by Toby Bennett
Varkuz kept an eye on the narrow gash in the rock ahead of her and backed into the shallows, using the water to slake off the worst of the gore on her body. As she did so her body began to change. Subtly at first and then in great bone grating leaps and cracks, she was still strong but her spine was straighter now, her body more human, though still subtly armoured, with just the hint of scales. The daemon drew on the dreams of a girl not quite yet grown into womanhood and then expanded on the theme. She was sure Father Danith would have approved of the shape she made for herself, feminine and curved yet not unmarked by the corruption of the meerbus, woven into strange, runic patterns beneath her skin. There was clearly nothing human about the woman that left the water and advanced on the cave but at the same time it was a shape designed for human sensibilities, a queen, who might easily reign in the shadows of Niskar, a true replacement for the Lord of Shadows, who’s age would, finally, be forgotten.
“I know you are in there, assassin.” the daemon repeated, her full lipped mouth turned up in a mocking smile, “will you not come out to meet me? Or do you fear a poor lady such as I.”
“No lady, if I am a judge.”
Rage literally boiled over the daemon’s face and teeth bulged on a jaw, now too small to accommodate such fangs. With visible effort, she regained the symmetry of her face and her indulgent smile but she was not able to quell the banked fires, burning in her eyes.
“You have already robbed me of glory once, murderer, it is only fitting that you be the first to kneel before me in my new incarnation.”
“Your sense of inferiority is clear, imp, else why do you care for such trifles? Did you come all this way to exact revenge? Or simply to prove that you are not the worm you know yourself to be.”
“Your words are brazen while you hide in the earth but I wonder what sounds you will make when we come face to face again.”
“That has happened once already and as I recall it was not I that turned to heel.”
“Your memory is faulty there! Was I not with Lothar when he first broke you? Was it not my claws you felt raking within your very soul?”
The memory of that moment sent a shudder through Akna’s body. Lothar had fallen but here was his other half; anger, far greater than his fear of the sun, brought him to the cave mouth.
“Perhaps you are right, then,” the razor edge of the sabre swished through the air like the twitching tail of an angry cat, “we do have business together.”
Akna took the final step out into the full sunshine, with every expectation that the step would be his last, but all he felt was a tickling warmth. He began to laugh at the sensation, suddenly, the daemonic thing standing before him, playing at being human, didn’t seem so intimidating. It was as if the sun had woke that part of his soul that was still his own, which had been slumbering in darkness all the time.
“You did your best, yet here I stand. Does it not worry you that you have tried to end me twice and failed?”
“We will see which of us is arrogant soon enough.”
Two spurs of serrated bone slid from the palms of the daemon's hand and a scorpion’s tail reared over her head. The venom drenched stinger was the first thing to hit the sand as the two clashed, at the same time one of Varkuz’s bone daggers hit home in what would have been a fatal thrust, if Akna had not managed to change the direction of his body in the last second.
Ilsar watched the clash in wonder from the shadow of the cave mouth. Intermittent black smoke from the dying fire and the frantic, unpredictable movements of the two combatants, made it impossible to get a clear shot with her crossbow and with no other weapon to speak of, she was loath to intervene, lest she distract Akna from his dance.
Within the first couple of passes of the battle, Varkuz was becoming frustrated with her new form. The beast that she had shaped to make her pursuit had been stronger and quicker, or at least that was how it seemed. How else was it possible that one man could have answer for her assault? Her body was already remaking the ruined tail but the real wound was to her confidence. Had she faced down nearly twenty men on this beach, only to be defied by just one? It made no sense, except that, unlike those men, he was not afraid. They had all been competent, well trained and deadly but they had also recoiled from the sight of a daemon in the light of day. The aura of terror Varkuz projected was as much a weapon as any of her physical attributes but the assassin had no care for fear, no mind for self preservation, in the sense that most animals of the material planes understood it.
Varkuz had felt that this one was different, even when the daemon had first encountered him in the guise of Lothar. Varkuz had easily sensed the boy’s potential .She and Lothar had poured much of that stolen energy into the cardinal’s greatest achievement, but unlikely as it seemed, Varkuz had missed the iron in the soul of their victim, a hard core, that had given him the strength to escape and now sustained him, when he should have fallen. The serrated blade bit again, drawing an arch of blood and tearing out chunks of flesh. The smile returned to the daemon’s mouth, flesh was still flesh, however stubborn and if Akna would not fold, he could still be broken.
The assassin gave ground before his opponent's greater strength and speed. The wounds he had already suffered were taking their toll and he knew how the course of the fight had to go. A left, right, parry, backhand slash, that would barely penetrate her hide; a repost and then the terrible fire of the jagged bone spur on his arm. He foresaw each step of the dance and played his part perfectly. His defence and attack were exquisite, but they were only delaying an outcome, which the grinning succubus in front of him had already read as clearly as he had.
