And this time there were others. Some of the minds and souls under its thrall were bound to machines – useless lumpen things of metal and plastic, for the most part, industrial robots churning out food and bullets and recycled sewage. Then there were the happy few who had been slaved to greater things...
The Worm’s mind was far from sharp – it was just the echoes of intellect bubbling up out of its digested prey, after all. But it remembered the Illuminatus’ lessons. And it saw great potential in some of its new toys.
Only a few of them had come back from the second round. For some, the terror of final death had been too much, and they’d curled up on themselves like Vasily Valchek, praying for salvation which never came.
Others, just as Simeon had predicted, fought like cornered beasts as the reality of their mortality sank in. They were the ones who came back first, attended by flitting aeromekan which washed the crusted blood from their skin. Each of the Lords and Ladies who remained was surrounded by a tight little cloud of hovering machines – cameras and aeros and the mechanical cherubim which bore up their sashes of white samite. And every one of them had a certain look in their eyes – a hunted look, for all that they were victorious predators.
To stay here meant almost certain death, by the cruel mathematics of the Game. But to leave – that was an admission of failure. It meant exile, and that was worse than death to these people. At least, before, death had only been temporary.
“How’s everybody holding up?” asked Elisha Dawes, bright and brittle as she knocked back another neon-banded cocktail. “I hope that that ghastly Mr Ascher’s silly claims haven’t spoiled the mood!”
The little group she was talking to nodded and smiled, keeping up a slick professional front. Any admission of weakness would be a lethal disadvantage.
Duke Helmsfjord tweaked the ends of his waxed mustachios, a sure sign that he was nervous.
“Well, milady, I must admit I’d love to hear what Kronos thinks of this mess. Who knows what our poor citizens are feeling, now, knowing that their beloved rulers are so upset!”
That was as far as he’d push it – even with enough expensive liquor to kill a Pit Feral in his veins. Their guilty glances said it all every one of them was trying to access the datanet. All of them needed to know if it was true.
“Come now, Gustav!” whispered Lord Diem, his almond eyes wide with mock astonishment. “Surely you would never break the edict of silence? This Game of ours is sacred, sealed until the last man falls!”
Elisha shifted her focus with a thought, sliding electronic-warfare overlays to the front of her vision. Diem’s icepicks were grinding away at the Temple’s defenses just as hungrily as those of Helmsfjord – and any number of other Kheptarchs.
“Gentlemen – please!” she said, setting her face in what she thought was a devastating pout. It succeeded in making her look like a deep-sea fish. “This is all just that damned fool Direktor’s idea of psychological warfare! Do you really think that he could best Emmanuel Lancaster? That androgynous old ball-breaker probably scares Kronos itself!”
Diem nodded – but he still kept his slaved icepicks hacking away at the dome of silence which clamped down on the temple. It was futile, of course.
“You’re right, of course, dear Lady. But it is not for us that I worry – my good friend Gustav is correct. The lower castes must be confused and frightened out there.”
He plucked another cocktail from a spider-mekan’s tray, staring for a second into its vivid green depths. “Perhaps....perhaps for their sake we should call a forfeit?”
She caught that – a definite twitch. She knew that Helmsfjord had seen it too. Tranh Diem was desperate to save his skin. And the lower castes – those poor confused lambs he was so worried for – they caught it in glorious threedeeo. The few bookie joints still open, barricaded up behind steel plate and autocannons slashed his odds across the
board.
Kronos was busy, tonight. The machine knew the truth, and every minute of delay told the Subcity that Ascher was right. They really were dying one by one up there.
Elisha narrowed her eyes, sizing the little plutocrat up with a glance. Panic like that was sure to ruin his concentration, and the next round would bee another free-for-all....
“Oh, Tranh, you old sentimentalist!” she gushed, blowing him a half-drunken kiss. “You have the soul of a saint, I swear! But we could never forfeit – we could never let them think that Omnivasive controls us! After all this is over I’m sure the high committee of the Game will revoke Ascher’s contract, and then....”
But Tranh Diem never got to find out what the grinding bureaucracy of the Committee would do to punish the wayward Direktor.
It came up through the floor, erupting through the marble tiles in a spray of stone chips and choking dust, a ragged thing all black and red and dripping. Elisha’s slow-mo replay clicked into focus, zooming smooth as it reached the zenith of its arc, and she picked the creature’s bruised and bloody face. It was Simeon Blaire.
He seemed to hang there in the air for a second, transfixed by the beams of searchlights and the hollow eyes of the cameras, twisted up around his pain, his teeth gritted, one eye swollen shut, his fingers hooked into claws.
Then he fell, plowing through a rank of cryo-frozen Kheptarchs in Jaegenn’s grim statuary, rag-doll limp and broken. He did nothing to check his slide and tumble across the top of the mahogany buffet, piling up the brocade tablecloth and a mound of exquisite food behind him as he slithered to a halt.
The room held its breath, waiting for the twitch, the curse, the cry which would prove that he was still alive.
