Crossroads

by Stephen Kenson

  Hanging above her was a corpse suspended by a rope around its neck. The creaking was coming from the rope as the grisly form swayed gently back and forth. Elaine struggled and thrashed against the ropes in a mad effort to get away from the horrible sight, but the ropes held firm. Finally, the skin on her wrists and ankles rubbed raw and bloody, she stopped and went limp, gasping for breath and shivering in terror.

  She looked around and saw a number of dark-clad figures standing outside the ring of flickering candles. One figure detached itself from the group and moved into the circle of golden light. He was an older man, wearing a long black robe made of some velvety material. He had dark hair, graying at the temples, and a salt-and-pepper beard. He looked rather like someone’s kindly uncle, except for the long knife he held, its razor edge gleaming in the light. Elaine recognized him as the man from the subway, the man who spoke to her before everything went blank and she found herself here.

  As the man approached, Elaine shrank away from him as much as the ropes would allow. He smiled warmly, like he was comforting a scared child. She noticed a murmur that began in the shadows outside of the circle, a rising chant that kept time with the steady, creak, creak, creak of the swaying body above.

  The chant grew louder and louder, and the man reached out to stroke Elaine’s hair gently. She wanted to scream, to struggle, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t think. All she could do was listen to the echoing chant, the dull, creaking rhythm, and watch the dark-haired man smile silently at her. His eyes were strange, like he was looking right through her, past her flesh into her very soul. Elaine wondered for a moment if he really saw her at all. He never said a word, only continued to stare and smile as the chanting built all around them, higher and higher.

  When Elaine Dumont’s blood stained the front of his robe bright crimson and the lingering power of her life filled his veins with a warm rush of power, Anton Garnoff was still smiling, and the swaying corpse seemed to smile with him.

  1

  I hate bugs. I always hated them, even as a kid. I think there’s just something hardwired, deep in the human brain, that says bugs are wrong somehow. Just looking at them creeps me out. So, naturally, there I was inside the rusting corpse of a factory complex some fifty kilometers outside the Federal District of Columbia, facing down a guy in charge of some bugs bigger than me. Not a nice feeling, let me tell you.

  I flattened myself against a support girder along one of the upper walkways of the dimly lit complex and tried to still the sound of my own breathing so I could listen. I heard a distant humming echoing through the large open space above the maze of machinery quietly rusting away on the floor of the factory. It was broken up by random clicks and tapping noises. I tried to ignore it and focused instead on closer sounds that might give away the presence of my quarry.

  I heard a faint rattling of the catwalk behind me and to the left and a muffled cry that was just as quickly cut off. I spun around the support girder and leveled my Ares slivergun across the open space toward the opposite wall and fired off a shot. It went wide of the mark, but I wasn’t actually trying to hit anything. Gunfire would endanger the person I’d come here to save, and I had more precise weapons to use than a gun. The slivergun’s plastic flechettes smacked against the ferrocrete wall with a loud crack as the dark figure on the other side waved his hand and called out in a harsh language of clicks and buzzes not mean to be spoken by a human tongue.

  I ducked behind the girder again and heard a spattering and a loud hiss. A terrible stench filled the air as the acid began to eat away at the corroded metal, dissolving it. I spun and took a couple of quick steps back to stay out of the small puddle of greenish-yellow liquid that dripped from the edge of the catwalk, taking the liquefying remains of the top of the girder with it as it began to quickly evaporate.

  “Give it up, Crosetti!” I called across the open space. “There’s nowhere for you to run. You’re trapped. Give up the girl and you might be able to walk away from this.” Fat chance. Like I was going to let a total wacko like this one actually walk away, but I had to try and reason with him. As long as he had the girl, he was dangerous. Mocking laughter, high and shrill, answered me.

  “You should be the one begging for mercy, Talon. You are in my domain here.” The two of them had reached a staircase leading down to the factory floor. Crosetti had the girl in front of him like a shield, clasped protectively to him, with one arm clamped over her mouth to keep her from screaming. The other hand was empty, but I knew that a mage as powerful as Victor Crosetti was never truly unarmed. He began guiding her down the stairs, keeping his eyes on me. I was running out of options. The girl looked up at me with pleading eyes and I considered the fate that awaited her down below.

