Hard Reign (Quentin Case Book 3)

by John Hook

  “There is a big pool of lava there and I think the way this works, we mostly just have to make sure the sword doesn’t get completed.”

  “And Rox will try and stop us.”

  I shrugged. “Looks that way. She is dead set on ending... everything. I’m not sure I blame her.”

  “Surely, there has to be some other answer.”

  Izzy was trying to be encouraging, but it wasn’t succeeding.

  “Look at my choices for all this great power I’m supposed to have. I let the sword get completed and either Rox destroys everything or the Idiri do something that makes everything a far greater hell than this. Or, I destroy the sword and we are still stuck with the hell we have. Excuse me while I celebrate victory.”

  Saripha spoke up.

  “I’m not going to try to talk you out of the feelings you are wrestling with, but you will find another way.”

  “Maybe. Always good to have hope. Right now I’m going to focus on one tiny bit of good I can do.”

  “We’ll have to go tower by tower and do what we did before, Saripha, Izzy and I.” Blaise surveyed the towers as he spoke.

  “Might take too long. I think I have another way. I think I can use my abilities to hack into the system if I’m connected to it.”

  “Connected to it?” Izzy was trying to figure out what I meant.

  Saripha looked at me. “That’s going to be risky. What if you get overwhelmed?”

  “Saripha?” Izzy looked at Saripha with a puzzled expression.

  “Tell him,” Saripha said to me pointedly.

  “I’m going to attempt to remerge with my trapped glamour. From there, I can use my energy similarly to what I did with the door in the underground city and later with Knightshade, to find the harmonics in the system and shut the whole thing down.”

  “I hear a big ‘but.’”

  “It depends on my not being overwhelmed by the pain. I could always jump back out, but to succeed I’m actually going to have to immerse myself in the pain, not just mine, all of it.”

  “I think the method we used before sounds better.”

  “I’m not offering up a vote.” I smiled.

  Izzy sighed.

  “What I need you folks to do is to draw out the Shirks and keep them busy. I don’t want anyone catching on too early. Saripha is probably going to need to monitor what I’m doing.”

  “How many Shirks you think there are?”

  We could see some wandering around the tower campus from here.

  “Probably not many and they have no long-range weapons. And they are pretty easy to discourage.”

  “Might be fun.” Blaise grinned.

  “Kyo, you handle tactics,” I said. Kyo nodded.

  “Let’s get started, Saripha.”

  I sat cross-legged at the base of a tree, so that if my body began convulsing in sympathy I was a bit propped up. I pulled inside myself and began doing breathing as Saripha had taught me. I opened myself up. Saripha leaned me gently forward and then applied pressure to the small of my back.

  For just a moment I felt waves of pain and jumped out. I could feel myself convulsing, but I didn’t open my eyes. I focused my breathing and sank deeper and then thrust myself back until I connected to the pain again. It was like a thousand needles all being pressed into my body at once. Each time I stayed a little longer, but it was hard to keep myself from jumping out again. Each time I would collect myself and resume breathing. Saripha was humming an odd tune in my ear. I wasn’t sure why, but it seemed to help focus and calm me. Pretty soon I started carrying that tune with me.

  I realized what I had to do. With great effort I forced myself into the wave of pain, the shower of hot needles piercing every nerve fiber. Endless pain with no system to allow these glamour bodies to go into shock. The song in my ear helped. I had to get my breathing under control inside the tower, not out there. And that meant I had to stay with and ride the pain.

  I screamed.

  And then I started breathing.

  I couldn’t keep it up for long. I kept bouncing back and forth in and out of my body and the one in the tower. Even with the song, as soon as I started breathing the waves of pain overwhelmed me.

  So I opened my eyes.

  The gag was over my mouth, but I screamed until my throat hurt. I let all my senses engage. The only way I could do this was to be fully present, despite what that meant. I had to look out at all the other chambers through my fogged enclosure. I had to feel the full fury of the pain tearing at me, feeding the pipe along with all the others. I had to smell the sour odor of my own body being stressed beyond endurance with no way to shut it off. I had to hear my screams being conducted through my bones. I had to be willing to be fully there, to stabilize myself in state.

  I mentally held myself there. I could feel myself retreating to a place where everything was just a little muted. I screamed more to draw myself up. Finally, I found myself riding the pain like a wave, not dulling it, habituating to it. I left my eyes open and my senses aware and kept breathing deeply.

  The pain became patterns. The patterns wove in and out of each other. I extended my own energy, and my energy moved in the same patterns. Then I began peeling apart different bands of energy. It was an odd sensation, because my rational mind, if I still had one, was simply experiencing pain. It was as if the stuff with the energies was operating autonomously without conscious direction. If I tried to shift my thinking to what was happening with the energy, I lost the patterns and had to start over. Given that I wasn’t sure how long I could hold onto the pain and remain sane, I didn’t want to keep doing that.

  Finally I found a way to fold out different patterns of energy like a fan and then they took on different colors. I folded them again and saw network patterns like we had seen in the tower we destroyed. I merged my energy with the network and held on until I could feel that my energy had merged with every node of the network.

