by Tim Waggoner
Four symbiont cages sat on the chamber floor—two on one side of the room, two on the other. The rest of the cages had been removed by soldiers earlier and hauled off to another chamber for temporary storage. Elidyr always insisted that an attempted bonding between symbiont and host take place in the chamber where the symbionts were normally kept. They were more comfortable there, he’d explained to her once, which helped them relax during the bonding process. Well, relax more than they might have otherwise. During an ordinary attempt at joining, the other symbionts remained in the chamber, but Elidyr had thought it best if only the symbionts that were going to be involved in the day’s experiment were present, and Lirra thought it a wise move.
Soldiers wearing enchanted armor stood guard by each cage, keeping a close eye on the symbionts inside. Their soldiers’ swords were sheathed for the time being, and instead they carried the metal rods Elidyr had designed for capturing and handling symbionts. A steel table was positioned in front of the cages, and upon each a volunteer lay prone. Affixed to the foot of each table was a single three-foot long crystalline rod, its milky-glassy surface gleaming in the illumination cast by the everbright lanterns stationed around the chamber. Each volunteer was an Outguard soldier, and they all wore their uniforms.
The volunteers lay still, features composed, though it was clear to anyone watching that they were working hard to project the appearance of calm, in defiance of how they really felt inside. Their hands were clenched into fists, their chests rose and fell in erratic patterns as they struggled to master their breathing, and they swallowed often. Lirra looked at Osten. Given the bad experience he’d endured yesterday, she wouldn’t have blamed him for being a nervous wreck, but of the two men and two women who’d volunteered to receive a symbiont today, he looked the calmest. Out of the four, he was the only one who’d been bonded to a symbiont before, if only for a short time, and she figured that experience was helping him manage his anxiety.
Elidyr had chosen to use four different types of symbionts today: a tongueworm, a crawling gauntlet, a stormstalk, and the tentacle whip that had taken over Osten the day before during his test. Osten lay on the table positioned in front of the tentacle whip’s cage, for he intended to try once more to bond with that particular aberration. Lirra had asked him about his choice not long before the experiment began. “I know the thing, and it knows me,” Osten had told her, as if that was reason enough. And perhaps it was, but Lirra couldn’t help feeling that Osten had chosen to bond with the whip again because he had something to prove to himself—and perhaps to the aberration as well. For their parts, the symbionts seemed to sense that something important was about to take place, for they writhed restlessly in their cages, occasionally testing the doors, as if eager to taste the flesh of a new host.
She glanced at Rhedyn then. His shadowy aspect was more prominent, making his features barely discernible. Perhaps he was merely gathering his shadow sibling’s strength in case anything should go wrong.
Elidyr wore a leather satchel slung over his shoulder, containing tools of the artificer’s trade, and for the last several minutes he’d been using one device or another to poke and prod at the Overmantle as he performed a last check to make certain everything was in working order.
“How much longer?” Vaddon said, an edge of irritation in his voice.
Elidyr stood hunched over the Overmantle, holding a device made of two thin glass rods with silvery webbing stretched between them. He waved the device in front of the Overmantle’s opening, nodding to himself as he did so.
“That should just … about … do it.”
Elidyr abruptly straightened, tucked the glass rods back into his satchel, and then turned and grinned at Vaddon.
“We’re ready to begin whenever you are, General.”
“Let’s get it over with,” Vaddon said evenly.
Elidyr nodded once then turned back to the Overmantle. He slid a tray of crystals halfway out of the containment framework and began touching them in a precise order. He didn’t bother explaining what he was doing, but there was no need since Elidyr had covered the basics the day before in Vaddon’s office.
“The Overmantle will do two things,” he’d said. “First, the psi-crystals will strengthen a host’s mental defenses, allowing him or her to resist all attempts at mental dominance by a symbiont. Second, the dragonshards will open a tiny portal to Xoriat, one no larger than a pinprick. The crystals will draw forth a small controlled stream of chaos energy through that portal and transfer it to a host. Once that energy is inside a host, it will insulate him or her from a symbiont’s corrupting influence, much the same way our bodies are more resistant to a particular disease after we’ve contracted it and recovered. Once a host is cloaked by these powerful twin protections—hence the name Overmantle for my device—he or she should be able to control a symbiont with ease.”
