Reviled

by Dean C. Moore

  Moments later, he shot through Soren’s skylight, healing the shattered glass with a gesture even before he finished landing.

  He looked up at the balcony to see Lar making off with one of Soren’s nanite machines, on top of which were stacked a pile of books he no doubt needed to decipher the damn thing. “Pick up the pace, you plodding fool,” Player barked behind him, carrying his tray of elements in bottles, the ones on the periodic table he was currently experimenting with, to see how he could expand his control as an elemental wizard, “before I sweep the floor with you, literally.”

  “Maybe you should just walk around,” Lar said, trying not to fumble the precarious balance of the machine and the books as if it were some complex juggling trick. He pressed his back against the wall to give Player some more room to amble by, which of course, he still didn’t have, with the tray in his hands. So, Player, groaning all the while, blew a twister about Lar, suspended him off the floor, well away from the balcony landing, until he was past.

  Lar got blown back to where he was, mumbling, “Don’t know why you couldn’t do that in the first place, save me a lot of lip.”

  Victor shifted his focus to Soren who was seated at his operating table, on a make shift bench of a 2 x 12 piece of wood spread across a couple sawhorses. He had his face in a book, running his hand over the same drawing, over and over again. It was too simple a geometry—closely resembling a Paisley pattern—not for him to have committed it to memory in under a second. It must have been Victor’s day to be surrounded by dunces. If the universe was trying to get him to show some appreciation for his own gifts, this method wasn’t going to work.

  “You’re playing house with the kids?” Victor said, his disparaging tone conveying perfectly his feelings on the matter.

  “Yes, I’m verbally, emotionally, and physically abusing them to teach them to be immune to such things,” Soren answered dryly without taking his face or his hand away from the book.

  Victor laughed and slapped him on the back. “I see we’re as in sync as ever, my friend. Of course, I just have one slave to torture for now. And I hate being bested at anything, so I’m going to have to catch up soon.”

  Victor slid Soren’s hood down, and ran his hand through his hair, as he might a younger brother, the relationship he’d taken toward him from day one. But as soon as he touched him, he knew something was wrong. Victor actually took a step back and recoiled his hand in a hurry. “Shit. What the hell happened to you?” He put his hand up to his nose to smell his fingers.

  “Oh, my God. Cabbalistic nanites. Tell me it’s not true. You’re mad for putting this stuff in your body. Soren, not even I may be able to save you this time.”

  Soren slid up the hood. “They’re the same nanites I had in me when I visited you before and showed you my latest makeover.”

  “Yes, but the nanites weren’t activated yet, not sufficiently anyway, for me to pick up on their true nature. But their current energy bursts…. There’s no denying now that they’re up to something terribly ominous.”

  Soren extended his arm toward Victor without taking his eyes off the book, levitating him off the ground. Victor winced, fighting the magic. “Soren, don’t make me angry.” His voice showed the strain that came with resisting the tractor beam. “Damn it, you asked for it.” He extended his arm at Soren and…and nothing. What the fuck? A couple deep breaths before he could surrender the fight and he said, “Fine. You win this round.”

  Soren released him from the tractor beam and he fell to the ground, rather rudely. The look he was giving Soren right now…. It was probably for the best his back was to Victor.

  Victor hastened to the table, pulled the book away from Soren, ran his hand over the pattern. “Ancient. Alien.” He flipped through the book, all the way to the back, where he discovered the chip. He ran his finger over that. “Fascinating. You found your way to one hell of a channeler buried in time. This trip may not have been such a waste of time as all that.” He threw the book back on the table in front of Soren, who had yet to look away from the spot where he was reading the book; his hood hid much of his reaction. He opened the book back up to where it was, and picked up fingering the image where he’d left off. “What’s with that one shape?” Victor couldn’t help but recall his Paisley analogy—the cabbalistic shape had a similar, eerie, protozoan-like feel to it; as if it were alive—and conscious, only at a scale no mere mortal could appreciate.

