Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (The Above Book 1)

by Van Allen Plexico

  “And even more while you were away,” Alaria said. “Some of it he might invent, though we are not terribly sure of that, and he has never said; other things he acquires in various locales throughout the infinite planes. But, somehow, he has always had a knack for finding the best items. The most useful gadgets.”

  “That would not be my reason for visiting,” I said. “I believe there are answers to be found there. I think he knew far more about what is happening right now than he let on.”

  “Perhaps it will be a profitable and beneficial visit for all concerned, then,” Alaria said.

  I started to voice my agreement, when suddenly I felt my feet leaving the ground. Stars swam about my head, gravity did a flip-flop, and the trees flew by, sideways. Then someone turned out the lights and the troubles of the world just drifted away. Big time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I opened my eyes carefully and looked up at the ground; at the green, green grass and the occasional patches of sand and mud, spinning lazily above me. Trees, growing from their leafy limbs down below, all the way up to their winding roots, far up in the sky, whirled past in a circle. My left leg, or as much of it as I could feel—and something about that fact struck me as odd, but I was not sure exactly how, at the moment—dangled out beside me. My right leg, in a similar state of numbness, save for a strange, tugging sensation, extended straight down toward the blue, blue sky, far below.

  I dwelt on all of this sensory input, considered it carefully, and concluded one thing: I was about to be sick.

  Squeezing my eyes tightly shut again, I waited, and the wave of nausea passed, mercifully, without becoming productive. I breathed in and out, slowly and deliberately. Something nagged at me. Something was wrong, beyond an upset stomach. The world—something about the world was not right. But what?

  Carefully I eased one eye open, peeking out, afraid the sickness would hit me again. This time I found myself staring into another eye, all sparkly with a thousand different colors. Recoiling momentarily, I calmed myself when I realized that I knew that eye. There was only one—or, rather, two—of them in the entire universe.

  “Alaria?” I whispered through lips I realized were as numb as my legs.

  “Mrgghhhh.”

  Not the reaction I was hoping for. I closed my eyes again, struggling to think, to kick my mostly dead brain into gear. Blue ground. Green sky. Gravity… wrong!

  Upside down. I was upside down. But why? The nausea returned, but I forced it away through sheer force of will. My mind was working now, after a fashion, and I focused on the situation with all my determination.

  Hanging. I was hanging upside down, and so was Alaria. And even more than that: we had been… drugged?

  Back through memories I pushed, striving to remember… But it was like walking through molasses. I had to jump all the way back to a time I somehow knew was a good bit earlier, when Alaria had first joined us and we had set off for… for Arendal’s sanctum.

  We.

  We?

  I opened my eyes again, watching the world spin around me slowly, until Alaria’s own spinning, upside-down form passed by. And then: trees, trees, trees… Alaria again.

  Who was missing? Someone…

  Evelyn!

  But where…

  “Alaria.”

  I said her name louder, but this time she made not even another gurgling sound. Her mouth hung open, seemingly lifeless.

  “Alaria!”

  “So. Awake. Good.”

  The words were twisted, bitten off, and oddly pronounced; they sounded as though they were spoken with vocal cords not meant to carry speech. They came from somewhere above me—below me—wherever. From the ground, off to one side. I waited patiently till my slow spin pointed me in that direction, and I leaned up as best I could, striving to see who had spoken. Soon enough, I saw, and my memories received another jolt, and things became clearer.

  A tall, extremely thin being stood at the edge of the clearing we occupied. His skin, brown mottled with green here and there, resembled tree bark in texture. His bare feet splayed out at the ends like roots. A long, narrow nose dominated his smallish face, along with two beady red eyes. He wore no clothes. As I looked at him, and as he became aware I was looking at him, he hopped back and forth from one foot to the other.

  “Yassili,” I said.

  Possibly the most reclusive of us all, Yassili claimed dominion over the plant kingdom, and generally despised interaction with anything that did not sprout from the soil. Rarely had I encountered him in all the years past, but still I knew him. He was one of us, yet not one of us, and I had never made the slightest effort to recruit him or even get to know him. And now here he was, in the—flesh? Fiber? Chlorophyll? —and I had cause to regret that earlier neglect.