The end came when he caught his heel on a jutting rock and tumbled backwards, his head barely missing the guttering fire near the cave entrance. The earth was thin and hard packed where his head struck it and for a moment, his senses reeled with the impact, the heat of coals and the sudden gloom, as he fell into the shadow of the rock, combined with his rising nausea to make him forget where he was. The sudden weight, as the daemon pounced upon him, was a dreadful return to the bleakness of his situation.
“You’ll not die quickly,” Varkuz purred, “I’m not in as much rush as you were.”
“What about the stones?” Akna gasped. “Don’t you want to know where they are?”
The daemon laughed.
“Gilash might have concern for such things but you will not save your life with trifles, this time. I will have the stones I collected back, I imagine that you will not have put them far from you; you and I both know why you cannot be parted from them. Ilsar, I know, will have kept her stone. Haven’t you girl?”
“Get off him.” Ilsar said, her voice heavy with smoke.
“You were never the one to give me orders, or has he made you forget that also?”
“Let him go.”
“Let him go or you will shoot me with that feeble crossbow? I think not. You might see me in a different shape but I know you still recognise me as your master or you would have pulled the trigger and joined this fool in his death.”
“I may yet.”
“Don’t lie to yourself girl, you and he are not the same. He escaped, but you, you are a finished work, one that has served me well for years, whether you remember it or not.”
Varkuz slowly forced one of her spurs into Akna’s shoulder, Ilsar’s gasp of pain and despair was audible, a fraction of a second after Akna bit off his own cry.
“But some strand must have come unravelled for the connection you feel to him to exist. Blame the fates that you should have met in Takiaza’s tomb. I could not guess that you would meet one of your donors beyond the veil. How could I even imagine such an eventuality? None of the others have survived.”
“What?”
“Will you really feign ignorance? Yet I'll wager the crystal you found in Lothar’s collection has never left your hands. What are you, Ilsar? What do you remember before your last infusion.”
“Infusion?”
“You fee
l his pain, and hear his thoughts? But why? Because what I took from him I gave to you. How could I not? So young, yet he broke through all Lothar’s defences and came very close to finishing him three years ago. We designed you to incorporate the skills of those we took in the dungeons. We refined you, made you the best at what you do.” The daemon gave the cave entrance a look full of false pity. “No, of course you don’t remember, each infusion was traumatic enough; you changed afterwards and did your best to forget that you had. I don’t blame you for putting the past from your mind, just as I am doing. There was a time I identified with Lothar’s flesh, now I have found different meat to inhabit. You have changed too, my girl. This offal beneath me might not remember it but he once dreamed of one such as yourself, one of the first dreams of a young fool, the fantasies of an adolescent. You have used that idealised shape to advantage have you not? Just as you have used so many stolen skills.”
“Akna?” He felt her panic rising and even without being able to see her through the smoke, he knew her finger was trembling on the trigger.
“Don’t listen, Ilsar, she speaks only to wound, just as Zenker did to me.”
“No… there is more to what she says.”
“So much more,” the daemon crowed, “is there not a sweet irony in your search for a way to regain your soul, when your companion has been using it all the time.”
“I don’t believe you.” Akna answered with as much conviction as he could, in the face of Ilsar’s growing doubt.
“Why not? You saw Lothar’s Chimera, appropriate that it should protect his greatest accomplishment. Her crystal is not a daemon stone, not quite but it is rarer still, since it formed naturally in the bones of the earth. It takes exceptional skill to meld and mix dreams as Lothar did but it takes a rarer stone preserve such a creature. Druzkul and Grizkul were but two dreams, imagine now refining tens, even hundreds over years, into the perfect killer. We wasted none of those who sought to thwart us, no one with talent that is, you should be flattered to be amongst them. You can take some solace in the fact that you will live on in my service, even after you die.”
The daemon raised her bone blade over her victim and Akna closed his eyes waiting for release. As soon as he did, he found himself watching the scene through Ilsar’s stinging eyes. He knew her thoughts as soon as they came to her and he knew what she meant to do.
“No, you must not leave the shadow.” He pleaded with her silently.
“Then you know it’s true.”
“Only as I feared it for myself, I would not have you risk yourself for me.”
“Zenker spoke true when he spoke of becoming the summoner’s slave. I have been so many different things and I can remember none of them, the only fixed point is you, myself. What good is existence if I must become clay for priests and daemons?”
“No…” There was no force in the denial, Akna wanted to live, he had always wanted to live, just as he had when the daemon's claws had last threatened to tear him apart. As the sharp spur came down, Ilsar threw herself from the mouth of the cave, in a charge that bore the daemon out from the shadows and smoke and out into the sun.
Akna screamed as he felt the touch of the light, he felt himself grow insubstantial in an instant, burning away like mist. Ilsar’s flesh recoiled from the world of substance; there was only the pain of unravelling in a single moment. There was no longer any doubt that Varkuz had told the truth. Akna, shared that pain, took it into himself through the conduit between them, into his hollow soul.
The daemon recovered and regained her feet, she found herself caught between anger and amusement. She would never willingly have lost so useful a tool but the remaining assassin’s cries were a joy to hear.
“I don’t know what you did to her but we did not make her to be so foolish.”
