All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  The puritan was unable to completely dodge the missile in time. The jagged stone sliced out a line across his temple as he ducked, and Cain cried out in pain and righteous fury. Before he could recover, Aziz leapt at him and kicked him hard in the chin, sending him sprawling.

  Quickly Aziz pointed to Aqhar and snapped his fingers, at the same time growling words in a hideous language unknown to human ears. In response, the now ensorcelled man strode forward and began to shove at the lid of the sarcophagus as Aziz looked on.

  Cain uttered a curse and struggled to his feet once more, but now found that Aziz was ignoring him. Instead the possessed man had leapt atop the half-opened sarcophagus and was staring down into it.

  Cain leveled his pistol and fired.

  The shot struck Aziz in the ribs and knocked him from the sarcophagus, off the far side.

  Cain rushed forward and first looked for Aziz, but he had disappeared.

  Then he turned and gazed into the depths of the sarcophagus.

  A body lay within. At first, Cain would have sworn it was a monstrous, depraved shape, all twisted and wrong somehow, with a sense of pure evil hanging about it like a cloud. But then, as he stared down at it, the body appeared to subtly change. Even as he watched, the demonic shape flowed into a far more pleasing form—though whether this represented the demon’s true likeness or the illusion it preferred to affect, he could not say.

  Cain brought himself out of the near-trance and cursed, turning away just in time to see Aziz rearing up, a huge stone clutched between his hands. He was only partially able to dodge the blow; the possessed man smashed the block into the side of Cain’s face, sending the puritan crashing backwards, tumbling limply away.

  Aziz cast the rock aside and regarded the body in the sarcophagus once more, a smile slowly spreading across his repulsive face.

  “At last!”

  He leaned down, and the hellish red light appeared to flow from his twisted features, from his body itself, down into the form that lay within the stone box. Like a liquid it gushed down, beginning to fill that shape and abandoning the body of the guide.

  “Never!” cried Gideon Cain—and suddenly the still-possessed Aziz felt a jagged piece of glass striking and penetrating his back.

  The demonic creature started to laugh.

  “Surely, Puritan, you cannot expect that—”

  His words died out, his expression changing from one of triumph to wonder and then to horror.

  From a short distance away, Cain hurled another long sliver of broken glass, this one lodging squarely in Aziz’s chest as he turned about to confront Cain. Then another, this one slicing into his stomach.

  Aziz lurched forward, shards of dusty glass protruding from his body. But not entirely dusty, no. For upon the nearly opaque surfaces, Cain had quickly and frantically traced copies of the runes that covered his body and his sword.

  The holy runes that Cain claimed God had revealed to him in dreams. The holy runes that brought pain and death to creatures such as this.

  “You will not have your own physical form back, Azazel,” Cain cried, readying another shard. “You will not walk this earth in your full power and horror again!”

  The demon Azazel, still inhabiting the body of the poor guide Aziz, glared at Cain in fury and in obvious agony.

  “Damn you, Puritan! Your interference has grown intolerable!”

  The blood-drenched guide lurched toward Cain, his features now twisted beyond human recognition and his eyes in full crimson blaze. The talons that had been his hands reached out for the puritan, and his mouth split open in a mind-numbing wail of horror.

  Gideon Cain did not move, did not retreat. He stood hard and still, his dark eyes narrow slits, his mouth a tight line of defiance and righteous determination.

  “You are finished, Azazel,” he pronounced coldly. “Your reign of terror ends here—now!”

  And with that, as the demon grasped for him, Cain struck out with the largest shard yet—a jagged piece of glass he had covered with a dozen hastily-drawn runes. The glass sheared through Aziz’s neck and sent the guide’s head tumbling to the floor.

  Blood gushing, the unfortunate guide’s body collapsed and lay unmoving on the dusty floor. Cain stood over it, his expression now one of equal parts satisfaction and disgust. He did not allow the pity he felt for what had been the man Aziz to temper his sense of justice dealt to a great evil.