  “The cabbalistic nanites inside me are keys that unlock different doors. I’m just trying to get a feel for which door this one opens. Something was calling me to it.”

  Victor nodded, understanding. “That fool must have gained access to the Akashic records, but he needed a memory palace just to find his way back to the rooms with the knowledge he needed. Those cabbalistic nanites floating around inside you are his memory palace. Only, for now, at least, those memories mean nothing to you.”

  Victor lifted him off the stool in one hand and ripped the book out of his hands. “Give me your full attention, damn you. I met the Dark Matter Man face to face. Well, he’s a girl now, but trust me, that’s not the interesting part.”

  “Yes, I know,” Soren said, sounding more dispirited than ever.

  “You should be excited! It’s you and me against the world again, pal.”

  “No, Victor. This time you’re on your own. Go find your own family. You’ll need them without me at your side.”

  Victor groaned. “I don’t do well with sidekicks, you know that.”

  “Learn.”

  He let go of Soren and paced, gesturing. “This cabbalistic connection you have. It could be just what we need to trounce this bitch. Hell, that dark magic puts you more in sync with that bitch than me right now, which is saying a lot, by the way. Never thought I’d be out-eviled by the likes of you. And you know how I hate to be bested in anything. Sorry, we covered that already.” He stopped the pacing abruptly. “Look, don’t make me beg.”

  “I wouldn’t be of any use to you, Victor. Not until I can get control of the beast inside me. So long as he’s in control, I’m more likely to join up with her.”

  “What are you talking about? This is the same old Soren I’ve always known.”

  “Look again.”

  Victor trampled toward him and ripped off the hood again. Grabbed the hair in back of Soren’s head and pulled back until Soren’s lowered eyes had no choice but to meet his. And Victor seemed to get lost in Soren’s gaze for a while. “This you…. It’s just a mirage. What a cunning prick. Smart little monster.” Victor roared with frustration. “My God, how could you let this happen!” he blared, throwing him back, pacing, and pulling out his hair. The mandalas were firing up in his body armor as if a part of his own mind was determined to solve the problem right then and there, no matter how much mind power he had to throw at it.

  “I’m still inside here, Victor, fighting to get out. But as you can see, I’m a bit preoccupied with my own survival, and the last thing I want to do is empower the beast by getting near Dracus.”

  “Yes, yes,” Victor gestured with his hand, his profile still toward Soren; with his other hand, he was pinching the pressure points to either side of his nose to relieve the pressure; the realization of Soren’s true state came close to causing his head to explode. “You’re off the hook, my friend. Your sidekicks juiced up enough with my mandalas to help you through this?”

  “That’s the hope.”

  “I’ll leave you to play house, then. Seems like you’re doing just what you need to do. Any luck, you’ll be there for me just when I need you, and not a moment before, as always. And if not, I suppose I can take some solace in the fact there’s someone living an even more tortured existence than me.”

  He jutted forth into the great beyond on his mandala rainbow, like the harbinger of doom he had become—like they’d both become. His rainbow colors painted across the sky, the hues off just enough to make you wonder what kind of world this truly was.

  *** />
  Soren’s eyes drifted upwards at the sound of Natura walking her donkey upstairs. “As if inviting an elemental wizard to live in this house of cards wasn’t enough invitation for it to collapse in on our heads, turns out walking her donkey destresses her. Maybe the Brute doesn’t have the hold on you that you think it does, Soren, if you can put up with that nonsense.”

  ELEVEN

  Norel emerged from his basement lab into the tavern above him. The trapdoor slammed back against the hardwood floor, barely drawing a glance. The joint was brimming with activity. Sully’s Bar had morphed into Sully’s Bar and Grill because no one wanted to leave. The patrons would throw a glance outside at the cold blue world speckled and layered with snow and then turn their attention back to the tavern and to the warm amber lighting of the whale oil lamps, the warmth of the dual fireplaces at either end, and no one was going anywhere. Most of the clientele were hoping to ride out this little interlude, hoping the wizards would put the world back into orbit come time to go home after a two-or-three-day bender.

