World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 02] - The Last Battle

by Bill Bridges (epub)

  Martin was clearly completely out of control, consumed by his own prodigious fury. She couldn’t afford to succumb.

  Martin sniffed her out and charged again, moving faster than she thought possible. She barely ducked out of the way, slashing him as he went past.

  He wheeled and fell upon her, his rear claws tearing away at her thighs, his front claws digging into her shoulders.

  Loba cried out in pain and shut her eyes, concentrating, focusing her falcon lore. She opened her eyes and spoke in a deep voice: “Be still. ”

  Martin immediately let her go and stood slack jawed, watching her warily but moving no further.

  She limped away, leaving a trail of blood. She needed a Theurge, someone expert in controlling spirits. If the Shadow Queen had spoken truly, it might not be possible to extricate her from Martin. They might both have to die to save Martin’s spirit.

  She squinted at a sudden red glare. The Red Star broke through the Penumbral clouds, painting the desen red. As its light hit Martin, he broke from Loba’s spell and leaped forward again, a claw slicing open her throat with one clean swipe.

  Loba stumbled and fell, breathing heavily, her strength gone. She howled in pain.

  Martin hesitated, blinking, watching her clutch her throat, trying to stem the tide of blood. His eyes softened and he dropped to his knees.

  “Aunt Loba! ” Martin cried in his own voice. “What happened? Don’t die! ”

  Loba stared in surprise at the boy as she collapsed, unable to sit any longer. Her blood flooded out of her and into the Umbral clay.

  Martin rushed forward and cradled her, rocking. “No! Sirius! You did this to her! ”

  Loba shook her head, trying to deny his accusation, trying to speak. Only air came out. Her eyes fluttered and closed. Her body went limp.

  “Nooo! ” Martin cried, leaping up and running around the clearing, trying to catch some scent of the foe that had killed her. He smelled only Loba and himself. Sirius was subtle, able to hide his scent.

  He hunted in ever widening circles. Frustrated, he stepped over the Gauntlet and hunted in the physical world, this time catching Sirius’s trail, which led him into the cave. The wolf lay dead.

  Martin sat down, confused. If Sirius was dead, who killed him? The same being that had killed Loba?

  He broke down crying, great howling sobs that echoed from the cave and across the desert. There was no one to hear them.

  • • •

  Martin patted down the grave dirt with a shovel he had found in the cave. He bowed his head, praying for Aunt Loba’s spirit. He dropped the shovel and walked away, toward the fire pit.

  He shifted to wolf form and stepped sideways. There, stretching away to the North, was the moon path the Navajo woman had sung about. It had not yet faded. He began to run, heading North to join King Albrecht’s army.

  Antonine Teardrop padded silently on all fours, walking beside but not upon the green-glowing path. He couldn’t risk Zhyzhak seeing his silhouette. The Black Spiral Dancer was well ahead of him on the path; she had been increasingly wary and cautious after her encounter with the Eighth Circle’s warden. Antonine had to fall back farther behind her, even though he risked losing her at times.

  The mists that billowed around him, passing between him and Zhyzhak, might have thrown him off her track, causing him to take one of the many false paths branching away from the main trail. But Antonine knew his tribe’s special lore, taught to them by the spirits of the wind. It allowed him to see through impeding substances and illusions, to perceive something as it truly was. Mists, fogs and even darkness were no barrier for his far sight.

  He had watched as Zhyzhak stopped now and then, catching her breath and resting. The march was taking its toll on her. Few had ever gotten this far and only two were said to have passed the test of the next circle, although Antonine believed that they had in fact failed it.

  Zhyzhak looked around now and then, screaming at the void. It took Antonine a while to realize that she was interacting with shapes or sounds that he couldn’t see, things that were not truly there. The Labyrinth’s tricks were beginning to work on her.

  Antonine knew with a sense of dread that he now existed beyond the boundaries of space and time. He and Zhyzhak walked a realm of ancient, primordial power, one lacking any literal form or substance—everything here was pure metaphor. Zhyzhak saw shapes and heard sounds because she expected to see and hear them. She could not imagine a place without such substances, a place of pure abstraction.