Elidyr turned to Sinnoch. “Open the cage doors.”
A clawed hand emerged from a sleeve of the dolgaunt’s robe. Clutched in his spider-leg fingers was a glass sphere the size of an apple. Sinnoch circled his thumb over the top of the sphere’s surface, and in response the locks on the four symbiont cages disengaged with audible clicks and the doors began to rise. The symbionts were intelligent enough to sense that something strange was going on, and they were reluctant to expose themselves to danger willingly. And yet, there was a host for each one of them, laid out on a table like food at a feast, just waiting for them to come forth from their cage and take it. Eventually, instinct won out over caution, and one by one the symbionts began to move out of the cages and toward the steel tables.
The tentacle whip was the first to emerge. It slithered quickly toward Osten, as if somehow sensing he was the same man it had dominated before and it was eager to claim him once again.
Elidyr turned his head back and forth, watching closely as the quartet of symbionts climbed onto the tables and drew near their soon-to-be hosts. Elidyr had explained to them that it was important the bonding process between human and aberration already be underway before he activated the Overmantle—if for no other reason than to keep from scaring the symbionts off—but it couldn’t be too far along, else it might be too late for the device to prove effective. He had to activate the Overmantle at just the right moment, and not before.
The tentacle whip fastened its beaklike mouth on Osten’s inner forearm, and the thin crimson tendrils that surrounded the mouth wrapped around the man’s elbow before burrowing into the flesh. Osten’s teeth were gritted tight and his jaw muscles clenched. Sweat poured off him, and his every muscle was wire-taut as the symbiont began altering the internal structure of his body. His brow furrowed in concentration, and Lirra knew he was fighting to resist the pain of the foul creature merging with his physical body as the psychic corruption as the whip joined with his mind.
Lirra turned toward Ksana and saw that the cleric’s eyes were closed, her lips moving silently. No doubt the cleric was seeking her patron goddess’s blessing for the volunteers as well. Lirra hoped the gods were in a beneficent mood today. She knew Osten and the others could use all the help they could get.
The tongueworm slithered over the length of a woman’s body, reversing its position as it neared her mouth. It inserted the tip of its tail between her lips, and the woman closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide to receive it. The worm hesitated for a moment, as if not quite able to believe it was being welcomed, and then it plunged its tail down the woman’s throat. Tears streamed from her eyes, and her body convulsed as the tail wriggled its way down into her stomach, intending to anchor there. When the bonding process was complete, the tongueworm—whose hood resembled a human tongue—would lie flat over the woman’s true tongue. She would still be able to speak, but the tongueworm could lash out whenever she willed it to deliver a paralyzing poison strike using its concealed barb. Lirra turned to see how the host on the third table was faring.
The crawling gauntlet had scuttled across the man’s body like a la
rge crustacean and settled over his right hand and forearm. The bonding process for this aberration was far less disturbing than for a tongueworm. The host wore it like a natural gauntlet, and the symbiont extended tiny tendrils into the flesh to bind itself to the host body. The man winced as the gauntlet joined with him, but the procedure looked much less painful than it was for Osten and the woman, and Lirra was glad for the soldier, though she had no doubt he’d have an equally difficult time resisting the psychic influence of the evil creature.
The last symbiont was a stormstalk. It resembled something like a fat, fleshy serpent with a single large white eye in the center of its otherwise featureless head. A static discharge of energy like a miniature lightning storm danced over the surface of the eye as the aberration slithered across the chest of the woman who would serve as its host. Once coiled over her breastbone, its tail wriggled toward her neck and slid around the base of her skull. The creature plunged tendrils into the host’s skull, burrowed through the bone, and dug into the brain to take root. As the process began, the woman screamed—the only one of the four volunteers to make a sound as their symbionts joined with them—and Lirra didn’t blame the woman one bit.