But before the lords and ladies could prepare his eulogy, Blaire’s attacker was upon them.
A thin blue beam shot from the gaping hole in the floor with a sound like a whipcrack, piercing the crystal dome above and lancing up into the smog-shrouded sky. An instant later a pulse of searing plasma fire followed it, neatly paring the jagged edges of the hole away to a perfect circle, tiles and tables and those few unlucky hierarchs who stood too close flashing to incandescent ash and spiraling up around it.
The pillar of flame blew the top off the gaming temple, raining razor shards of crystal down on the throng of Blaire fanatics below, a tangled, drunken, cheering mass who welcomed the random death from above with howls and whoops of joy.
For a minute after that cerulean blast nothing came up from out of the hole but coiling smoke and the sound of tortured metal. Blaire, forgotten, was curled up like a burned spider amid the ruins of the banquet. He coughed up a mouthful of blood, trying to push himself back to his feet with the jagged stump of a broken blade welded to his wrist. One side of his head was burned bald now, blistered and raw. His single eye blazed hatred as bright and lethal as that plasma blast – the other was clamped shut, dripping and scorched. The jagged remains of its diamondglass oculus studded his brow like jewelry.
He finally managed to lever himself upright as the Kheptarchs looked on, aghast, limping over to the great ice-statue of Artemis where his black-handled sword still stood. He ripped it from the huntress’ eyesocket with a grimace of pain, blood dripping from his mouth as he gritted his teeth.
“Come on then, you bastard!” he yelled, lurching around to face the smoking hole in the floor. “You didn’t think I’d be that easy, did you?”
Out of the smoke something black and bulky came flying, skittering hot across the tiles where Blaire stopped it with one foot. It was the burned-out, ruined bulk of an ancient plasma cannon, utterly overloaded by that final titanic blast of energy. To finish the job, something had twisted the thing’s wrist-thick barrel off like the tip of a cigarette.
“Come out, come out, whatever you are!” whispered Blaire, stalking forward between the little knots of horrified aristocrats. This kind of raw, unrefined violence was appalling to them, a travesty. But what came up out of the floor to answer Blaire’s challenge – that was even worse.
“I know what you do when you�
��re alone.” it told him.
“I know what you lust for, what you hate, what you fear – I know the place where they all intertwine. That sick little place you thought was secret.”
He listened, hanging in the dark, clinging to the wall like a spider.
“I’ve given you a little taste, boy, but the first one’s the only one that’s free. I want to take you back inside your mind. I want us to live in your secrets. I want us to turn that darkness inside out. Is that so much to ask?”
It was keening, pleading, mewling like a child, stroking the raw meat of his brain like a disease, a lover...
It had him, and it knew.
From the wires and plugs and slivers of silicon in him, through the hot wet meat and reinforced bone it came, sweating out of the hard, black little core where he kept his vile desires. The part of him which played the game. The part of him which kept a beloved, hated slave just to torture. The fury in him which made him the perfect tool for Kronos, secret enforcer of the Game behind his skull-faced mask.
“Yes.” he said, silent, to the thing which licked his naked spine. “Give me the power! And give me Blaire!”
He heard it howl, then, a ragged, bubbling sound which degenerated into a storm of discordant laughter. For the briefest second he heard another sound behind it, the sound of a million doomed voices telling him to run, to turn back, to escape while he still could ...
Then the darkness behind his executioner’s cowl erupted, a deeper black, and he felt the fire like molten lead in his bones. The power! The impossible power!
“That’s right, boy. The one named Simeon will rot in your embrace, now. The whole world, soon enough....they shall call you – Exalted.”
He smiled, then , as the pain sweated out through his skin, slick and hot and bubbling.
Lysander Jaegenn stabbed one hand of jagged obsidian claws into the wall above him, marveling at the strength his new patron had given him. One hand after another, up out of the dark, up to where he could hear music playing, where he could see searchlights sliding over the gravid belly of the clouds through a shattered crystal dome.
Blaire first. Then the rest of them....
Hab 99 was a tomb. The great squat cube of metal and concrete was silent now, the wasteland around it cold and dark. Lex Domingo stumbled through its bare corridors and stark, empty rooms in a haze of pain and fear, his mind disjointed and spinning wild in his throbbing head.
It surely didn’t help that half of it was missing, torn away in a spray of bone and brain by a C-Tac bullet. A galaxy of other bleeding wounds stitched their way across his body, from his dragging left leg to the meaty crater in his shoulder.
And yet he lived. Death had spat him out into this cold grey limbo, and now the Voice was calling to him, reeling him in like a hooked fish.
Lex looked down at his hands with his one good eye – the other was there, he could feel it swelling out of his shattered cheek like a grotesque mushroom. Like his fingers it was probably slicked over by the black oil – and where that stuff had come from he had no idea. The last thing he remembered was a supernova of pain, the chatter of gunfire, searchlights through dust.... Then waking up cold and bleeding, leaking black instead of red. He felt as if the world was paper thin, projected on a screen, that he was only just clinging to life by a thread.