  Victor Crosetti was a shaman, one of the people blessed (or cursed, maybe, in his case) with the Talent. Since the Awakening some fifty years ago, one out of every hundred people developed the ability to use magic. Crosetti was one of the unlucky few whose magic was more than his sanity could handle. Shamans had totem spirits that guided them, animals like Bear, Fox, and Raven. Crosetti’s totem was Ant, and contact with such an alien intelligence drove all insect shamans mad. But it also gave them great power. So, here was a lunatic with the power of a master wizard at his command and obsessed with Mary Beth Tyre, age fifteen.

  Mary Beth had disappeared from her home when she was only six. She had been through some of the worst horrors imaginable since then: neglect, abuse, even slavery. I'd just spent nearly three months in some of the worst hell-holes I could imagine all along the eastern seaboard helping to track her down, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to allow some nutcase to kill her when I was so close.

  “Just let the girl go.” I said in what I hoped was a firm, yet calm voice.

  Crosetti laughed at me again. His balding head and his big eyes, combined with his tall, gangly body, made him look like some kind of humanoid ant standing on two legs. His voice was high and nasal, touched with a bit of hysteria. He really was on the edge.

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” he said. “She’s to be my queen, you see, my beautiful, beautiful queen. I’ve been waiting for so, so long, but now the time is right. Together we will rule over our people, our loyal subjects... won’t we, my love?”

  Mary Beth flinched away from Crosetti’s touch and thrashed against him, but his grip was too strong and she was too weak. I had to do something.

  Narrowing my eyes, I focused my will on Crosetti’s misshapen head. I gathered my anger toward him like a physical thing, bright red strands of fury shot through with black threads of disgust. I plucked out any shreds of pity and wove that pure anger into a weapon. It became the image of a magical spear, the embodiment of the emotions that let us—let me—kill without remorse or mercy when necessary. I saw Crosetti’s leering face at the center of a reddish haze as I raised my hand and flung the invisible spear at him with all of my strength.

  The powerbolt lanced across the distance between us at the speed of thought, only to splatter against an invisible shield of magical power that surrounded Crosetti and his victim like a cloak. Crosetti flinched as the power of my attack battered him, but it couldn’t get through his shields.

  Damn, he was powerful, more powerful than I thought. I started to worry for myself as well as Mary Beth Tyre.

  “Is that the best you can do, Talon?” Crosetti sneered. “You cannot match the power Ant gives me. Your magic is weak. If you want the girl, you have to come and get her.” With that, he dragged the struggling Mary Beth down the stairs and disappeared into the dark maze of machinery below.

  I leaned heavily on the railing of the catwalk, gasping for breath. The effort of the spell had taken more of a toll on me than usual. I’d let my anger get the best of me again. I wanted to goad Crosetti into casting a few more spells so he might exhaust himself. I figured my own defenses could handle it, but instead I’d ended up falling for the same tactic I’d been using. Now both of them were down there with whatever Crosetti had
brought into this world from the depths of the astral plane.

  I listened to the humming and clicking for a moment and tried to get a better look at what was down there, but it was too dark to be sure. I took a deep breath to steady myself, then vaulted over the railing and dropped toward the ferrocrete floor some ten meters below.

  The force of my will reached out, slowing my fall as I bent the laws of physics with the power of my magic. I landed on the floor of the factory as light as a feather, then dropped the levitation spell, alert and ready for anything. The smell I detected up on the catwalk was much stronger down here. A kind of musty, dry, organic scent, with a sickly sweet tang to it.

  I transferred the slivergun to my other hand and drew Talonclaw from its sheath at my waist. The edge of the dagger gleamed in the dim light, winking off the runes cut into the blade and the fire opal set into the hilt. I felt the chain-wrapped hilt almost come alive in my hand, a warm tingling that spoke to me of the dagger’s magical power. It would likely be more use against whatever was down here than my gun, or any other mundane weapon.

