“Well, that's what we need,” said Liam.
Laurentinus hefted the barrel up and one of the other Cross Guard strapped it home with leather and a prayer.
Liam scrambled onto the horse’s back.
He heard a familiar war cry.
Looking back, Liam’s heart stopped.
Meg had flown down, javelins in her hands. She had killed two of Brax’s lizardmen cohort, but the others had their shields up. Sysminor casually backhanded the air. Meg darted upwards-
Too slow.
No.
That massive hand smashed into Meg.
Liam didn’t even realize he was screaming until the horse under him reared nervously. Meg smashed down into a collection of trees and was gone. Liam’s whole body felt cold.
Sysminor was looking right at him. He started to stomp forward, Brax and the other lizardmen flanking him. Liam’s hands clenched on the reigns. He swung the horse around, kneed it and fled.
Right into the canyon.
Meg is not dead, he thought. Dear God, she is not dead. If she is, I will find you, Jesus. I don’t care where I have to go, what I have to do, I will find you Jesus, and I will kick your fucking ass.
The horse charged into the canyon, which swept up to either side of Liam. The trees growing along the bottom grew close and thick and the foliage that covered the ground made it hard to see. Too hard to see. His horse stumbled into a hidden hole, its leg breaking with a hideous snap.
Liam went sprawling as the horse's piteous shriek fill the air. He scrambled to his feet, his head aching. The rig Laurentinus had made for the bomb snapped and the barrel went tumbling along the ground. Fortunately, it was still intact, though it had spilled a line of gunpowder from where it lay now to where Liam knelt.
The trees parted and Sysminor stepped forward, looming overhead.
“Army smashed,” he gurgled happily. “Reinforcements on on on the way.”
Brax rode around the gods legs, his raptor panting. Brax looked grim faced, sword drawn.
Sysminor shrank down. His body collapsed in on itself, and as it collapsed, the crude, jagged patterns seemed to grow more and more refined. Sculpted muscles were formed and the face became almost elven in its perfection. Those lips twisted into a broad smile and Sysmnior spoke and, for the first time, sounded…
Sane.
“Having all of my coding in one place helps immensely with the syntax,” he said, casually.
Brax stood behind him.
“You failed, Liam,” Sysminor said, walking forward, putting his foot on the barrell Liam had invested all his hopes in. “Nice try though. This bomb might have killed my physical sleeve if I didn’t have the control I have right now.” He shivered. “I have missed full sapience.”
Liam gulped, his hand still fastened around the wood.
“Now. I’ve killed your friend. I’ve killed your lover.” Sysminor shivered again. “I never understood the pleasure of revenge until I met you, Liam Vanderbilt.” He scowled. “I slept for uncounted eons, but then you had to tip the security systems of Purgatory off. Ares told me everything you did. You woke me, Liam, you woke me into this hell. Now, I will make Purgatory what it was meant to be.”
A rattling, crunching, crashing sound interrupted him.
Sysminor looked back.
Brax was already riding forward. Behind him, two of the wagons full of gunpowder were being dragged forward by a combination of leashed raptors and terrified looking horses.
Liam used his good hand to draw a striking crystal from his belt.
Brax’s clawed hand closed around the empty scabbard that hung along his back.
Sysminor stood and glared at the wagons as they charged towards him.
He lifted his hand.
Liam slashed the ground with the striking crystal. Sparks flared.
The gunpowder caught.
Brax lifted Liam and slung him over the raptor, then banked towards the wall of the canyon.
Syminor’s palm flared with energy.
The wagon slammed into a force field that shimmered to life around Sysminor. The whole thing shattered apart and filled with air with a haze of black pwoder and splintered wood. Sysminor laughed.
Then Sysminor heard the hissing. He looked down. Just before his shield had snapped up, the line of gunpowder had burned up to the edge of the godkiller bomb.
The bomb now trapped in the force field beside him.
“Oh,” he said.
