned her flailing effort to stay erect into a shoulder roll and came up facing the new group, sword in both hands as they charged.
They were horrible, grotesque; loud gurgling screams chattering off the walls. The slop of their contact with the concrete … the pure terror of beholding that mass of shredding bodies fighting each other to reach her …
But she had no time to be afraid.
“HA!” she threw out a hand, creating a ripple in the air. The front wall of bodies rammed against it, momentum from those to the rear scrunching into them and taking the rest to the ground. It was impressive—a clear demonstration for both her and the beasts, she was one to be reckoned with—and she wondered if she should sheath the sword. She didn’t think she wanted to kill them, just keep them away until they figured out she was a force beyond them and stopped trying to get her. But were they smart enough to draw that conclusion?
And for that instant within instants she felt an odd sense of amazement that she was making such an analytical assessment of what should’ve been a petrifying situation and was acting, not reacting, with control and purpose.
Unnh! a grunt exploded from her chest as she was hit from behind. That instant of introspection passed and she was back into the thick of it. They were all around.
Instinctively she turned the impact into another roll, slipping clear of grasping limbs as she regained her feet and realized three bodies had blindsided her simultaneously and were still coming. She slashed with the sword as she came clear, hacking the closest, grabbed the sword with both hands and wailed harder, suddenly furious—chopping them to bloody death even as they screamed hideous bloodcurdling screams. Pent up nerves, time on the road training with no real action and suddenly it was on. It was kill or be killed, and she was unleashing with everything she had.
Trying to do otherwise just wasn’t going to work.
She spun and leapt toward the edge of the platform—catching a flash of vertigo as the furious leap carried her much further than her legs could’ve done alone. As if her anger in clearing the immediate area impelled her movement; a direction of that same telekinetic energy that carried the lunge further than expected. She landed away from the greatest concentration of attackers and cast about for a way clear.
She sheathed the sword. Wound her arms all the way around, snapped her palms straight and stomped her foot out before her, willing a tremendous punch across the entire area.
“HA!!” the shockwave actually boomed within the confined space, knocking down dozens and eliciting several more confused roars. Her head snapped in the direction of one of the roars and at last she saw the source; some kind of mutant animal, bigger than the rest. Whether originally man or beast she had no idea.
No time. She channeled another blast, mind in overdrive—
“HA!!” that one swept across a bigger swath, pushing further and taking out a fresh group.
But there were more coming. She was only slowing them down. Hundreds of them. Disfigured, diseased masses of bodies …
There was no way she could win this.
Then something heavy dropped from above. Right onto her. She screamed, so unexpected was it, so massive, so filled with stench.
Overwhelmed. Totally, completely overwhelmed. It was Shock and Awe to the nth degree and it was too much too fast. She had just enough time to realize her momentum had been completely snuffed.
It was over.
CHAPTER 43: ARCLYSS THE DESPOILER
Already life in Osaka had become much more open. Egg enjoyed walking the streets in the sunshine among the other pedestrians, without the thought in the back of her mind that she was hiding something. Without being reminded that as a member of the secretive Conclave she was somehow different. She might still know things others didn’t, but it wasn’t as if the revelation of that knowledge would any longer get her into trouble.
The feeling was amazing.
In the wake of the monumental Truce the world was coming together. Old clouds of tyranny were clearing, everyone adjusting to new possibilities. The simultaneous looming threat, the idea that an alien force gathered against them far away and could come to Anitra at any time, seemed remote. At least from the perspective of the man in the street. Things were too serene for that reality to fully impinge. More than that, that very threat was uniting the world even more. Others were taking it seriously. The upper tiers of Dominion and Venatres leadership alike, crafting a strategy to head off the danger before it could reach their world. Plans that would demand resources and, most significantly, cooperation.
Egg looked around as she walked. It was mid-day on a non-working day, people out enjoying the sun, way more smiles and laughs filling the air than she ever remembered. It was a fun day to be alive.
In fact, and because of this new spirit of hope, for the first time really, that she could recall, she felt the weight of the drabness of her city. Osaka
was all black and gray, no real color to the architecture or the humans moving up and down the street. Everyone in black clothes, everything somber. Today, in the bright sunshine beneath a cheery blue sky … it was painfully stark. She recalled how vividly Jessica described where she came from. Boise, on Earth. How different it was, how colorful. Even the land of the Venatres would not compare as far as Egg could tell from Jessica’s descriptions. Having never known much of anything else it was hard to imagine. Lately, however, she’d been getting better at it, her daydreams and idle musings rich with possibilities.
She held up her wrist, letting the red gems of the shiny silver bracelet catch the light. Brilliant. It was the bracelet Jess gave her, and where before she’d hidden it, worn it only around the house, now she wore it always. It was by far the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given her, nearly the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and when people asked she proudly said it was a gift from far away and left it at that, not mentioning Jessica or angels or anything else.
Absently she wondered what Jess was doing right then. The girl from the other world. The angel, in their prophecy. By everything Egg could see Jess was just a regular girl like any other—albeit one that was at the center of what was shaping up to be an epic turning point in history. And not just for Anitra but, apparently, for Jessica’s world as well. What’s next for you? She imagined her beautiful face. So pretty, so hopeful. Everyone loved her. They all expected her to charge back on white wings with a solution to everything.
Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4) Page 49