  “You… are enjoying… view… of my forest, yes?” he asked in his maddening, halting way. “Unique per-perspective… you have now… I think.”

  Ignoring him, I sought the hum of the Power flowing through me. It was not there. Had the Fountain been shut off again? No, somehow I knew it had not; I could feel, just below the surface, the usual buzzing of the Fountain’s energies radiating outward through all the planes. It was still there; I simply could not access it.

  Drugs. It had to be drugs. Somehow, Yassili had drugged me; apparently, he had done the same to Alaria. As she swept past again, I could see the thick vines that bound her, wrapped tightly around most of her body, suspending her about ten feet above the ground from their connections high up in the trees. I could feel them around me, too, though one of my legs dangled free.

  Yassili’s upside-down form approached us slowly, circling warily about the clearing in which we hung. One long, wiry arm, knobby and branchlike, folded out and prodded at Alaria, producing a delirious moan from her. He greeted the sound with a broad, repulsive, toothy grin. His hair, ratty and dangling like moss from one side of his head, shook back and forth as he trotted around to me and repeated the poking, prodding procedure.

  I glared at him, searching my contorted thoughts for the right approach, still not feeling completely myself or entirely confident in my potential actions.

  “You… disappoint… me,” he said then, his face somehow even more hideous upside-down. “You… are… prince… of lies. Master…of deception. And yet…” He grinned again, even wider. “…And yet Yassili capture you… so easy.” He dragged the next-to-last syllable out to the point that I wanted to punch him, and would have, had my arms not been bound tightly to my side by ropelike vines. I became aware at that moment, of course, that my nose itched terribly. What a surprise.

  Shaking my head in a vain attempt to clear it further, I focused my attention on him as he continued to circle about us. I needed to buy time until I could regain my wits, perhaps give Alaria a chance to wake up, too, and generally figure out some sort of strategy for dealing with this annoying, walking foliage.

  “What is it you want, Yassili?” I asked, as politely as I could manage.

  “Hah. From you? Nothing.”

  He wagged a bony, sticklike finger at me.

  “From the others, though…”

  The grin again.

  “I… will… negotiate… with… Baranak…”

  He snorted a bizarre sort of laugh.

  “And then we… shall… see!”

  “You have to be kidding me,” I said, as much to myself as to him. After everything I had survived to this point, the walking houseplant of the gods was going to turn me in?

  I started to say something else to him, possibly antagonistic, probably insulting, when I felt the drug seeping into my system again. Yassili had not approached any closer; it had to be the vines. The same vines that held us secure and dangled us from the trees also administered some sort of sedative. My thoughts were swimming again, blurred and fuzzy as rational thought slipped slowly, steadily away…

  Smoke. The sudden, pungent smell of smoke pierced through the veil clouding over my mind, and revived me somewhat. I
definitely smelled something, somewhere, burning.

  Yassili must have smelled it, too, for at that moment he leaped back from Alaria and me and whirled around in a circle, his face contorting with rage and fear, frantically dancing from one foot to the other, looking, looking…

  From out of the underbrush across the clearing charged a figure in black. I fought against the sedative and stared, trying to make out who or what it was. One of the Dark Men? Here? Had things just gone from very, very bad to exponentially worse?

  But no, it was not a Dark Man—or, at least, like no Dark Man I had yet encountered. This person, though clad in black, sported a short, bobbed blonde hairdo. I blinked, fighting against the returning mental haze, recognizing who it was.

  “Evvvlnnn…”

  She did not pause to acknowledge my slurred reaction. She simply rushed forward, brandishing something in her right hand.

  As Yassili saw her coming and moved to face her, the vines and bushes all around the clearing sprang to life, crowding in toward him protectively, moving to interpose themselves between him and his attacker.

  Evelyn raised her hand, which I could see now held… a gun? Yes, a pistol. She fired; it made a soft, popping sound. Yassili stumbled forward and fell, tumbling over the grass and dirt.