  Even Antonine, schooled for decades in the mystical training of his tribe, had trouble interpreting this place’s reality. It shifted randomly—or at least, it seemed to be random. He wondered what the Wyrm would actually look like when—if—he actually encountered it. Would he be able to perceive it as it was, a force of nature so powerful as to be nigh unimaginable? What did the very concept of entropy look like, anyway?

  Antonine frowned as he padded on, keeping sight of Zhyzhak ahead. The Wyrm would be cloaked in imagery, of course, not because it wore such a substance of itself but because limited, mortal beings such as he and Zhyzhak could not perceive it any other way. His own mind would paint it with shape and substance, a mind desperately trying to encompass a power beyond conception.

  He wondered: Would Zhyzhak see the same Wyrm that he did? They were both Garou, beings of matter and spirit, born of Gaia. Would this racial tie cause them to share a consensual illusion when encountering the Wyrm? It would be interesting to see.

  Antonine halted, dropping to the ground. Zhyzhak’s loud yelling echoed through the mist. He peered past the shifting clouds to see her crack her whip. Something stood in her way and she seemed prepared to attack it.

  “Get the hell out of my way! ” Zhyzhak yelled.

  The hydra before her did not move. Its nine snakeheads floated in the air, sinuously curving around one another, examining Zhyzhak from all angles. It sat on its haunches, large muscular legs armored in golden scales. Its wings unfurled lazily, stretching and then folding again.

  Zhyzhak raised her whip.

  “We are the Warden of the Ninth Circle, ” the nine heads said, their combined sibilance hissing across the empty landscape.

  Zhyzhak adjusted her blow before it landed, cracking her whip to the side, missing the leftmost snakehead by a bare inch. She stepped forward, examining the creature.

  “So r “This is the Circle of Deceit, ” the hydra said. “You must betray the Wyrm’s truest servant. ”

  “It’s not me? ” Zhyzhak cried. “Ha! Point him out! He dies! "

  The snakeheads all turned to look at a portal in the mist revealing the blasted, fiery landscape of Malfeas. At its center, upon a throne on a high tower, sat a large, heavily muscled Black Spiral Dancer, his fur carved from head to toe with blasphemous pictograms. His eyes darted from side to side, watching all that took place in the duchies below.

  “The general of Malfeas, ” the hydra said, its heads watching the portal. “The only being to pass our test who still lives. ”

  “Him? ” Zhyzhak said. “I kill him, then rule Malfeas? ”

  “Exactly, ” the hydra said, all eyes watching the general. He sniffed the air suspiciously and turned around in his chair, looking for something. He seemed to sense that he was being watched. “He fears you. He knows someone will usurp him eventually. He is weak. If you strike now, you can take him. ”

  Zhyzhak howled and cracked her whip. Instead of reaching through the portal, it slashed across the snakeheads’ necks, severing six of them. Blood hosed out of the six stumps.

  The hydra stumbled and its three remaining heads spun to stare aghast at Zhyzhak.

  The Black Spiral Dancer stepped forward, howling with laughter. She looped her whip around the frantically moving necks and tugged tightly, yanking them together into a single hunch, trapped by the barbed strands of the whip.

  “Circle of Deceit, idiot! ” Zhyzhak yelled. “That means you die! ” She yanked the whip again, like p
ulling the cord on a lawn mower or boat engine, and the three heads fell from their stumps.

  The hydra’s body hit the ground and dissolved. Its blood spread out in a widening pool. Wherever it touched the path, the glowing balefire dimmed and went out, extinguished. The mists dissolved, taking the portal into Malfeas with them.

  Zhyzhak stood on a dark, empty plain, all signs of the Labyrinth gone. Only a single feature appeared before her: a grimy manhole cover on the ground where the hydra’s body had been.

  Zhyzhak stepped forward and reached down, slipping her claws through the tiny holes. She yanked the iron disk up and threw it aside. Its clang reverberated across the emptiness. A flickering orange light escaped from the hole, suggesting fires burning somewhere below.