Varkuz frowned when Akna gave no response, other than a high pitched scream. As she watched, his body jerked and the muscles in his face contorted in ways that made her think of her own transformation. Even as she stared, patches of the assassin’s dark hair began to lighten, becoming platinum streaks.
“It’s not possible is it?” the daemon wondered aloud. “Is she in there with you? Are you reunited at last? And what of the rest of them? Have they found shelter in your pitiful meat?” Varkuz barked a laugh. “They were killers all, so they should find themselves in good company.”
Akna’s back arched almost to the point of breaking and fire ran through his nerves; he tried to make sense of decades of memories. Memories that faded as soon as he touched them, disappearing like quick silverfish into the unexplored waters of his unconscious mind. Varkuz drew in her spikes and clapped her hands to see the mad man writhing before her.
“It’s more than I could have hoped for, I’ll have the joy of finding them all over again, this time there will be no escape. I will tear you apart so slowly, you may never register the moment when you actually die and that will only be the start of your service to me.”
The meaning if not the words registered in Akna’s drowning brain. Memories of claws digging through his soul, followed by the true pain of emptiness filled his over-brimming soul and sudden clarity sliced through the chaos; the churning multitude that now inhabited his mind, shared his fear and with a common goal, his thoughts were focused in a way that he had never experienced before. He drew upon the experience of killers, adepts and thieves and for the first time in three years, he felt the touch of the veil and knew new possibilities in hunting the treasures that lay beyond. His first thought was to use his new sensitivity and the stones, which the sailor still held in the cave, to bring forth a defender, which might ward off the daemon in the darkness. A darker thought, far more appropriate to the situation, bubbled up from the mire of his thoughts.
Varkuz pounced at Akna the moment his mad thrashing stopped but through it all, his hand had never left his sabre’s hilt and he levelled the silvered blade in time to make the charging succubus pull up short. He used those seconds to get his feet under him and shuffle back towards the cave mouth. Sharp blades and teeth lashed out at him, as he slipped into the shelter of the rock but if he had been a swordsman before, his instincts had now been sharpened beyond all human limits. Only his wrecked and bleeding body prevented him from taking the fight to Varkuz, who now seemed terribly predictable in her attacks.
“You squirm and you squirm,” Varkuz said, clearly mistaking the reasons for his retreat, “we will both only appreciate our time together better when you finally surrender. I will put you back into your stone one sliver at a time.”
Akna felt true fear at that prospect, strange and unfamiliar, the product of the newer parts of his mind, but the fear brought with it anger and a growing taste for vengeance. None of those who had been robbed of their essence by Lothar and his daemon had ever been soft or easily cowed and the threats only woke a cruel resolve, which the over confidant daemon could not guess at.
“Come on, then,” the assassin growled, “and we shall see who has the greater pleasure.” With that he backed hurriedly down the narrow passage, his sabre guarding his retreat.
“All in time.” Varkuz replied but she waited at the entrance of the cave long enough to thicken her hide to an extent where Akna was unlikely to do any damage with his sword. It was not his sword that Akna clutched desperately, while he waited in the dark. It had been three years since he had focused his mind into the trance-like state that would allow him to access Niskaan’s realms and though he could now draw on a wealth of experience from many adepts, who had learned their craft at the feet of the greatest masters in Niskar, the rhythms of breathing and relaxation of muscles did not come naturally, as they might if he had practised the craft with any regularity. It would be a close run thing, he achieve the necessary state before the daemon killed him. At the very least she would be forced to give him a quick death. If she realised what he was about, she would not continue to risk toying with him. The crystal sphere in his hand was slick with sweat and he found it hard to distinguish be
tween his own fear and the terror that poured off Karick’s untrained mind. He had gone from sensing nothing to sensing everything, so that the sailor's thoughts screamed through his own fractured mind like a wind, whipping up the panic he was barely holding in check. He needed calm; the working he planned would strain a master of the art, indeed he had only seen it done once before. He had discarded the other stones, only the crystal sphere would do, not a daemon stone, not quite but rare and powerful nonetheless. Takiaza’s stone had allowed him to perform a miracle and if Akna knew any stone, it was the one in his hand. He heard the sound of bone scraping on the stone walls and held the stone tight, wishing he was somewhere else.
Chapter 26:
“Through all these dreams I’ve stumbled,
Through night time fevers crossed,
Through all my days I’ve tumbled
And now I face the frost”
Varkuz came into the darkness, bringing bitter hunger and revenge. For fleeting seconds they filled the cave, cowing the craven sailor, who squashed himself into the tiniest corner in the tight confines of their refuge; with the suddenness of an exhaled breath, there was silence and nothing. Not the darkness of the cave nor even the stygian black that rules in deeper places in the earth, there was nothing, because it had yet to be created. The daemon lashed out at the emptiness, disorientated and wild and it seemed that her thrashing spurs tore at the darkness. With each blow light erupted, an echo of the sun that Akna had once seen burning above a marble burial mound. It grew as his mind calmed surrounding them in a glowing sphere of light.