Brax reached one of the tunnels leading into the Ancient ruins that threaded through the canyon. The raptor tripped on something and Brax and Liam went tumbling forward.
The shield filled with brightness. A searing white light, created by gunpowder amplified by crystal, contained and focused by a shield, all of it sending pure energy in the only direction it could escape.
Down.
Then the waste heat from the shield touched off the haze of gunpowder and splinters that still hung in the air.
The explosion sent the two men tumbling forward, rolling head over heels. The roaring sound dampened all sounds – and then became all the louder. The explosion which whumped upwards and filled the air with smoke started to go in reverse as the roar became a whistling screech. Air tore at Liam and Brax and Liam grabbed onto the wall of the cave. The air was rushing past him faster and faster as Brax closed his hands around Liam’s legs, holding on tight.
“What the fuck!?” Brax bellowed.
Liam looked past him – and saw that a swirling vortex of air was rushing downward.
Through the haze of dirt and debris, Liam could see that the ground where Sysminor had stood was now a perfectly circular tunnel, blasted down through the earthen bottom of the canyon.
And there, maybe a few hundred meters down, was the cold, pitiless glint of stars and the blackness of interstellar space.
Liam looked up, desperately, trying to see what the cave offered. He thought he recognized the symbols for a year ago. Tethis. The teleport shrine.
“Brax!” he shouted over the roar of the wind. “We’re in a teleport shrine!”
“And!?” Brax shouted back.
Liam blinked.
“I have a theory!”
His fingers loosened. He felt himself getting dragged towards the hole.
Brax’s hands were slipping from Liam’s ankles. Liam’s arm felt like it was about to tear out of his socket.
Liam closed his eyes and let go.
He skidded towards the exit.
He grabbed Brax with both arms, so they were almost one person.
Liam shouted.
“Emergency teleport!”
***
Pain.
Aches.
Color.
Lights?
Voice?
Voice. Definitely. Meg opened one eye. The voice was familiar.
“Meg? Meg! Meg!”
Liv. Didn’t Liv go running off with lizards? Meg reached up, and tried to grab for Liv’s throat. That sounded like a traitor thing to do, traitors got their necks slapped. Her hand was forced aside and everything came into focus with a rush of healing energy.
“Meg, godsfuckingdamn it, we need you to focus,” Liv snarled. “There’s a hurricane devouring the countryside and we need you!”
Meg blinked and sat up, hearing the roar of the wind. She was sitting in a clearing. The trees were all bowing and rustling and the dirt along the ground was blowing everywhere. She shook her head and saw that Neb was kneeling behind her. She smiled at her.
“I’m not the best healer, but,” she said, shaking her head.
Meg rubbed her head. She felt gummy blood, mixing with her hair.
“Okay, why do you need me? Please, explain slow, my head kind of hurts,” Meg said.
“Liam blew up Sysminor,” Liv said, shortly. “And now air is blowing out through a hole in the planet. We need to plug it.”
Meg was less shocked than she thought she should have been. She could see the edge of panic in Neb’s eyes,
and the harsh control on Laurentinus’ face. But her own ability to be surprised felt deadened by her aching head.
“A hole in the planet?” asked Meg, vaguely.
“Don't ask! But I think I know how we close it,” Neb said. “We use the last barrel of gunpowder to collapse the canyon wall on the hole. But we need you to put the bomb in the right place - the detonation needs to be inside the canyon wall, not merely at the top.”
Meg closed her eyes. “Racism?”
“What?” Neb asked, baffled.
“The valks are being racist?” she asked. “Won’t listen to landers?”
“There are no valks left,” Liv snapped. “They fled when you went down and Liam ran into the canyon. The whole fucking army’s fallen to pieces!”
Meg nodded.
“Better than racism,” she grunted. Then, shaking her head, she said: “Okay. So, um. Just to be clear, we’re going to fix the problem caused by a bomb with a bigger bomb”
“Smaller actually.” Neb said. “Like I said, we, uh, we're on the last barrel of gunpowder.”