  Zhyzhak crawled down the rungs into the sewer hole. • • •

  Antonine let out his breath. He'd held it for nearly five minutes, trying desperately not to draw attention to himself. As soon as the Labyrinth shut down and the mists disappeared, he feared that Zhyzhak would see him, even crouched as low as he was. But she hadn’t bothered to turn around and look behind her.

  He stood slowly, cautiously, watching as her shadow disappeared and the full stream of light spilled from the sewer hole.

  He padded forward, disappointed. He had hoped the test would be subtler, more convincing. Most of the others who’d made it this far had fallen for it. The challenge was to kill a manifestation or great servant of the Wyrm. Victory meant taking that being’s place, with all the power and privileges that came with it.

  But that was the trap. Worldly power. It was cheaply given and cheaply won. The victor, who had fought so hard to reach this last, final test, would easily succumb to its lure, little realizing that the true power still lay beyond. Or that was the theory. Antonine knew that no true Garou elder would have fallen for the hydra’s ruse. Perhaps the Wyrm was now so desperate for help that its banes could no longer pose a convincing challenge.

  Zhyzhak had properly turned her deceit against the warden and so won through to the Wynn’s lair. But did she realize that the challenge was not over yet? The only true deceit worthy of the Ninth Circle was to betray the Wyrm itself.

  Antonine had to get to the Wyrm before she did. Zhyzhak had broken the rules by using the fixed Red Star to guide her path. She had arrived with some measure of her sanity—her own will and purpose—intact. If she had succumbed to rage by now, she might very well free the Wyrm and return the balance. This was the deep irony of the Black Spiral Labyrinth’s true purpose: not to corrupt but to free, to systematically drive any aspirant mad so that only instinct prevailed when meeting the Wyrm—an instinct for rage and destruction.

  Zhyzhak would not attempt to free the Wyrm. She would try to destroy it, mistaking it for yet another test. She would act not from instinct but from deliberate cruelty and desire for power. Its freed manifestation would be formed from her hate and lust. She would control its march of destruction; under her insane will, it would not serve Balance, but Corruption.

  Antonine reached the open sewer hole and peered down. Rungs led into a large tunnel flowing with water and muck. Antonine shifted into battle form and climbed down the ladder.

  If he could beat her to the Wyrm, he might be able to free it, allowing it to resume its natural role as the Balance between Order and Chaos. It was the goal his tribe had always sought. In the lore of the Stargazers, the Wyrm was not monster but victim, trapped in the Weaver's cocoon of twisted logic—the very concept of the selfish, limited Ego given form. As with everything at this level of reality, forms were merely metaphors made manifest. Spider webs were symbols for the convoluted, entrapping processes of Ego consciousness, which had long ago choked the natural, instinctual order. If the instinct, the universe’s Id, could be freed from the suffocating dictates of a super-ego gone mad, the Balance would return and a new world would rise from the ashes of the old.

  Heresy, of course, to the rest of the Gaian tribes. Antonine himself felt the gnawing of doubt as he climbed down into the sewer. What if his tribe was wrong? What if the Wyrm really was a horrid beast whose unleashing could only spell a final doom for Gaia? He shook his head. Even the other tribes acknowledged that the Wyrm was once a force of Balance, that its role had been perverted. What once was could be so again. He had to believe that. The only other option was unremitting, unending fighting, life versus death. There had to be a way to transcend such opposites.

  As he reached the last rung, Antonine dropped the rest of the distance into the tunnel. It stretched in two directions until it dead-ended in T-intersections. The slimy water flowing past his knees felt warm and clinging.

  He sniffed the air, seeking sign of Zhyzhak’s scent. The odor of the muck overwhelmed any other smell. He looked around for footprints but the water covered any sign of them. She could have gone left or right, and from there down one of four directions.

  Antonine focused, willing his eyes to pierce the illusion around him. He knew it was false, an image conjured by the Labyrinth. He sought to perceive the true Labyrinth beneath. The sewer walls faded away, replaced by twisted and knotted whorls of spider silk, ancient and rotting.

