by T. C. Rypel
“Watch,” Shem told her, passing his hands before the construct in such a way as to reassemble it into a recognizable structure. It grew in the vista before her, now occluding the hillside view. “See how insignificant it appears from this vantage.”
And she did feel a sensation of headiness. For an instant Valentina was a goddess, overlooking a tiny castle in her thrall.
But at her side, Shem’s fair brow deepened and clouded over with a fatal realization.
* * * *
Within the fortress, the questing party found that suddenly normal, navigable space had returned. For whatever unfathomable reason, the magic had departed. Walls, doors and windows behaved truly, serving up visions of physical reality.
“Our advantage now,” Gonji told them through gritted teeth, once they had accepted the return of the reality they had known. “To the gatehouse, where Simon left Valentina, and Lola and the bird-woman!”
“Our advantage!” Buey echoed.
The small band of warriors moved off with renewed determination.
But then, with the colossal upheaval that ensued, shattering all physical boundaries and driving them to the brink of madness, it was suddenly no one’s advantage.
* * * *
Valentina gulped and recovered her senses. She turned from her view of the Fortress and snapped Shem from his own disquieting vision.
“Shem, the dead pursue us. Kill us. Do you know how? Is there anything you can tell me that might help us against this sorcery?”
“Time suspension, perhaps,” he said simply, absently. “Yes. I can’t explain further, but yes, it’s possible.” He seemed to be intent on watching the castle a moment. Then: “Do you—do you have a lover among those doomed men?”
She was taken aback by the sudden candor. To see her blanching expression, Shem blushed, aware that he’d laid his soul bare. He looked awkward and uncomfortable. “I am sorry, I—”
“No, it’s all right. No, it’s…it’s funny, you see, I—I’m among the best friends I’ve ever had. People I’m willing to die for. But there’s none that I would call my lover, though I’ve called many men lovers when I wouldn’t have called them friends.” She snickered at the curious irony she’d uncovered. “I thought to give my flesh to you, if it would have helped.” Her brow knit, now, to hear her own frankness, to see Shem avert his face in embarrassment. “But I wouldn’t have done that to you. Not to you. I—I have an affliction, you see…”
Shem looked back to her. Slowly, his expression opening to her, he moved nearer. He touched her hand. Understanding lit his deep blue eyes. “You are soiled, nothing more.” He smiled, as if comforting an unduly troubled child.
Valentina’s eyes went wide. She experienced a depth of embarrassment, to hear his words, that made her want to run. She drew back, but Shem took her hand again.
“Come with me. The child sleeps. Nothing can harm it here. This is the arch of the Architect-god himself. Once, legend tells us, it was the first he created. The first gateway by which beings of flesh and seeking mind might seek his bounty. The inscription read, Et in Arcadia Ego…Sum—‘And in Arcadia, I am.’ I will show you another.”
She went willingly, drawn by his gentle spell. They walked the hills for a time and through two gateways in which he bade her not to look about, lest she see things best withheld. She found herself complying, resisting her incidental curiosity in favor of a burning desire to reach their destination.
When they reached a second arch, this one undamaged, he translated its inscription: And in Arcadia, I heal.
“Elixir vitae,” Shem said, waving a hand over the lush garden that sprawled before a cataract of crystal-clear water. “Panacea for many ills of the human corpus.”
He plucked a yellow blossom and laid it on a cut on Valentina’s arm. There was an effervescent effect, and the wound’s lips began to shrink, to close, though the residue of dried blood remained. He drew the astonished woman toward a mossy bank and pointed.
“The aquamarine growth. A fungus. Three applications, one each by the suns of this sphere. You first inhale its vapors long enough to induce sleep. The second day you drink a distillate of a small quantity. The third day, you fast, and at nightfall you indulge in a quantity, raw, no larger than will fit into your palm…and you are cleansed.”
She was thunderstruck by the simple, saving eloquence of what he said.
