The White Towers

by Andy Remic

“It does. I was… different. But the power of the Equiem flowed strong in my veins.”

  “How different?”

  “I could show you, but you’d vomit your lunch on the floor between those neatly polished brown shoes of yours.”

  “Try me. I had the stomach to feed my wife’s murderers their own pulsing, excised kidneys.”

  Kiki gave a narrow smile. “As you wish,” she said.

  All those images flickered through her mind in a heartbeat and she remembered the Summoning and remembered the Rage and remembered the Heart and remembered the Earth and, finally, sought out the energy of the Equiem.

  “You have been in my dreams,” whispered Kiki.

  “I know.”

  Aeoxir attacked, his sword a blistering trail of shining silver light.

  Kiki parried, both swords clanging from Aeoxir’s blades as she back-pedalled, boots skidding through dead pine needles on the forest road, and their swords exchanged blows in a dazzling array of double thrusts and blocks. Dek strained forward, like a dog on a leash, but Zastarte slapped him in the chest, shaking his head.

  “No, she’ll not thank you!”

  “She’ll not thank me if she ends up dead!”

  “Er.” Zastarte looked over Dek’s shoulder. “I think we have other problems.”

  Kiki and Aeoxir fought backwards and forwards on the woodland road, a dazzling display of awesome skill, and with Kiki’s confidence growing. Then she felt, more than saw, Dek and Zastarte step out behind her, with their backs to her, weapons drawn. She launched a dazzling attack which saw Aeoxir forced back, defending frantically with both blades, and she thought to herself: fucking chew on this you elf rat motherfucker, fucking Tree Stalkers is it, I’ll give you a piece of Iron Wolf steel through your fucking heart – but managed a quick glance and her heart went cold.

  On the road behind them, stood the other four Tree Stalkers. They were all tall, narrow of hip, broad of shoulder. They had black glass eyes and white needle teeth. Wreaths of smoke curled about their boots, and they carried swords and bows. They stood in a line, unmoving.

  Kiki and Aeoxir circled one another warily, swords reaching out, touching occasionally with tiny clings of metal on metal. Their eyes were fixed, mouths grim lines, both having found somebody of fearsome match.

  “You are faster than I imagined,” said Aeoxir, voice a purr of falling pine needles.

  “And you’re a damn sight uglier in the flesh than in my fucking nightmares.”

  A smile. “You will all be ugly, Kiki, when the elf rat armies swarm across your lands and take what’s rightfully ours.”

  “Show me.”

  Again, she launched, and their swords rang across the opening. She blanked out the idea that the other Tree Stalkers were waiting for her; that was a problem for another age, another lifetime; and maybe Dek and Zastarte would sort out that particular problem. Or maybe not.

  Steel clashed, the four swords of the two combatants a shimmering blur as they moved backwards and forwards across the dead pine needles. Suddenly, Aeoxir launched at her, recklessly, and used both blades to slam Kiki’s blades aside, and he front-kicked her in the chest making her stagger back; then he leapt in, one sword taking both her blades to the side in a circular sweep, whilst the other hacked for her neck…

  Kiki spun low, dropping suddenly, her legs sweeping Aeoxir’s from under him. Her right-hand blade hacked overhead, thudding into the ground where his head had been an instant earlier. He rolled smoothly to his feet, but Kiki launched another blistering attack, forcing him back. A thrust cut a long line across his cheek, and a low blow hacked a chunk from his knee a split-second later. Aeoxir, growling, suddenly drew back his arm and threw his sword like a spear. Kiki flexed left, and the blade whistled past her ear and clattered off between the boles of winter trees, lost in the darkness of the winter forest.

  Kiki turned her head back, and stared at Aeoxir, and smiled.

  He grabbed his remaining blade two-handed. “Come on bitch, come and die.”