  With food in short supply, the chef and his helpers were pretty much serving up the drunks that had died from alcohol poisoning the night before. The cleaved, cooked torso and limb segments ran the generous length of the bar, ranging from raw to well-done. A couple customers were holding their pieces of human flesh on a barbecue fork over the fires at either end of the pub, roasted testicles standing in for roasted marshmallows. And roasted tongue, of course, or perhaps a rib section—nothing too heavy or too large for dangling over the flames.

  Norel stepped over the resealed trap door, looking like one of the many hunters from the night before with the crossbow and sheath full of arrows slung over his shoulders, and headed outside into the cold, where he hoped to find some answers. The world’s new orbit was a fact of life that would be settled into in time, after denial had waned, but he wasn’t so sure of anyone surviving the Dark Matter Man, done over as Dracus; yes, word had reached him, even in this sector, which was about as far away from the Transhuman district as you could get.

  The door leading out of the pub yielded to a blast of wind that blew Norel back as if he’d just taken a cannon ball to the gut. The locals inside the tavern were only too happy to throw him the rest of the way out and seal up the door—permanently—lest anyone else decide to lay claim to the choice real estate inside the pub. Norel heard them hammering the nails and figured out what was what without even bothering to turn around; there were enough handymen inside the tavern to make quick work of any boards freed from a former life as a table or a chair in the last barroom fight.

  Outside, the scavengers were hacking away at the people frozen to death in the night—the old and the young that had somehow missed the first wave of diebacks; perhaps because back then they had other family members to support them, who had since reneged on such responsibilities in order to keep themselves alive. Or perhaps they’d since fallen to one or another of the werewolves and vamps.

  Now that there was little to separate dawn from dusk and all the intervening hours in between as far as light levels went—what with the perennial clouds overhead dumping more snow and freezing rain on them—the werewolves and vamps pretty much had the run of the place. But they were being smart about it. Any number of them had their eyes on Norel now, but none had made a move. They were waiting to get good and hungry before putting the moves on anyone. Their own instincts had kicked in regarding the best means for surviving the shortage of live meat in the days ahead. They hadn’t made it to the top of the food chain of predators just by being more lethal; they needed to be smarter than that—if only to outlast the werewolf and vamp hunters, who’d almost certainly culled the herd of the less cunning of them already.

  Porthos—named after the largest of the musketeers due to his size and, with age, his increasing inclination to hunt in small packs of three or four—snarled at Norel as he walked by, freezing him in his tracks. The old werewolf was the strongest alpha in these parts; even the hunters steered clear of him. He was huge, even by werewolf standards—about the size of a full-grown buffalo. His incisors would have gotten a Sabre-toothed tiger to back off. But he was picking his battles, too, and after sniffing Norel, turned around in the doorway he was standing in and retreated inside the building where he could get out of the blustering winds. One of those blusters might well have saved Norel, loosening the one fastened button on the overcoat and exposing his frail body before he could close the hatch, as it were; Porthos may well have decided Norel wasn’t worth the blood and meat he could get from the human.

  Norel glanced across the street at the sound of another snarl, realized then that Porthos had more than one provocation for retreating back inside. A younger alpha, the next in line to his throne, had made an appearance and he was itching for a fight. The rival jumped into the middle of the street, staring Norel down, probably wondering if it was easier to vault over Norel’s head or mow him down on his way to picking a fight with Porthos. Maybe this was the day he was confident the old wolf could be permanently retired.

  But something was wrong with the contender. His threatening roars spoke less of challenge and more of confusion and turmoil going on within him. He tried to shake it off the way a dog does getting out of a bathtub. The tremors only provoked the reaction that was underway. His head morphed into that of a male lion—the biggest one Norel had ever seen. He retained the torso and legs of the wolf, but his tail became a serpent, which hissed at Norel, and flicked his tongue, tasting the air. The snake flicked its tongue in a few other directions, before deciding on a path for the head to travel along, and off the wolf-turned-chimera went, distancing himself from the werewolf king and Norel.