  “In the name of God, man,” the chief guide, Aqhar, cried out as he finally came to his senses and hurried over. He gazed down at his former friend and comrade in shock. “What have you done?”

  “That which I had to do,” Cain replied coldly, allowing the dripping glass shard to fall from his fingers and shatter on the floor.

  The ground now shook more violently than ever, and massive pieces of stone dropped to the floor, each of them taller than a man and some larger even than the sarcophagus. One landed directly on top of that marble box, obscuring it entirely from view.

  “We must leave—now!” cried the sole surviving guide. “The roof will be down at any moment!”

  Cain cast one last look back, first at the space where the sarcophagus had rested, then at the stone that covered his now-lost sword. And then he hurried after Aqhar up the spiral stairway and back into the upper chamber. Behind them, the ceiling collapsed and the space of the crypt vanished forever.

  Cain and Aqhar emerged from the hidden upper room back into the cave that held the temple façade. It, too, was shaking and crumbling, and masonry rained down all about. They pressed on, across the skeleton-littered floor, and thus out through the hidden passage and into the cave. Massive slabs of rock fell behind them, sealing off the chamber forever.

  A few more hurried steps and the two men were back out into the desert.

  “Yet more devilry” Aqhar exclaimed. For now, in place of the noon sun they had left behind scarcely two hours earlier, the moon hung high overhead, and it looked to be close to midnight.

  Cain took this in stride and merely sat, dusting himself off and refastening his buff coat with its ties that his people preferred over the more ostentatious buttons.

  “Which way back to our camp?” he asked the bewildered guide.

  ***

  Days later: that same pale moon stared down cold and hard on the two men who huddled about the campfire. One of them gnawed at a bit of food while the other hunched over something he held in his lap.

  “I pray for my friends,” Aqhar said softly as he ate. “They did not deserve such a fate.”

  “None do, yet thus will demons and devils ever treat with Man, until we defeat their master utterly and cast him into the darkness forever.”

  The Arab considered this and nodded sadly.

  “There at the end,” Aqhar said, “before we departed the crypt, I saw that there was no treasure. I do not understand it, other than to believe a jinn cast some spell upon my eyes.”

  “You have the main of it,” Cain replied, nodding once.

  “Yes. Bewitched, we were. I believed we were surrounded by treasure—and Aziz, he convinced me in only a few words that you meant to take it all and leave us stranded in the tomb. I believe he did the same to Faruq.”

  “It was not Aziz,” Cain replied, glancing up at the guide. “Not truly. He had been possessed by the demon Azazel, whom I have pursued from my homeland to yours, and across many miles in between. He worked his mischief upon the Witch Trials of my native Salem, causing terrible harm to come from them, rather than the simple and honest justice that God demanded and that we expected.” Cain’s eyes were cold. “I know not whether he survived our recent struggle, but I suspect he will return—though where this time, I cannot say.”

  “Surely he could not have survived the collapse of the crypt?”

  “He has survived many clashes and catastrophes over the past two years that I have pursued him,” Cain said, his gaze level. “But so have I. And I will not be thrown from his trail quite so easily. I will never stop see
king him until I have finally cast him down and ended his evil forever.”

  Aqhar listened but said nothing at first. The moon shone down cold and pale, and a stiffening breeze swept across the desert. Then he said, “We will reach Baghdad tomorrow. At that point my services for you will be complete. I hope, effendi, that you remain safe after we part.”

  “I will feel safer when I am once again sufficiently armed,” Cain muttered.

  “Armed? But you purchased both pistols and a new sword from the caravan we passed yesterday. You are as well-armed now as you were when we met.”

  “Hardly,” Cain replied, before bending back over the naked sword and resuming the task he had been working on for the past two nights: carefully etching the same holy runes into it that had covered his old blade. “But soon I shall be.”

  “Then we part on fair terms,” Aqhar replied. “May your journey end in success.”

  “It will,” Cain replied, all of his attention focused squarely on his labors.

  The two parted the next day, and only much later did Cain learn that his demonic quarry had once again been within his grasp—and had once again slipped through his fingers.