  With a few whispered words, I cast out with my magical senses, searching for Mary Beth Tyre. The atmosphere within the factory was thick with the putrid essence of Crosetti’s magic, but I could sense Mary Beth not far away and began to move through the darkened rows of machines toward her. As I came around the corner of one of the huge presses, an ant tried to take my head off.

  That was even stranger than it sounds. The thing was the size of a pony, standing nearly face to face with me. As I dodged to the side to avoid the snapping mandibles, a detached part of me took note of the incredible detail visible on so large an insect. How hairy was its rough hide, how large and reflective its eyes and, most of all, how sharp and powerful its jaws and pointed legs, looking capable of ripping a human limb from limb. Ants are creatures capable of carrying thirty times their own weight, and the one in front of me must have weighed a hundred and fifty kilos, if it weighed a gram. It was more than capable of crushing me. Had I been a mundane, that is.

  The ant warrior lunged toward me with a high-pitched chittering sound. I dodged to the side again and struck at one of the flailing legs. My dagger connected, and the leg fell to the floor in a pool of pale yellow goo. The ant spun faster than anything so large had a right to and slammed me across the narrow aisle into one of the machinery banks. I managed not to drop Talonclaw, but my slivergun clattered across the floor somewhere.

  There was no time to worry about it because the thing was on me again in an instant. One leg struck me in the chest like a baseball bat wielded by a troll, knocking the breath from my lungs with a whoosh. Another tried to crush my head like a melon, but I slid down the wall and avoided it, bringing me close to the creature’s thorax. The leg punched a deep dent in the rusting side of the machine press behind me.

  Focusing my awareness on the astral plane, I could see the dark, shimmering aura of the insect spirit and the bright gleam of my mystic blade. With a powerful lunge I stabbed Talonclaw deep into the ant warrior’s thorax, near the head, striking not at its physical body, but at its spirit on the astral plane.

  The ant spirit gave a psychic shriek of agony and stumbled backward, flailing wildly and thrashing its head. I managed to retain my grip on the hilt, and the blade slid out of the creature’s body with a slight sizzling sound. The ant fell heavily against one of the presses and lay still.

  Ignoring my lost gun and the slightly twitching body of the ant warrior, I moved quickly through the maze of machinery toward where I’d sensed Mary Beth’s presence. No other bugs tried to block my way, which started to worry me. Crosetti was an Ant shaman of some power. He certainly must have more spirits serving him. Their number was limited without the aid of an Ant Queen, which he clearly wished to summon, but it had to be more than a single warrior drone. If they weren’t out here looking for me, I was afraid I knew where they were. As I moved, I whispered words of power under my breath, reaching into the depths of the astral plane, sending out the call. I had reinforcements of my own.

  In the heart of the factory was an open area between the massive presses where heavy loads could be moved through. Crosetti had converted it into his lodge, the ritual place where he could summon his totem spirit to the physical world. Strange spirals and geometric designs in rust red and dun yellow decorated the gray floor, and a choking smell like warm yeast filled the air.

  Nestled against some of the heavy machines were pale white cocoons, like giant grubs. They held Crosetti’s other victims, people in the process of being possessed by ant spirits so they could serve as host bodies, a gateway to allow the spirits to live in the physical world. In the center of the circle Crosetti and five other ant spirits were preparing Mary Beth Tyre for the same fate. Crosetti turned toward me, a twisted look of hatred on his face as he pointed at me with a bony finger.

  “Kill!” he shouted to the ant spirits, and they began to move toward me. I spoke the final words of invocation, a sound that echoed through the astral, and twin pillars of flame sprang up, flanking me. Within the white-hot depths of each, you could see a vague humanoid shape.

  “Okay, guys, you know what to do.” I said and the two fire elementals sprang into action, attacking the ant spirits as I made a run for Crosetti. Flames engulfed the two closest ants, creatures that were a weird melding of human and insect. They were flesh-forms, not like the spirits I’d fought earlier. They were mortal bodies possessed by ant spirits, making them fast, strong, and tough, but not as immune to harm as a true spirit. The flesh-forms shrieked in pain as the flames burned and charred their twisted bodies.