  Without a word Kiki leapt forward, both blades shimmering in arcs of silver steel with blistering speed, displaying incredible agility and accuracy as the steel clashed and danced and sang a song of death across the forest road. Kiki drove Aeoxir back, and she felt triumph in her heart and quashed it savagely, for the fight was only done when the fight was done, and the killing only finished when the cunt was dead and headless on the road, corpse spewing a bloody fountain. She sensed panic in Aeoxir, felt him making tiny mistakes, slowing just a little as the worm drove deep into the flesh ripe apple of his confidence; and this pushed her on harder, her blades blurring as she threw every single ounce of skill and technique and experience into the battle that was, she realised, one of the hardest fights of her life. Suddenly, a savage horizontal cut took Aeoxir’s blade from his hands and it skittered silently across the pine needles of the road. Kiki risked a glance at the other Tree Stalkers, thinking this was their moment to charge; but they stood motionless, like ghosts in the gloom and swirling mist. Immobile. A distant threat.

  Is that what it’s like with these Tree Stalkers? she wondered idly in the splinter of a second. They stand by and let their comrades die? Punishment for failure? A lack of team-work, a lack of camaraderie?

  Suza sidled into her mind at this moment, with Aeoxir disabled, hands before him, face suddenly ashen, dark glass eyes gleaming with understanding as he backed away a millimetre at a time, and she gave a snort of derision.

  You think you’re special, bitch? You think the elf rats are somehow lower on the fucking nobility scale? What a load of horse shit. You Iron Wolves are a bunch of fucking scum lowlifes, you think you have honour because you cut up a few mud-orcs and put a spear through a sorcerer’s eyeball? Well it soon changed, didn’t it bitch? You all turned on one another. You couldn’t wait to fill your hearts with hate. Look at Dek and Narnok. All that business with Dek shagging his wife and betraying his best fucking friend, betraying you, his lover and wife to be; and even you, bitch, cunt, you fucking turned on Dalgoran, the man who took you in as a deformed Shamathe child, who brought you up, who taught you the secrets of Equiem magick and how to channel it and how to ease away your pain, milk away your suffering, how to change your fucking shell into something that wouldn’t get you burned at the stake as a witch or demon or devil. Because that’s what you are, Kiki, a fucking devil.

  Go to Hell. Burn in the Furnace. Suffer in the Chaos Halls.

  I am already there, Kiki, my darling sister. Would you care to join me?

  Kiki leapt forward, and her blade pressed against Aeoxir’s throat, cold iron jerking up to lift his head so his eyes met hers.

  “I thought your friends would help,” she snarled, Suza’s poison still ripe in her mind, her brain fluttering as she wondered what the fuck she should do. It wasn’t their aim to destroy the bastard elf rats; the idea was to make them pure again. To save them in some twisted logic that harked back ten thousand years to the time when their decadent ancestors had persecuted a noble race. This fight, here and now… well, it wasn’t right.

  “We fight alone,” said Aeoxir, smoothly, eyes fixed on hers.

  “And you die alone?”

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “We work together. As a team. As a unit. The Iron Wolves.”

  “Interesting.”

  Aeoxir’s back was against a tree – and he simply melted into it. Kiki blinked, and in reflex stabbed forward her sword, the point of which embedded in solid wood. She whirled, fast, and saw the other Tree Stalkers still standing – immobile. Watching. Like sentinels. Dek cast a glance back at her, his own black sword out, his face grim as the Reaper.

  Before Kiki could even react to Aeoxir’s disappearance, a savage wind howled down the forest road, kicking up leaves and branches and pine needles. It screamed, and roared: a primeval thing, a raw elemental, like a wall of sheer force that slammed down, nearly bowling Dek and Zastarte over, and sending Kiki skidding across the ground still
upright, her hair whipping around her head, her face filled with pain.

  The wind dropped as suddenly as it came.

  Kiki threw a glance to Dek, who shrugged.

  Then it roared again, a solid wall of force that cannoned down the forest road, stirring up great piles of debris into a howling, spitting tunnel of branches, leaves and pine needles. Kiki started moving up the road with great, exaggerated steps, towards Dek and Zastarte who were watching the other four Tree Stalkers with suspicion and the threat of violence. Kiki found herself in the middle of the road, buffeted, her shouted words whipped away in an instant. She started to slide again, for the force was incredible, and Dek turned as if to move towards her, to offer help…