  Azazel had not been trapped in the crypt, Cain discovered, but had found yet another host to carry his vile essence away. And with that knowledge, the puritan could imagine the signs he in his single-minded focus upon his sword had missed that final night in the desert.

  He remembered Aqhar offering words of encouragement before turning away from him, away from the campfire, and facing the darkness of the deep wasteland.

  How that darkness must have been illuminated, Cain realized. How it must have veritably danced with the dim light of the campfire—and with the baleful red flames of death that cavorted madly behind Aqhar’s eyes.

  About The Author

  Van Allen Plexico won the 2015 Pulp Factory Awards for both Novel of the Year and Anthology of the Year. He is the bestselling author of more than a dozen novels and numerous short stories, novellas, nonfiction books and essays from a variety of publishers. He is considered one of the founding fathers of the New Pulp movement and is proud to help revive the classic pulp writing style for modern action/adventure fiction.

  For more information, visit http://www.whiterocketbooks.com.

  The Blue Breeze

  Regina Richards

  Editor’s Note: Easily the most fantastical of the worlds presented in this collection, this one reignited the sense of beauty and wonder I remember as a child when I first began reading about worlds of the strange and fantastic.

  The kissama tree ruffled its bark with peevish insistence, scraping the portions of Lāākē’s flesh not protected by his leather boots and breeches. He lifted his bare chest a little away from the massive branch on which he lay and pulled a dead rodent from his pamu-hide satchel. The kissama rubbed its upper branches in anticipation and the bark smoothed.

  A knothole yawned wide. Lāākē dropped the rodent into the toothless maw. Its tail flicked as the knothole sucked it in, then sealed over the tip with a final smooching sound.

  That small an offering would buy him no more than a few moments. Kissamas were the most tolerant of the trees within the Hell Hollows, but even they would not tolerate a visitor who did not pay generously and often. Fortunately, this morning his traps had been full. If need be, he had enough in his satchel to buy hours more. And if necessary, he’d spend it gladly and let his belly growl.

  Lāākē scooted out on the limb until his head was no more than an arm’s length from the light. He’d chosen the kissama not only because it accepted paying visitors, but because of all the plants in the Hell Hollows, it was one of the few that dared grow to the very edge of the Cleaving.

  A flash of blue to his right caught Lāākē’s eye. “Go away,” he said with amiable tolerance. Instead the Blue Breeze whirled out of the bushes, its morpheus mist twirling gleefully in the small clearing beneath the tree. It was almost indigo today, which meant it had probably already been the length of the valley and back, tormenting all it encountered.

  “Go away,” Lāākē repeated, more sharply. “I’ve no patience for you today.”

  But the wispy blue demonkin remained, though it slowed its whirling dance and its edges evened and rounded, hovering, curious. Then it shot upward into the tree, stinging over Lāākē’s naked back like a horde of tiny insects.

  “Stop, you mannerless twist of Hell hurl.” Lāākē gripped the branch with his thighs to avoid being knocked to the ground and yanked an arrow from his quiver. He gyrated the tip through the Blue as if mixing board stain, tearing glistening silver swathes through its misty mass. The Blue retreated to the ground below, reforming to slither-dance in sparkling, offended aqua.

  Lāākē returned his attention to the world just past the kissama’s leafy branches, the one so different from his own. Her world. The world beyond the Cleaving.

  The barrier the Wasobi people called the Cleaving was in truth two cleavings, each encircling the base of one of the twin mountains. The mountains, situated a half day’s walk from one another, erupted like radiant volcanos from the shadowy Hell Hollow valleys that surrounded them. Their slopes rose with unhurried grace through sunshine-bathed meadows and richly gardened terraces, growing gradually steeper through the lush alpine forests and sheer rock cliffs, until the white-capped peaks scraped mighty slashes through passing clouds.

  At the base of the southern mountain, Lāākē’s side of the Cleaving was as different from the dazzling mountain realm as mud from music. The murky world of the Hell Hollows was a dense tangle of lethal forests where plants, animals, and men were locked in constant battle. The Cleaving divided these two worlds as cleanly as the razor tongue of a phantel might cleave a man in two.