  “Staaaaaa… baaaackkk…” was all I could manage by way of warning to her, but she advanced anyway, the weapon still pointed at Yassili.

  Sure enough, he started to rise again, indecipherable words sounding from his twisted throat. He made it to his knees, reaching out for her, before she fired the weapon again. Pop. He fell, and this time he did not move.

  Instantly the vines holding Alaria and myself released their grip, and we fell. Fortunately, the thick grass cushioned our impact somewhat, as we had virtually no control over our muscles. The vines over our heads now dangled limp and lifeless; the attacking plants around the perimeter collapsed back into their normal, vegetative state.

  Managing to roll over onto my back, I raised my head somewhat and looked around. Alaria was awake now, but barely able to move. She lay nearby, both hands pressed to her eyes. Evelyn stood over me, a big smile on her face, her duffle bag slung over one shoulder, one of my pistols gripped in her hand. She indicated the gun: “This seemed like a good time to try it out,” she said.

  I found I could smile back.

  “Yes—I think it was a good decision,” I said, my words only slightly slurred.

  I tried to stand, failed, and sat back on the ground, barely sitting up. Pins and needles assailed my extremities.

  “Yassili… attacked us?”

  It was Alaria, finding her voice again. I nodded, then said, “Yes,” when I realized she still had not uncovered her eyes.

  “I do not recall that,” she said. “What happened?”

  “I’m… not sure, myself,” I replied.

  “He jumped us as we were passing through this clearing,” Evelyn said. “He hit both of you with something big and solid—I didn’t see exactly what. In the confusion, I managed to slip into the bushes.”

  “Good work,” I said, and Alaria, somewhat reluctantly, echoed me.

  Evelyn gazed down at me, looking quite pleased with herself.

  “We must have been out for a little while,” I said then. “What kept you?”

  She scowled at me, then patted the bag that hung from her shoulder. “I got separated from the guns when we were attacked. Something grabbed them away before I knew what was happening.” She shrugged. “Afterward, the green guy never seemed to pay me any attention—he was totally absorbed in you two—so I went looking for them. Found them, finally. But then two very animated fern trees wanted to play ‘keep-away’ with the bag.”

  I nodded. It sounded no more fantastical than just about anything else I had experienced recently.

  “So, how did you get it back from them?”

  She smiled and patted a small bulging pocket on the hip of the black flight suit she wore—the one she had borrowed from my ship’s stores.

  “Fortunately, you keep an emergency kit in your suits, and it included an igniter.” The smile became a grin. “You would be surprised how accommodating a giant, killer plant can become when you set fire to it.”

  I laughed, and so did Alaria. I glanced over at the flame-haired goddess, and saw that she was regarding Evelyn with newfound respect—which, for Alaria, in relation to mortals, basically meant with any respect at all.

  Gingerly stretching my legs out before me, I kneaded them, trying to work some feeling back into them. After a few minutes, I found I could stand, and so I made my way, stumblingly, over to Yassili. He lay in a twisted heap, his long, gangly arms and legs splayed out around him. I contemplated his unconscious form, thinking of the few times I had encountered him before. None of those incidents registered as a particularly pleasant memory. Idly I wondered if I had wronged him at some point in the distant past. Then again, no one else had ever much cared for him, either. He had never been terribly social. For many years, he preferred to spend his time in his large garden outside the City. Eventually, he abandoned even that, and moved out into the wild. Over time he had grown more “wild” himself, his body changing along with his voice, and with his mind. Rumor had it he had used the Power to bring this about willingly, along with gaining some mastery over plant life itself. Evidently this was all true. I shook my head, thinking of his clumsy attack on us, and how it had nearly succeeded. How he would have sold us to Baranak for something as pitiful as slightly better treatment in his rare dealings with the City. Had he simply come to me for help, in normal times, I would have aided him, I believe. Certainly I would have sided with him against Baranak and his minions, and would have treated him far better than they ever did, had the Golden City been mine to rule. Now, though, I looked down at him and felt nothing but anger and revulsion and disgust.