Meg staggered to her feet. Her head pulsed with pain, pain that fled the instant Neb touched her fingers to her temples. “Right. Right. So, I get it in the wrong place and-”
“Everyone on Purgatory dies,” Laurentinus said.
Meg groaned.
“Be careful,” Neb said. “I’ve just healed the surface level pain. There’s deep injuries in here. If you strain yourself too much-”
Meg waved her hand dismissively. “It won’t matter if I fail, Neb..”
Her wings spread.
Then hit the air. Her head buzzed and she soared forward, her wings beating hard against the gale that was pushing her towards the valley. The scene below was that from a nightmare. The armies had smashed together and been torn apart, and now the wounded and the dying had been left behind. Leaderless and confused, with what seemed like the end of the world striking them with flying chunks of debris and kicked up dust, many wailed out to their gods, desperately begging for help.
No gods seemed to be forthcoming.
However, a small collection of Cross Guard, lizardmen, and a few Hellenic villagers had scraped together the last keg of gunpowder and were busily attaching a collection of leather straps to it. Meg landed beside them, her feet pressing to the ground. The ache in her head continued to pulse through her body. Meg gritted her teeth and ignored it. She grabbed onto the leather straps, hefting the bomb. It was heavy, but she could manage it. The straps helped a lot.
“Whose idea was this?” she shouted.
“Mine!”
Fizit, the spymaster of Brax’s army, looked straight at Meg, her face unreadable. Behind her, Meg could see that a whole wing of Brax’s army had arrived. But rather than coming to kill or capture, they came with healers and cots to take the wounded away from the gale.
Meg nodded curtly. She’d punch Fizit in her snout later. kicked herself into the air.
A sudden spell of dizziness struck her. One wing beat out of time.
She spun. Almost fell.
Then she forced herself back up, her arms straining. Meg beat as hard as she could, screaming mental obscenities at every single fucking valk who had ever been born. Her hands tightened around the leather straps.
She let the gale drag her backwards as she cupped her wings and caught the wind. Meg swept forward, her eyes narrowing against the wind and the grit and the debris. She felt as if she was falling. Her head spun. There was the canyon wall. And she saw her target: a shimmering golden light surrounded a crack in the canyon wall. Meg flung herself forward and brought her hands up. She jammed the bomb in, then beat her wings as hard as she could. She soared up and above the storm swirling underneath her. Looking down, she realized that in the eye of the storm, she could see a blackness deeper and darker than anything she had ever beheld in her life.
Pain shot through her head and her wings suddenly stopped working. She spasmed in the air..
Once more, she was falling – and her mind scattered backwards to the last time she had plunged into this fucking canyon.
The gale sucked her down.
The bomb went off underneath her.
There wasn’t actually that much debris, really. No more than a small landslide, though one boulder hit the hole with a shockingly loud crunch. But it was the lack of sound that was almost deafening to Meg. Her wings beat once, twice, and then she managed to slow herself so that she only hit the ground lightly. The air felt cold - as if the hole had sucked all the heat from the valley floor.
She lay there, face first, groaning.
“God,” she muttered, speaking not to any of the divine beings of Purgatory. Rather, she spoke to the god she was least sure existed, but knew was more important to her than any other.
For unlike every other god, this one mattered to her man.
“God, if you don’t have Liam pick me up and carry me home, I am going to make Golgotha seem like a fucking picnic.” She closed her eyes and tried to get her arms under her.
***
It felt a bit like being turned inside out, toenails first.
It felt a bit like having his nerves lit on fire.
It felt like an eternity.
It lasted less than five seconds – which, all things considered, was a good thing. If it had lasted longer, Liam might have gone completely mad.
And almost impossibly, it was even less pleasant than the last time Liam had been teleported. He tumbled free, hitting and skidding along the ground. A tail smacked him in the face and he spent a few moments wishing he had killed every last fucking lizardman on Purgatory. His hand went to his nose as he groaned.
“Well,” Brax said, his voice matter of fact. “We’re not dead, at least.”