  He looked carefully and saw a single silver line running through the threads, following a convoluted path back and forth and around other threads. The legendary Silver Spiral that led to the heart of the Weaver’s cocoon, slipped into the tapestry by Gaian spirits as the Weaver frantically wove her web. The Great Spider failed to notice the single thread and wove it like any other into her work. It would now lead Antonine straight to the Spider’s ancient prey, the insect caught in her trap—the Wyrm.

  Zhyzhak, blind to the thread, lost in the illusion of the sewer tunnel, might take a series of wrong turns and become delayed, giving Antonine his one chance. He thanked Gaia for her bounty and headed to the left and then right, following the faint gleam of silver hidden in the pale, yellowing tapestry that surrounded him.

  • • •

  Zhyzhak roared in frustration, banging her fist against the slime-drenched stone wall. She had not counted on this. Her fetish no longer worked; the Red Star could not be seen. She had no idea where to go. The passages led to more passages that led to still more passages. She doubted she could even find her way back to the manhole again.

  She stopped and wracked her brain. Mental gymnastics were not her forte. She had risen to power through strength and unremitting savagery. She relied on her thralls to figure out the details. She could really use Slatescrape-ikthya now; he’d be able to puzzle out this maze.

  A distant, faint clanging sound reached her ears. She cocked her head in its direction and listened. Nothing.

  She broke into a run, tearing through the corridor toward the source of the noise. She didn’t know what had made the sound, but it was her only clue. She paused at another intersection, listening for a repeat of the clanging.

  There—to the left, another clang, this time closer. She vaulted down the tunnel, turning as it bent to the right, and skidded to a halt as the tunnel ended in a hundred-foot drop.

  The tunnel mouth opened out before her into a vast room where multiple tunnels met, heading in directions that seemed unnatural, the perspective all wrong. For a brief moment, it looked as if webs covered the room. Zhyzhak shut her eyes and shook her head to clear it. Her brain began to hurt. She opened her eyes again slowly and peered down into the cavernous chamber.

  Hundreds of drains emptied liquid sludge into the center. It pooled on the floor before whirling down an unseen drain.

  Another clang rang out, this one loud and just below. Her eyes shot to its source: a towering, rusted, slime-strewn gate with six huge bolts holding it shut. It looked designed to admit a giant. A figure moved down there, struggling with all its might to open one of the bolts. Three bolts were already undone.

  Zhyzhak squinted at the figure and finally made him out. She gaped incredulously at it. A Gaian Garou. A cursed, stinking, goddamned Gaian Garou—here, in her Labyrinth. She growle
d, her rumbling consternation traveling across the room and down to the ears of the Garou.

  The Garou’s head snapped up. He looked straight at her, a scowl on his face, and then redoubled his efforts to move the fourth bolt.

  Zhy2hak screamed and leaped from the tunnel mouth, falling toward the Garou. He easily sidestepped away from her. She careened into the gate and bounced off it, splashing into the sludge, stunned. She had never hit anything so hard in her life. The gate seemed to be made not of rusted metal, but of hardness itself.

  She shook her head and snarled, rising and advancing on the Garou.

  He looked over his shoulder at her and blinked. She could tell he had called upon some wretched spirit gift, a power the spirits taught to his kind. Zhyzhak put on a burst of speed and snatched the Garou’s neck, yanking it down and throttling it.

  Except she only grasped air.

  Her empty claws clutched nothing. She looked back up and saw the Garou continuing to push away the fourth bolt. It slid open with a reverberating clang.

  Zhyzhak screamed and leaped at the Garou again. He evaded her grip once more; her claws again slashed through empty air. He climbed the open bolts to reach the higher ones.

  Now she had him. Perched high up as he was, he had no room to maneuver. She carefully climbed up behind him and snatched his ankle, tugging him free. Again, she grabbed empty space. The Garou was not where she had thought he was.

  Zhyzhak pounded the gate in anger but pulled back as her fists throbbed in agony. The hardness of the gate again. What the hell did it hold? What possible force was it designed to bar?

  Zhyzhak froze, realization dawning. The Wyrm. Her lord and master waited beyond that gate. She had but to open it and...

  That made no sense. If the Garou was trying to open the gate, that couldn’t be good for her or the Wyrm. Did it have a weapon she couldn't see? Some fetish with which to destroy the Wyrm?