That thread was woven from his pain – he could feel the fire in his bones, feel the raw meat of his wounds scalded by the very air. The impact of every mote of dust on his exposed nerves was exquisite agony.
He knew that if he was really awake such pain would have him balled up on the floor howling for a shot of pseudomorph. That or a bullet. But under the sticky black membrane the pain came through muted, like music thumping behind a concrete wall. He could even pick out subtle nuances to it which would have been drowned under his own screams if he were....well, if he were really alive.
That was the very core of Lex Domingo’s problem, as he staggered through the choking dark. He was quite obviously dead, and the promises of a dozen religions had turned up false. Nagging in the back of his ventilated skull was the certainty that the power which animated him, which drove him on, could easily drag him back through the veil, into a world where his pain was shouted instead of whispered, now and forever. That, and the implacable command of the Voice made him hold onto his failing flesh tooth and nail.
He spotted the body as he stumbled through a broken doorway and into the hab’s main stairwell. It was one of his brothers, one of Grady’s boys all got up in his gang colors, yellow and purple warpaint slapped across his cheeks. One of his legs was gone – just a charred stump, his severed foot still stuffed into a blackened boot a few feet away. But – and this came through to Lex like an electric shock to the chest – he was still alive. His heart was still beating, fitful and weak, but still pumping blood through his veins.
Lex pulled back a little, but the voice urged him on, as hot and loud as lust used to be, back beyond his death. As demanding as the need for drugs had been, when he could still feel pleasure. Those memories were stripped from him mercilessly as the Voice jerked him forward, incorporeal hooks tugging at his open wounds.
KILL. FEED. REPLENISH.
He could no more fight it than he could stop himself from breathing. Well – he used to have to breathe, he was pretty sure....
The Rude Boy’s eyes snapped open as Lex’s hands closed around his neck, feeling his face shifting, the dark fluid coagulating, lengthening his teeth to needle points.
Fear flowed off the little bastard in waves, cutting through the background throb and ache of his constant pain, slowing the rot which he felt in his bones. He shook the half-conscious ganger and drove his spiked thumbs into his flesh, wringing out the terror from him for as long as he could. An instant before the kid’s hand moved he felt it turn to rage, and the pain came back, stronger than ever, clawing at the wall inside his head. The Rude Boy had a gun – a sawnoff, squat and black, and now he brought it up to Lex’s face, his eyes struggling to focus.
“You damned fucker! Get – get away from me! Justget the fuck AWAY!” he
shouted, spraying Lex with bloody froth from his mouth. Now the Voice in his ruined head used the pain as a goad, stripping away the layers which numbed him. He could feel the ganger’s breath hissing over his raw wounds like fire. He could feel the black ichor which preserved him eating away at his bones.
And he found he could grab the pain with an imagined fist, compact it down into a ball laced up around a core of fury. He hadn’t asked to live, or to die. He hadn’t asked to be brought back, not with the searing lash of the Voice roaring like a furnace in his
head.
So he took the pain, and gave it to his prey.
Raw, enervating terror rushed back at him as he played the agony over his victim like a blowtorch. The Rude Boy dropped his shotgun as he felt in grisly detail what it was like to be missing half his head. What it was like to have his shoulder ripped to shreds, his arm dangling from scraps of tendon and gristle. What it meant to be clamped in the foul embrace of the Saprophyte, utterly disposable, rotting and burning inside...
That’s when it had him. That’s when Lex Domingo felt the change, the hooks and clamps and teeth letting go.
In the final instant he understood what had happened, what had extended his mortal span beyond what mere flesh would endure. He knew, because he saw it pour out from his fingers like rippling oil, rainbow-sheened, slithering down his victim’s throat and into his eyes, releasing him to the full fury of his pain.
It was all there at once – the bullet holes, the internal bleeding, the great ragged crater in the side of his head. It was far too much for a body to take, and so Lex Domingo finally died, collapsing to the floor with a gurgling cry.
The Saprophyte writhed within its new host, gelid and all-pervasive, knotting its barbed tendrils around his bones. For a second or two the Rude Boy’s eyelids flickered, his limbs spasmed as if he were in the grip of a seizure. And th
en the blackness came up through his pores, pooling and puddling from the severed stump of his leg, forming a spike of obsidian to replace it.
As he stood up, Kylan Tomassen remembered being hit, remembered the C-Tac Constable grinning as he felt his knee shatter, ripped apart by buckshot. Then it was all spinning darkness, a leering demon face leaning down over him ...and the Voice.
KILL. FEED. REPLENISH.
Kylan picked up his shotgun and staggered off into the gloom. stepping over the thing which had once been his brother Lex Domingo. Without the saprophyte inside him the end had been quick, but far from painless. Now he was rotted away to nothing but steaming organic soup and brittle bones, a cast-off shell. That other part of him - the part which the Worm’s servant had balanced on the razor’s edge between life and death while it used him – had flown. No doubt Kylan Tomassen would be following soon.
Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus Page 12