“It is evening. Will you…sleep here tonight?” Shem’s voice, breathless, had diminished to the volume of a moth’s wing-beats.
And then Valentina began to quiver, for thoughts of her syphilitic affliction had now jarred something loose among her guilt-bound memories.
She had at last remembered the face—the touch—the sweating grasp like so many others she’d known. The same boorishness, braggadocio. Another virile specimen who would ply her the way he just knew she was born to be plied. She remembered all but the name of Fernandez. And she knew what she must do.
“Shem—” she said, fighting for control. “Shem, you must send me back to my friends. I have an—an unfinished quest.”
“No,” he protested. “Did you not listen? I told you they were doomed. Something is happening in that tortured nexus of worlds. You cannot go back there!”
“But why?” Valentina’s eyes went wide with apprehension.
“Because the gateways are closing in this place. That fortress is enfolding back into its center. All inside it will share the fate of the meddlers who fashioned it so perversely.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ll be compressed—crushed within it.”
“Shem—you must do something!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
They were naked sacrifices for the entertainment of a leering cosmos.
To the perspective of the inhabitants of the Fortress of the Dead, Wunderknecht and assassin alike, it seemed as though they’d been jolted by the whim of some capricious god, their tilting grounds wrenched apart, such that they stood in awe aboard chunks of flying debris in an immense ether-bound arena.
Just as things had appeared to revert to normality, there had been a jarring impact, knocking them all off their feet. When they had gathered their senses, they found themselves floating in a shimmering, murky void on fifty-foot sections of the exploded castle. The jagged segments drifted slowly on straight lines—vertical, horizontal, and skewed—passing one another until each reached the edges of their mist-bordered sphere of containment. Moving through the barrier, they would find themselves momentarily disoriented, realizing finally that they had resumed their inexorable course at the extreme opposite end of the line from which they’d begun.
But the next pass brought each piece of castle ground or wall or turret nearer to the others than the last. And nearer to the trembling center of that sphere. It was a shrinking, spherical arena, with a dreadful core that looked like a living void. A hungering darkness.
For a brief interval all thought of combat was forgotten.
Gonji stood with his swords lashed to his back, his retrieved bow hanging limply in one hand, peering outward from a chunk of middle bailey ground bordered on one side by a sheared-off section of the main gatehouse’s tall inner towers. He scanned the incredible phenomenon with less sense of doom than of wonder. He could make out figures on the truncated air vessels, but none seemed near enough to engage, whether friend or foe. His mass of debris was on an outer plane, cutting a short arc from the enveloping sphere, but growing larger with each pass as he moved toward the center.
But Gonji and his band all soon noticed what occurred when a fragment reached the exact center of the sphere: It dissolved into nothingness, as if fed from front to rear into an invisible devouring maw.
Gonji could make out two figures on a horizontal path near the center, racing about in frenzy on the bakehouse roof. He
recognized Simon first, then saw that it was Cardenas with him. They had perceived their peril and were frantically searching for a means to survival. Gonji could only watch helplessly, from perhaps hundreds of yards away.
He saw Simon’s leap down onto a section of marble floor that passed below. Cardenas lost his nerve, waiting until the next agonizing pass to drop down through twenty feet of air, nearly missing the banquet hall section, shrilling with terror as Simon grabbed him, near an edge, and pulled him to safety.
And then a crossbow quarrel shattered on the wall behind the samurai. Gonji searched below him—the undead murderer Jurgen Kleinhenz was reloading from a fractured piece of the kitchens and larders.
“No steadier hand than a dead one,” Gonji taunted, nocking, aiming and planting a shaft in Kleinhenz’s chest—with no effect save moral victory.
There would be no truce with the undead, even in these mutually destructive circumstances.
Kleinhenz passed through the barrier, his perch reappearing far above, the killer well covered. No opportunity to try anything else.