  I started to wonder if I could remember how Izzy and Blaise unfolded the network when I felt the pain slipping away and quickly re-centered myself before I lost the network and had to begin again. I screamed and watched as that autonomous part of me slowly broke connections in the network and lines in the pattern went dark. It seemed to be going smoothly. I somehow knew that this was what Izzy and Blaise had done, that I was succeeding.

  Suddenly, a new pain gripped me. It was my chest. It was as if something was putting pressure on my chest with a sharp pain near the center. Even though the body was already stressed, I could feel a sudden increase in discomfort in my jaw and shoulders. I felt dizzy. I began losing concentration. My last thought was, “I’m having a heart attack.”

  I felt the bark at the back of my head. Saripha placed her hand reassuringly on my chest.

  “Owww. My head hurts.”

  “Probably wasn’t the best idea to prop yourself up against a tree. I did my best to restrict your movement.”

  “What happened?”

  “Take a look.”

  Saripha helped me to my feet and walked me down towards the towers. It took me a few moments to get steady on my feet again. The memory of the pain was still palpable and near the surface.

  People were pouring out of the towers. They were mostly disoriented and confused. Kyo, Blaise and Izzy guided them to head for the wooded areas.

  “I succeeded?”

  “Yes, though I suspect you were still finishing up when you first landed back into your current body.”

  “I think my body—the body in the tower—had a heart attack. I thought I had failed.”

  “You should know by now that they are just bodies, containers in your case, for a spirit no one has been able to kill.”

  “I need to go into that tower.”

  I pointed to the one that I had been captured in. Saripha came with me and Izzy followed. Kyo and Blaise continued to direct and guide the exodus. We entered the long hallway entrance.

  “What about the Shirks?” I asked.

  “The
y were Shirks. They tried to form up to attack us. I took out two with arrows and they suddenly decided there wasn’t enough to fight for.”

  “Always nice to have something you can count on.”

  We entered the large platform. The strange alien technology was there, but it was all inert. No power showed anywhere. Around the platform was the ring of rigs that people had been strapped into, the top ring of an endless number that descended below. All the rigs were open. All the humans were gone. Except one. We walked to the end of the platform.

  It may seem odd to say this, given everything I have been through, but it was one of the oddest experiences I had ever had. It was my body, still strapped in the rig, slumped over, face ashen, eyes bulging, and gag across the mouth.

  “I’m dead,” I said without irony.

  I looked at Saripha.

  “How is this possible? I didn’t turn into a proto.”

  Saripha shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a glamour body having something like a heart attack. You must have experienced a tremendous amount of stress.”

  “I found I had to remain fully conscious of the pain to connect with the pattern.”

  “No one has ever subjected a glamour body to that much before.”

  “And not turning into a proto?”

  “If I had to guess, and I do, I’d say that if you can kill without tissue damage, there is no rebirth.”

  “Wonder if you could poison someone you didn’t want to regenerate,” Izzy asked.

  “Stand back, I have to do something.”

  I stepped up to the rig. I hit the release lever.

  Izzy was agitated.

  “Quentin, if the rig didn’t open...”

  “I know Izzy, it probably means this one last piece of the system is still active.”

  As the rig started opening, the body began convulsing. It wasn’t the body. It was dead. However, the cruel punishment for opening the rig remained and the body dissolved before our eyes.

  “No one gets left in a rig. Not even a dead man.”

  “Now what?” Izzy asked.

  “We regroup at Zaccora.”

  I turned to Saripha.

  “We are going to go after Guido.”

  “I know.”

  When we arrived in Zaccora, we were greeted by Roland, Taka and Anika, who threw her arms around Izzy and they disappeared. I felt completely exhausted. It wasn’t so much my body. My mind had just had more than it could handle. I knew there were things that urgently needed to be done, I just had no idea what to start with. I suggested we all take some down time and then regroup.

  So I crawled off to the quarters I occasionally used here and sat down in a corner. I went into a meditative state and just turned myself off for a few hours. I drifted and some of it was fitful as images of Guido’s bondage and Rox with the sword drifted in, but most of the time I did succeed in just tuning out.

  It was morning when we gathered in around a table to catch up on what was happening and make our plans. Present were Izzy, Saripha, Kyo, Taka, Blaise, Anika, Roland and myself.

  Izzy, Saripha and I did our best to fill in the others on what we had been through. I abbreviated a lot of the mystical stuff, which left a lot of questions, but I mostly deflected them for now.

  “So Gerod is dead?” Roland asked.

  “Hard to know for sure in this world, but, like the other Shades, yes, I think he’s gone.”

  “So how do we handle this?” Taka asked. “We are still faced off against the Dark Men still loyal to him and the gray demons.”

  I noticed Tweedledee and Tweedledum standing at the back wall, smiling blankly. They just appeared with no fanfare. In fact, it took the others a couple of extra moments to notice. Roland was startled and jumped up, as he didn’t have much experience with them.

  “Easy, Roland. They work with Guido. They are the Azaroti I told you about, from the underground city.”