  “I believe I have come up with the ultimate proof that I am not guilty of the murders,” I said then.

  “Oh, indeed?” Alaria looked over at me, interested. “And what might that be?”

  “The survivors,” I replied.

  She raised an eyebrow, waiting.

  “Because most of those still around are not the ones I would have chosen to leave alive.”

  Her expression soured. “Present company excepted, of course,” she said.

  “Oh, quite so,” I replied with a small bow. Evelyn laughed.

  I bent down and examined Yassili’s head and neck, where Evelyn’s first shot had struck him, and found no wounds whatsoever.

  “What is it?” she asked, leaning down beside me.

  Alaria came up behind her, peering over her shoulder to see.

  “It did exactly what it was supposed to do—what all my weapons are supposed to do,” I replied, continuing to examine Yassili’s body for wounds like the one Arendal received. “It stunned him and drained his energy. The second shot knocked him out completely; he will probably sleep for a day or more.”

  Evelyn kneeled down beside me and studied him carefully.

  “No burn mark. No hole.”

  “Right.” I frowned. “That is a good thing, but still—“

  “Why did it affect Arendal the way it did?”

  I bit my lip, thinking.

  “The gun I shot him with. I’ve been thinking it was one of mine, one from my original production run, before the rebellion. It certainly looked like one of them. But—“

  “You didn’t have it when we first met,” Evelyn said. “Where did you get it?”

  I told them both about finding it on the table in the otherwise empty storeroom on the island. I did not mention the “note” that had accompanied it.

  “Someone left it for you?” Evelyn asked, surprised.

  She frowned, thinking, then said, “Someone wanted you to have a more deadly version of your own weapons? That doesn’t sound like any of the gods I’ve met so far. Quite the opposite.”

  I looked from Evelyn to Alaria, who had said nothing during th
is conversation. She merely shrugged, shaking her head.

  “I suppose we will find out soon enough,” I said, finally. “There are other mysteries that require answers before that one.”

  We started forward again, and then Evelyn asked, “What about him? Yassili? Do we just leave him there?”

  “He should be fine,” I said. “Better than he deserves, anyway.”

  Apparently Alaria concurred, for she never even looked back. On she led us through the forest, until we came to a spot, unremarkable from most any other spot we had passed through, where she raised her hand and brought us to a halt. Extending that hand out from her body, she made a slight twisting motion, and another portal sparkled into existence before us.

  “Only a couple more jumps after this, I think,” she said, and we followed after her.

  Her pace was quite good, and Evelyn and I pushed ourselves to keep up. The remainder of our journey carried us through a strange set of locales—a rocky canyon, done all in oranges and purples, was my favorite—though not much stranger than any I usually choose when I map out a new path. One generally seeks routes that contain mostly clement environments—not too hot, not too cold, not too little oxygen in the air, no acid rain, and so forth. Scenic routes are nice, and are generally appreciated by guests when we choose not to travel alone, even if they take a little longer to traverse. For our purposes now, however, I was hoping Alaria would skip the sights and concentrate on the most direct path to—to wherever we were going.

  She must have done this, for at the end of only two or three hours of hiking we emerged from a sparse clump of dying trees and found ourselves walking along the edge of a steep cliff, and there she signaled a halt.

  I looked around, now that we were out in the open, trying to get a sense of where we were. Dusky mountains towered behind us, the sun dropping below them even as I looked. Their ragged slopes did not level out to flat, boulder-strewn land until just a few dozen yards from where we stood. In the other direction, the cliff dropped off dramatically, giving the overall impression that we occupied a narrow strip of horizontal land in an otherwise nearly vertical world. There was little else to see; the bottom of the cliff lay far below, obscured in fog, and while there appeared to be another, matching cliff face, it had to be nearly a mile away from us, across what must have been a vast ravine. As nightfall crept over us, the wind picked up, tugging at my long coat with surprising force. It was getting cooler, and there was no shelter to be found, that I could see, anywhere.