Gonji looked back to where Simon and Cardenas crouched near Klank LoPresti’s dead body, and the samurai gnashed his teeth in anger. The ground they’d occupied before had now diminished weirdly in perspective as it neared the arena’s deadly center. Another chamber’s broken wall descended past Gonji’s viewpoint on an oblique angle. On the floor was the corpse of Nassim Patel, his head in grisly ruin.
* * * *
Luigi Leone had come face-to-face with the savage Ottef Abu-Nissar just before the massive shock that heralded the unfolding of the castle. When he recovered his senses, he flicked horrified one-eyed glances from his amazing circumstances to his strangely inert opponent. Abu-Nissar’s cat had strayed too far from him and now occupied a different purchase: the crenellated disc of a turret below them.
Abu-Nissar lay still, and the trembling Leone drew his sword and began to slash at the unmoving form, hoping desperately that hacking it to pieces would prove lastingly effective.
Buey drifted by, still sorting himself out, quaking with disorientation. He was on the overturned ceiling of a bedchamber, shards of glass from a chandelier all about him.
“Hang him, Leone!” Buey was shouting, recognizing who it was. “Strangle him.”
Ahmed Il-Mohar descended on a bizarre perch—the steps of the central keep, about eighty feet above and to the right of the right-angled wall of the ward on which Leone hacked frantically.
“No, he must be hanged!” the Morisco bellowed across the ether, concurring with Buey.
Ahmed eased toward the jaggedly crumbled edge of the stairs, then scrambled back again when he saw the ghastly, fathomless space beneath him. He hugged an ashlar block to forestall his vertigo. His staircase’s course drew him nearer to Leone, but as he passed he forgot the scene rising past him now and could think only of the proximity of his own death.
* * * *
Sergeant Orozco believed himself trapped in a nightmare. He recovered consciousness, his head caked with blood, every joint aching from his fall. He was in a now-exposed dungeon chamber, tipped slightly such that the drop into an abyss, below, yawned up at him. Fighting back a seizure of nervous tremors, he took stock of his situation. He saw the flatter, broader crag of stone-jutted land looming up below him like a rising leviathan. He would have to jump outward to make it. Quickly, before the moment passed—
He leaped, slamming down among the headstones of the graveyard that had occupied the grounds beyond the barbican.
Breathing heavily, heart thumping, he saw Wiemer clutching Lola around the neck on a strangely listing portion of the banquet hall gallery. It was wobbling slightly, like a spun platter. Rubbing his eyes, still refusing to believe the physical evidence of his bizarre environment, Orozco took aim with a pistol.
It had to be risked. The woman was likely lost anyway. And why not try it? None of this was real. He steadied his hand on top of an ancient gravestone. Clack. The pistol was empty. Orozco swore, as he vaguely recalled discharging it earlier.
This was not a dream. His mind screamed in rejection of it. But it was all too real.
He saw Cardenas on the banquet floor. Saw the leaping form of the now lupine Simon Sardonis, bounding atop a floating piece of the outer bailey wall to try to give chase to a temple cat and its assassin, several fragments away.
Orozco shook his head and licked his parched lips.
“Cardenas!” he blared, seeing the man hefting a pistol. “This one, Cardenas! Shoot this one!”
And then he lost his view of Wiemer and Lola, who screamed as she was wrenched back by her hair again.
* * * *
Cardenas looked up to the chunk of gallery that drifted by in a pattern that would cross the crumbled banquet hall’s, where he clung. He dimly heard Orozco’s shouts, wishing he could be left alone to die, caring nothing now for these people who had led him away as a captive, torn him from his family.
But in his bitterness he wished passionately to lash out at something, someone in this grotesque nightmare. It might as well be one of the undead assassins. His wheel-lock pistol clutched in a sweating fist, he drew a bead.
But then he saw that Wiemer used Lola for a shield, and he was moved by concern for the woman. Shaking as he was, he knew he couldn’t chance the shot. They passed by, Wiemer holding a grimacing Lola tighter and hissing his unholy laughter, as Cardenas withheld fire.