  “They always show up like that?” Roland sat back down, eyeing them suspiciously.

  “I take it you have something to say?” I directed the question to both as usual.

  “The monkeys are poised in the tunnels. They can come up from behind the gray demons and attack.”

  “Monkeys?” Roland looked at me.

  “Remember those fiery demons we saw briefly? There’s a whole army of them, apparently, except they are on our side.”

  Roland sat for a moment, thinking. I had seen this before. When he started thinking about strategy and tactics, he went very deep and considered every angle. It’s why Kyo and I gave him so much leeway with the troops, even the Rockvale and Zaccoran forces. Finally, he leaned forward and spoke.

  “I would like the chance to save my former men. Most of them are good men, if blindly loyal and deluded. But I know it will require patience, which is something you don’t have a lot of, Quentin.”

  I nodded. “Guilty as charged, but lay it out for me.”

  “When we tell them that Gerod is gone, they won’t immediately believe us. However, enough of them will know I wouldn’t lie about something like that. It is likely to eat at them. I think I can plant the idea that they are serving the purposes of the demons. They have to already resent being allied with demons. If it weren’t for the loyalty Gerod commanded they would have never done it. I think with a little time, tempers will flare and they will turn on the demons. We can then join them in battle rather than fighting them. The bad seeds we can sort out and deal with later.”

  “This sounds like it will take time.”

  “It will. However, if we go in now, many of the men I once called friends will die.”

  “And what about Guido?”

  “If the angels are preparing to hold us off at Antanaria, we are going to need an unprecedented force to get anyone through. We will need to leave Zaccora almost undefended.”

  “Kyo?” I turned to her as I always did in tactical matters.

  “He’s right. They know you will show up for Guido. That’s why they have him. They want you and they are going to throw everything at us to get you. They already have an advantage in the fact that they are making you come to them.”

  “What will they do if I don’t?”

  I looked at Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

  “They will wait. Time is on their side.”

  “They are waiting for the sword to be completed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they need my power?”

  “Apparently.”

  “And if I destroy the sword?”

  “They will build another. You are the real prize, if they can figure out a way to compel you to release your power.”

  “And that’s why they have Guido.”

  “That, and it is his punishment.”

  I looked at Saripha. “What are your thoughts, Saripha? Where Guido is concerned, the choice is yours.”

  She paused. Her eyes met mine and were blazing.

  “Roland is right. We need to be very careful how we proceed.”

  “Which leaves me with maybe destroying the sword. If I can get past Rox.”

  Taka sighed. “That will take time too. We’ve only found the explosive rocks in a couple of areas. It will be a large manpower effort to obtain and move the rocks to the mountain and figure out a delivery method that doesn’t kill the people who set it up. And that’s without interference by Rox.”

  “So you are telling me that I can do nothing.” I could feel my anger building. These good people didn’t deserve it, but it didn’t matter.

  “We are asking you to give us time to make a plan that will work and not waste lives uselessly.” Roland held my gaze. He understood what I was feeling. He also knew I knew he was right, but it didn’t matter.

  So I did what any mature person would do. I slammed my fist on the table and stormed out of the room. It had worked so well for me back in Ohnipoor.

  I wandered for a very long time. I’m not even sure where I went. I realized that everything had just been piling on an
d I had had no time for processing it, if I even could process it. For all the angels that wanted to shatter the universe and cosmic swords and magical blue powers, I was still, somewhere, Quentin Case, who once was a writer of passable pulp tales. I kept expecting to become something else that could handle all this, but it was just me. Something had made me need to throw myself at the forces that operated in this cruel, magical world, but even with the abilities I had been given to use in the fight, I was still Quentin Case.

  And what had all my fighting achieved? Little victories here and there. However, it cost one dear friend her mortality, another his freedom and another, Rox, had been transformed to the point where all she could think of as a solution was to destroy everything.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe this was all hubris on my part. Maybe it had nothing to do with the unfairness of this world of pain, but with my need to meddle with authority, no matter what it cost anyone else.

  I stopped. I looked at the sky. I smiled.

  No, she was wrong. I would have to stop Rox whether I could save her or not. No matter how hard it got, this fight had to be fought. Not by giving up. Not by sheer destruction. But by fighting with everything you had and then some. Maybe they win. Maybe, at the end of the day, the Idiri were too powerful. However, that was not a reason to stop.

  Or get impatient.

  If Saripha could wait, then certainly I should be able to.

  I felt elated, as if I had made peace with myself again.

  I returned to my room to see if a little more rest would help.

  I felt calm and centered.

  It didn’t last long.

  24.

  Epilogue

  When I arrived at my room, Saripha, Izzy, Anika and Tweedledee and Tweedledum were there.

  “I guess I owe folks an apology.”

  “Not really.” Izzy smiled.

  “That’s not why we are here,” Saripha said. Her tone was measured. I sensed a serious tone, but she wasn’t giving much away.

  “Okay, well, I will say that some time off by myself did me some good. I think I got some things sorted.”

  Saripha tilted her head.

  “You might need to unsort some of them.”