  Lāākē adjusted his position on the branch and gazed at the verdant meadow just across the Cleaving. Chiseled gray stones as tall as trees stood edge to edge in the sunshine, creating a smooth-walled semicircle that abutted the Cleaving at either end. At the precise pinnacle of the semicircle’s arc, directly across from the Cleaving, a wide, gateless entrance gave access to the meadow. The enclosed space could easily host two hundred people. But this morning it was empty, save for short grasses and delicate wildflowers growing tranquil beneath the ring-shaped sun.

  Cerreleans, the people of the southern mountain, called this place the Cup of Justice. Although the Cleaving cut it precisely at its diameter, making it more a half-cup of justice. It was a place with a purpose.

  Twice a year the Cerreleans came here to blow their trumpets and cast their condemned into the darkness. More often, their youths came to picnic amongst the wildflowers and play shrieking games of dare-and-dash near the Cleaving wall. It was safe enough fun. Unless a skirt or tailcoat penetrated the wall, and something quick and hungry waited in the darkness.

  The kissama raised its bark, scraping Lāākē’s bare chest. He dropped another rodent into a knothole, his attention on the Cup’s entrance.

  Something was wrong.

  The ring sun had been up for an hour and its stronger brother, the disk sun, was beginning to rise. Soon, the suns would favor the mountains with nourishing sunshine, and withhold much of that same light from the Hell Hollows. In the days since he’d first seen her, the blue-skinned goddess had never been late. Always she appeared with the soft light of the ring sun to stand among the gentle flowers and temperate grasses of the southern mountain and stare at the Cleaving. He knew she could not see into the Hell Hollows. None of them could. Not the people of the southern mountain. Nor the people of the northern. They saw only their own hazy reflections on a wall of polished onyx.

  And yet on that first morning, she’d stared directly at the place where he’d stood, wrestling fruit from a xsaxsa bush. And though she could not possibly have seen him, her gaze, so different from the disgusted glares of the Wasobi people, had been balm on his hate-charred soul. The shock of it had drawn him to the very edge of the Cleaving, pulled him so strongly he’d almost ste
pped through the barrier into the certain death of the light. He’d stopped short only because she turned and hurried away, following the call of an unseen female from beyond the semicircle of chiseled stones.

  Aleesha, the voice had called. And every day since, Lāākē had waited at this same spot. And every day Aleesha had come to gaze into the darkness. And he had gazed back, his hunger growing.

  It was a waste of time. Time better spent hunting. Though he could see clearly to her side, he could never go there; not without being burnt to ashes. But if she ever ventured near enough, he might be tempted to accept the loss of a hand or perhaps an arm to snatch her into the darkness, to look into her eyes and know for certain she saw him. Him. Lāākē, the shunned.

  Had it been like this for his green-skinned father?

  But his father had been no half-breed. His father had been a respected Wasobi warrior. Well seen. A merciless killer. And yet, when his blue-skinned mother had been cast into the Hell Hollows by her own people, condemned to be consumed by the dwellers in darkness, his father had not slit her throat and mounted her blue-eyed, black-haired head on his lodge wall. He’d hidden her. And when he could no longer hide her, he’d companioned her. Though doing so had cost him everything: his lodge, his people, and a significant slice of his rancid soul.

  The people of the Hell Hollows could see into the light, but never go there. The people of the mountains, north and south, could enter the darkness, but from their side never see into it. Green and blue were not meant to be together. Yet his parents had been. And they’d been happy. So too had he, while they lived.

  The whipping tail of the Blue Breeze curled around Lāākē, brickbatting his despised cyan flesh, stinging his unnatural turquoise eyes. Then the Blue passed on, moving through the Cleaving, shedding both its color and its wickedness as easily as a phantel might sluff its scales on a hot day. Changed, the breeze skimmed tenderly over the sun-kissed grasses to flutter the delicate pink fabric of Aleesha’s skirts.