The solicitor cursed, then saw two deadly visions: Abu-Nissar’s scrabbling temple cat traversed a course toward its lifeless charge—chopped to pieces by Leone—that would soon bring it into Cardenas’ range. Secondly, the banquet hall chunk he occupied would soon pass through the sphere’s devouring center, taking him and Klank LoPresti’s corpse with it.
Cardenas raced about the rough-edged floor, saw the rising roof of the granary, thirty feet below. Shrieking a prayer for deliverance, he threw himself atop the thatched roof, crashing partway through, knocking the wind out of him. But he was safe from the center for now.
He passed through the misty barrier at the sphere’s edge, found himself moving upward through utter blackness for a long time, babbling in terror. He gasped with relief to pass back into the arena again but almost at once caught sight of the walking corpse Fernandez, who exchanged crossbow fire with an unseen archer. Then the gallery was descending toward Cardenas, though farther away now. He heard shouting—a shot behind him somewhere.
Sergeant Orozco was passing him on the far side of the gallery portion. He saw the sergeant aim and fire a pistol, cursing. He had missed his shot.
Now Wiemer was returning, much closer to Cardenas now, holding a knife at Lola’s throat, searching his late banquet-hall vessel for him. He saw the dead killer’s alarm in not finding him there. Cardenas laughed inside. He had fooled the dead creature. He had him dead to rights.
But then he glimpsed the temple cat falling—sailing down from above him like a bat, in a ghostly ballet, eerily slow, its limbs outspread. And on the periphery he saw Lola make her move, twisting out of Wiemer’s grasp to throw herself down on the gallery floor as they passed, very near. Wiemer snarled and went for her with the knife.
Cardenas made his decision. He held the pistol in both hands and fired the passing shot just as Wiemer took shocked note of his new position. The assassin was thrown back against the gallery wall, as Lola shrieked and shrieked hysterically, venting both revulsion and relief.
But then one of the snarling demon-cats slammed onto the granary roof near Cardenas, shook itself and charged at him with ferocious vengefulness. Cardenas brought out his dagger and braced for its charge. But the powerful beast bowled him over and found the unprotected flesh of his throat.
The solicitor from Barbaso’s last conscious thought was a crib memory of the broad moon-face of his paternal grandmother, looming down
at him. And then vision and memory and breath were all stilled at once.
* * * *
Having found the courage to leap, Ahmed, and the temple cat, arrived on Leone’s side-tipped bailey wall at almost the same time.
Leone and the Morisco angled their blades at the beast, keeping it at bay. The creatures were heart-freezingly lithe. Like a huge feline shape composed of fuming, sinuous smoke with lethal edges all a-gleam. Until they struck, with that awful predatory mass that seemed to form in the material world only when needed for savage mayhem.
Neither man possessed a pistol now. And Abu-Nissar was reviving, his severed parts rejoining, though displaying the hundred slash-marks of Leone’s concerted effort. He rose behind the embattled fighters, to hiss in ghoulish glee. His familiar had again brought him back to blasphemous life.
“Engage the killer, senor,” Ahmed said. “I will deal with this creature.”
“He’s too fast,” Leone said. “Anyway, I haven’t got any rope. We’ll have to kill that devil-cat.”
They lunged alternately at the temple cat, their timid thrusts falling short or evaded by the lithe creature. It was somewhat injured, though, either from its long fall from the granary to the bailey wall, or from a fellow warrior’s shaft or lead ball. Its limp was echoed in Abu-Nissar, who nonetheless came at them, minaciously tossing his scimitar from hand to hand.
Luigi steeled himself with several quick breaths and, abandoning all reason, tried to drop-kick the temple cat in a madly desperate move he’d often seen his dead friend Klank employ. But the cat lurched back effortlessly from the plunging swordsman and his wildly flashing blade.
Luigi nearly fell off the wall and into the abyss, his momentum carrying him between two merlons, from where he snared a one-armed purchase and sucked in a ragged breath, peering down into endless space below. He was helpless, as the temple cat came for him.