  Overhead, two great oaks suddenly seemed to flex, leaning over the road towards Kiki who blinked, mouth dry, fear slamming into her mind as her hands raised above her to protect herself, and the great oaks loomed, branches stretching towards her with massive cracks and creaks and snaps. Thin roots slithered across the floor – pale white, anaemic, glistening with oil and sap – and began wrapping around her boots. She screamed, but the panicked noise was snapped away by the howling wind. Dek tried to run to her, but another tree bent, then slapped sideways, smacking into him, sending him flying into the darkness of the wintry undergrowth. All was chaos, all was bedlam, all was anarchy. Darkness fell like velvet dropped over the sun and moon and stars. Kiki found she could not move, through fear, because of the storm that screamed against her, and then roots whipped around her feet, and came snapping from the storm to fasten around her arms and body and throat. The ancient oaks flexed, and she was lifted screaming into the air, held apart like some religious icon, some virgin to be sacrificed, and panic slammed into her and down her and through her and she was completely at the mercy of the forest, of the trees, and of the creature that controlled them – Aeoxir, the elf rat, the High Lord of the Heartwood. Kiki felt herself stretched wide, and she knew with utmost certainty that this ancient woodland could wrench her apart in an instant and the irony ripped through her worse than any instant honey-leaf high; she’d thought she could beat the Tree Stalkers with good hard iron. How wrong she had been. How wrong.

  And you deserve it, bitch, as you deserve every unpleasantness they throw at you…

  Well that makes me feel better. The only consolation is that when I die, you die with me.

  No! I live!

  No, I understand you now, Suza, you piggy-back on my existence, on my survival; you are a fucking parasite of the worst order, you were a leech on your husband, working him into the ground until he died and you were free, and now you’re a parasitical virus in my mind sending me over the edge for a whim, or for some petty personal revenge that you think you’re entitled to. Well you’re not, fucker. Because when I die, when I snuff out of existence, then you die with me.

  No! impossible!

  Look inside yourself. We are joined. We have always been joined by that same blood mother bitch who carried us; only I was a deformed fucking nightmare, and you were the pretty little blonde bitch. Mummy’s little girl who got everything she ever wanted, and wanted for nothing, and I was jealous, and I despised you, I admit, but then we always get what we deserve, don’t you think? And you got dead. The problem here, bitch, is that when I die – and you probably think I deserve that – then you die with me. You’re a malingering spirit because you’re hooked on to me; in to me. But trust me when I say I’m going to Hell and beyond. I’m going to the Furnace. And you’re coming with me.

  That is... impossible!

  Think about it. But don’t take too long, lest these oaks rip my arms and legs free…

  And the pathway opened. It blazed like a bright golden trail before her, and Kiki felt the power, as if it resided in a vast golden lake beneath the surface of the planet, and all she had to do was reach down ever-so-gently and dip her finger into this well of massive energy. And she did. She reached down. And the glowing gold opened before her. Eternal. A gathering of life and power and mana and purity. Pure energy. Pure life-force.

  Kiki leaned forward a little.

  Reached up, and brushed a few strands of hair from her face.

  She reached into the power of the Shamathe. Left by the old gods. Left by the bad gods. Left by the Equiem.

  It flowed inside her, like a new best friend, like a returned lover, like an infusion of purity.

  And she welcomed it.

  Dek wheezed in the darkness, feeling battered and beaten. He vomited into the woodland debris, and the world felt the wrong way round and the bad way up. Stars spun in his head and he realised that fucking tree had cracked two ribs. “That motherfucker,” he snarled, and got to his knees, and clambered to his feet, dizzy and puking, and started staggering back towards the road, and the sound of Kiki screaming…

  He accelerated and realised he’d lost his sword. In the glow he could see Zastarte stood, frozen, and to the right the other four Tree Stalkers, motionless, watching, smiling, aware that their leader Aeoxir could handle one little Iron Wolf…

  “No!” he bellowed, words lost in the vastness of the forest and the howling storm as he saw the oaks shift, settle backwards, their roots and branches curled around Kiki, stretching her to the limit of human endurance and physical torture. He stumbled forward, hands clawing the soil, tripping over branches and fallen logs, his boots scrabbling in rotting leaves, his whole being stretching forward, yearning to be close to Kiki in this, her moment of death.