“Or this is a shitty afterlife,” Liam said, pushing himself up. With his hand sliding away from his face. The two of them were in a... facility. Temple wasn’t the right word, not for this place. The walls were the same smooth black, but rather than having strange diagrams drawn on them, they were instead broken up by smooth glass windows. They looked outwards at distant cloud shrouded land. Looking left and right, Liam realized…
He could see Babylon out one window.
New Athens out the other.
“What the fuck?” Liam whispered.
Brax stood. He moved like an ancient man, his knees popping and clicking loud enough for Liam to hear it. But that wasn’t what made Liam jerk his head around to gape at Brax.
No.
It was the fact Brax wasn’t golden anymore.
His body was the normal vibrant hues of a lizardman. Blue scales along his back, yellow along his belly. An impressive set of swinging blue balls under his thighs – his loincloth was gone, as was his sword. Liam looked down at himself. He was naked too. He stood slowly, trying to not clap his hands over his junk.
“No homo,” he muttered.
“Huh?” Brax looked at him. Then, looking down at Liam’s crotch, he chuckled. “Wow, Liv wasn’t lying.”
“Excuse me?” Liam coughed, his whole body turning red.
Brax shook his head. “Now, let's go and che-” He lifted his arm to point down the corridor, towards the door that sat at the end of the hallway. “Ahhhhhh!”
His scream was loud, ladylike, and so un-Braxish that it almost startled a snort out of Liam. He shook his head as the other man looked down at himself and really seemed to notice himself. Brax’s hands dropped to his belly, patted his shoulders. He turned back, looking at his rump, at his tail, then down at his crotch. His eyes were wide as he turned to Liam.
“I’m me again!” he said, sounding shocked.
“I’ve noticed,” Liam said, quietly. “So. I was right.”
Brax’s brow furrowed as Liam walked forward, spreading his arms wide.
“Purgatory isn’t a world of magic,” he said. “Ages ago, I was talking to Tethis. I said that my iPod only seemed like magic because we had a few extra millennia. The galaxy - the, uh, universe b
eyond Earth and beyond Purgatory - has had billions of years. How far ahead could they be?”
“If we were advanced,” Brax asked, his voice dry, “Why did I grow up in a world of bronze, while you grew up in a world of steel? How did we get fall so far?”
He spread his hands.
Liam shook his head. “Something happened.”
He turned and looked at the door.
“And I think we’ll find out what through here,” he said, nodding to the door. Part of him knew Brax was an enemy - an enemy who had taken Liv, who had killed Tethis, whose god might have slain Meg - but the moment felt too large for everything but a driving curiosity. He was naked and in an alien facility, with technology so advanced that he had been positive it was magic for the better part of a year and a half.
He was pretty sure he was going to die soon anyway, and…
Well…
He was too tired and hopped up on adrenaline to care.
Liam reached the door first, but it didn’t open until Brax came close. It hissed open and Brax grinned sheepishly at Liam, his tail lashing fast enough to betray his excitement.
The room had clearly been designed to do something – but someone had come through and made it into something else. A bed had been laid across a table that looked designed for conferences. A few chairs had been uprooted and placed aside, leaving room for a training dummy. A chair was planted before a flower-like pod of crystal spheres that pointed outwards in every direction. A sleek helmet of crystal wafers sat on a small pedestal, with a shield bearing a lambda leaned against the wall beside it. Beyond both of those was another door, leading into a room that held a teleport shrine.
Liam’s brow furrowed. “Sparta?”
“Ares,” Brax said. Then he grunted and looked down.
Liam turned.
A blade protruded from Brax’s chest, gleaming bright red with his blood. Liam’s enemy for the past year gaped down at the sword, then looked up at Liam. His eyes dimmed and he coughed out. “Tell her I...”
Then he dropped forward onto the ground.
Ares wiped his blade with a small cloth.
“You’re welcome,” he said, looking straight at Liam.
The Blood Groove (Purgatory Wars Book 4) Page 23