  Crosetti saw me coming and gestured tightly with one hand. His dark eyes seemed to bug out even more, gleaming in the light of the burning ant soldiers, and I was sure I could see a faint impression of antennae and mandibles on his face. A shimmering wall of light sprang up between us and I nearly ran right into it. An astral barrier spell. Crosetti tittered as I stopped dead in front of the translucent wall of crackling energy.

  “You’ve lost your gun, Talon.” he said with a malicious sneer. “And no magic can pierce this wall. Try to destroy it in the astral, if you want, and my loyal spirits will rip you apart. Now you get to watch as my Queen comes and takes her rightful place at my side.” He began to turn back to Mary Beth.

  “Don't do this, Crosetti! We can help you!” I shouted. There had to be some way through the barrier. I could try to break through with a spell, but the effort could exhaust me, leaving me no defense against Crosetti and his bug spirits tearing me apart. Already the ant warriors were beginning to overwhelm my two elementals. The smell of burning flesh was strong, and smoke was billowing through the open area.

  “I don’t need your help!” Crosetti screamed, flecks of foam spraying from his mouth. “I need her, my Queen, my beloved Queen . . .” He raised his arms in invocation and began a humming, clicking chant.

  I needed a mundane weapon, a way through the barrier, but all I had was my magic. I took a step back from the shimmering wall and threw Talonclaw with all my strength. The moment the magical blade left my hand, my aura no longer supported its enchantment. The dagger became nothing more than a normal piece of steel that flipped end over end right through Crosetti’s barrier, intended to block only the passage of astral beings and magical forces. There was a meaty thunk as the blade embedded itself in his upper back. His chant broke off with a cry of pain and he crumpled to the ground, the shimmering wall fading. I rushed forward, a killing spell close at hand.

  Behind me, the ant spirits faltered. Without the guidance of their master, they fled back into the astral plane. The fire elementals consumed the remains of the fleshforms, then hovered in the air, awaiting my next command. I bent down near Crosetti and rolled him over, ready for anything. His eyes were wide and staring past me at something only he could see, his mouth still open in silent invocation to his beloved Ant Queen. His aura was dull and fading fast. I glanced over to where Mary Beth Tyre lay, too frightened
to move, and all Hell broke lose.

  Windows and doors shattered and burst in like an explosion as people rushed into the factory complex armed for bear. With near-military efficiency they covered the area in front of them and a voice called out, “All right, nobody move!”

  “It’s all right, Ryan. It’s all over. She’s safe!” I called back. I heard the sound of footsteps rapidly approaching as I stood and spoke the words of dismissal to my elementals. They executed a graceful bow in the air and flickered out like a candle in the wind, returning to their astral home.

  I turned to Mary Beth again and put on what I hoped was my most comforting and reassuring smile.

  “You’re safe.” I said. “Nobody will hurt you now. I promise.” She looked up at me with a pair of heartbreaking blue eyes that started to fill with tears as a group of armed shadowrunners came around the corner and took in the scene. The smoldering remains of three flesh-forms lay on the ground, giving off a charred odor and wisps of smoke. Victor Crosetti lay at my feet, a small puddle of dark blood spreading out from under him.

  With a low-voiced command to the others, one of the men walked toward me, heedless of the carnage. He was Ryan Mercury, the leader of Assets, Incorporated. My boss. Though clad in a dark jumpsuit covered with straps and pouches that held various weapons and tools of the trade. Ryan was a living weapon who didn’t really need a gun or a knife to take down an opponent; only the power of his magic and his bare hands. He was one of the scariest guys I’d ever met.

  “Talon.” he said in a low, controlled voice, “what the hell did you think you were doing? I told you to wait for backup.” I bent down and pulled Talonclaw from Crosetti’s back before I replied, and Ryan glanced down at the bloody blade and the dead shaman.

  “I couldn't wait. Crosetti was getting ready to make his move. I couldn’t just stand by—”

  Ryan cut me off with a curt swing of his hand, like a knife. “So instead you risked yourself and the girl’s life by jumping in and playing hero.”