  Norel decided to follow. No one living in Shelley’s England would have gone with a chimera, even if they’d opted to become a shifter. Whoever or whatever had changed the accursed fellow had done so against his will. And it was Norel’s guess that it had something to do with the Dark Matter Man.

  It was too damned hard for Norel to keep up with this bounding creature that had four able legs at his disposal, not two, who was in the prime of life; not to mention being souped up with supernatural abilities. Norel untethered the horse attached to a carriage awaiting the fine Victorian lady coming down the stairs of her lodge. When the driver of the coach jumped down to give him a piece of his mind, Norel threw him with one hand in the direction of the lady coming down the stairs. Missing what was transpiring on the street, she screamed at the driver, “How dare you rub up against me, you commoner!”

  She kicked him back down the stairs, stepped over him on the foyer floor, then proceeded to plant herself in her coach, entirely oblivious to her missing horse, which Norel was currently riding. Norel even tipped his hat at the lady so she could turn up her nose at him, not realizing it was her horse he was stealing off with.

  The horse was a good runner, a bit of a war horse, even, considering it probably needed to be to survive the lash of a coachman riding for that woman. All the better. But while it ran like a champion, it didn’t take turns as well as the chimera. That said, the horse also seemed to have no fear of the beast, and was determined to catch him, as if the damn animal had indeed descended from a long line of war horses. Maybe that’s how the fine lady had come by him; Victorian women were known for favoring their studs, for all their faux demure nonsense; and the thought of rubbing up against such virility no doubt didn’t bother her at all, even if she couldn’t stand the idea of the common coachman touching her.

  The chimera was headed for the building dead-ending the street that had lost its façade. The stairwells and various floors remained intact. Norel glanced up at the uppermost story and saw the fairly-young-for-an-accomplished-Chinese wizard Augustus with his big hands for such a small frame. All of Augustus’s defiance was focused through pinched, thick, black eyebrows, intent eyes staring down at the bounding chimera, and a small but ample-lipped scornful mouth. It dawned on Norel then that Augustus was likely the chimera’s intended prey.
The same idea must have occurred to Augustus, too, because he was taking advantage of the clear line of sight to his target, blasting it with wizard’s fire, shooting out from those oversized hands. One bolus after another impacted the street, exploding the cobblestones and sending them like hails of mortar shells at the beast. Not only did the “shell” bombardment do nothing to slow the creature, neither did the boluses of fire. The beast burned alive, but refused to slow. It was now bounding its flaming body up the stairs.

  Norel, not knowing when to take a hint, was charging up the stairs on the war horse right after the chimera. His mount seemed as ferociously determined to win this race as Norel was increasingly unsure if this was the most judicious course of action. Norel’s genetically-altered flesh-eating bacteria that turned dead flesh into living flesh and healed all wounds might have survived the chimera’s lion-head bite or the venom of the viper-snapping tail, but would it keep him from burning alive? He wasn’t of a particular mind to conduct this scientific experiment, today of all days. He had to live long enough to get whatever information he gathered to Soren. One look at Soren’s cabbalistic nanites and Norel knew, if they were ever to dispatch the Dark Matter Man, it would be with his help, and his help alone.

  Each time the horse hit another landing in the building, it whinnied, and that whinny acted like an electric shock sparking another insight in Norel. Had the chimera been genetically altered with the aid of science, or magic? The answer might be all-important, as it suggested what the Dark Matter Man feared most. If he was far more adept at science than at magic, or vice versa, then that suggested a weakness which could be capitalized upon. But his science could easily be confused for our magic, since no one still really understood how dark matter worked.

  The chimera had made it to the wizard’s flat, charging through the door without slowing. The horse, galloping right behind the beast, rose up on its hind legs and kicked the chimera out of the way, frustrating his first lunge at the wizard.