  A noise boomed through the forest. It was so deep it was beyond human hearing, but came up through Dek’s boots and belly and made him instantly vomit yet again. He hit the ground on his knees, and bright light washed over the scene as if the sun had exploded. He saw the four elf rat Tree Stalkers picked up and tossed away like dry stick kindling. The roots and branches holding Kiki in thrall whipped away as if cut by razors, snapping back and slapping other trees and the woodland floor. And yet Kiki still hung there, rotating softly and bathed in a golden glow. The booming sound, like the charging pulse of the ocean in the deepest caverns beneath the waves, rose up and up and up through the ground and trees and forest, and the oaks that had ensnared Kiki wavered, then bent backwards and their roots tore from the earth with terrible shrieks and then went spinning off through the woodland, knocking aside a hundred trees each. Dek ducked as one huge oak, easy three hundred years old, whirred above his head like cast-off driftwood, its bulk the largest moving thing Dek had ever seen in his life, its mass carving a wide path through the woodland that would last for a hundred years.

  And then the storm died. And silence fell.

  And Kiki hit the ground with a thud.

  Dek floated for a while, and then consciousness drifted slowly back to him. He was lying on his side, curled in a tight ball, an embryo again. His ears were ringing, his mouth and throat burning with a dull throb, as if he’d been screaming until his lungs burst; but he did not remember. He breathed deep the scents of winter woodland, mud, damp undergrowth, mould and the aroma of decay. He forced open his eyes, which were filled with grit. The world swung into a lazy, blurred lack of focus. Dek rolled to his knees. He felt as if he’d been pounded with helves. He crawled forward, and soft, blurred light, a diffusion of reality, gradually moved into recognisable focus.

  The dawn had come, spilling wintry light through the high treetops. The world was white and green, and the gods only knew what time it was; how long Dek had been enveloped in the bitter wings of unconsciousness.

  He was lost. Disorientated. He crawled forward for a while, pausing to cough up balls of phlegm and spit them out. What he’d give for a long, straight glass of cool, fresh water.

  He reached the edge of the road and, slowly, recognition tumbled into place like the levers inside a lock. And there was Kiki, lying on her back in the middle of the road. Around her was devastation. It looked like a world-killing hurricane had torn through the forest, destroying everything in its path, uprooting mammoth trees whole and flinging them around a
s if they were children’s toys. Zastarte knelt over Kiki, and Dek watched for a moment, frowning, confused, for the scene did not look quite right. And then he realised Zastarte was talking to her, obviously trying to rouse her.

  Dek forced himself to his feet, and Zastarte turned upon hearing his approach. He gave Dek a bleak smile.

  “The horses have gone.”

  “How is she?”

  “This little lady? She’s fine. All her signs seem normal, she’s just in a really deep, deep sleep.”

  “What the fuck did she do to them?”

  “The Tree Stalkers? Way over there, and there, and there,” Zastarte gestured, and grinned. “In a hundred pieces, I expect.”

  Dek nodded, and knelt by Kiki’s side. He reached out and touched her cheek with uncharacteristic gentility. His bear’s paws, with their scars and half-finished tattoos, looked strangely out of place against Kiki’s pale skin.

  Dek looked round at Zastarte. “Do you think you can track the horses?”

  “I can try.”

  “And we’ll need our weapons as well.” Dek scratched his cheek, then shook Kiki gently. “Wake up, Keeks. Time to wake up.”

  She roused slowly, and was confused for long moments, staring at Dek without recognition. And then she sat up, and gazed around.

  “Shit. Did I do this?”

  “Yep. And destroyed the Tree Stalkers into the bargain, by the looks of things. I still think we should get moving, though. Who knows what other freaks of nature are on our trail?”

  Kiki nodded, and Dek helped her to her feet. She groaned.

  “What is it?”

  “I hurt. I hurt everywhere.”

  Dek took her face in both hands, and leaned forward to kiss her. “I thought you were going to die,” he whispered.

  “Takes more than the elf rats’ finest to murder me,” she croaked, and stumbled, Dek catching her before she hit the ground. She leaned against him, encircled by his massive pit fighter’s arms, and grinned.

  “You look like trampled horse shit.”