Lirra looked to Elidyr. The artificer was in motion, rapidly touching the Overmantle’s crystals in a complex pattern, his hands moving with the speed and grace of a master musician playing a familiar, beloved instrument. Several seconds passed without result, and Lirra began to fear that the device wasn’t going to work, that Elidyr simply hadn’t had enough time to complete it. But then the crystals began to pulsate with an eerie blue-white light, and four streams of energy emerged from the Overmantle’s framework and lanced through the air to strike the four crystalline rods affixed to the tables where the hosts lay. The rods shimmered with the same light as the Overmantle’s crystals, and the tables began to gleam blue white as the rods transferred energy to the steel. In turn, the magical energy was fed directly into the host’s bodies, and by extension, into the symbionts as well—just as Elidyr had said it would.
Now all four of the volunteers cried out in pain, but their shouts were drowned out by a chorus of shrill shrieks, like the high-pitched screams of animals in intense agony. The shrieking was so loud that Lirra clapped her hands over her ears to drown it out, but the action did no good. The sound remained just as loud, and Lirra realized that it wasn’t an actual sound at all, but rather something she was hearing in her mind. She was experiencing the combined psychic cries of distress from the symbionts as the Overmantle’s energy coursed through them.
She glanced at the others and saw that Vaddon and Ksana both held their hands over their ears, as did the guards and Elidyr. Not Sinnoch, though, and not Rhedyn, either. Of course they would be immune to the cries, Lirra thought.
The expression on Rhedyn’s face was neutral, while Vaddon’s was one of intense concentration as he observed every detail of the experiment going on before him, weighing and judging, just as he always did. Ksana looked worried, no doubt concerned for the volunteers’ safety, but along with the worry was a taut alertness. The cleric intended to hang back and let the experiment run its course, but Lirra knew that at the first sign any of the volunteers needed her, Ksana would spring into action. Elidyr’s face was wild with joy, like a Karrnathi child receiving his first weapon on Blades’ Day Eve. Sometime during the proceedings, Sinnoch had lowered the hood of his robe, and the dolgaunt observed the scene around him with a sly, inhuman smile that disturbed Lirra more than anything she’d witnessed since the experiment began.
Suddenly both the symbionts and their hosts grew still and lay motionless on the tables. The psychic screams of the aberrations died away, and their absence felt as if a great pressure had been removed from Lirra’s mind. As the hosts continued lying there, the Overmantle still feeding streams of mystic energy into the tables, Lirra feared that something had gone dreadfully wrong with the experiment, and that the men and women were dead. But then, almost in perfect unison, the four volunteers sat up, their expressions beatifically calm, and Lirra allowed herself to hope that the Overmantle had worked, and the hosts were in full control of their symbionts. If it were true, if Elidyr had finally succeeded, then perhaps Bergerron would continue to support the Outguard’s work, and they could—
Before Lirra could finish her thought, the hosts leaped off their tables and rushed toward the guard standing closest to them. The guards were still off balance from having experienced the symbionts’ psychic screams. They had dropped their handling rods to cover their ears, and while the psychic screams were over, none of the guards made a move to draw their swords as the hosts approached.
“Arm yourselves!” Lirra called out in warning, but it was too late.
All four of the guards wore Elidyr’s enchanted armor, and the spells worked into the metal should’ve repelled the symbionts or at least slowed their attack, but for some reason the armor’s magic had no effect and the hosts didn’t so much as pause as they closed in. None of the guards wore any protection for their heads or faces, for the Outguard had needed none before, and it was a lapse the hosts exploited with swift, ruthless efficiency. The woman with the tongueworm opened her mouth, and her symbiont shot forth like a striking snake, its barbed tip striking one of the guards just below the left eye. The flesh there instantly became swollen and discolored, and the guard stiffened as the tongueworm’s paralytic poison took hold. As the tongueworm flew back into the woman’s mouth, the host walked forward, drew the paralyzed guard’s sword, and laid open his throat with a single savage swing of the blade.
The man with the crawling gauntlet slashed open a guard’s throat with the symbiont’s razor-sharp claws, while the woman with the stormstalk sent a crackling burst of lightning from her symbiont’s eye directly into the third guard’s face. The man screamed as his flesh blackened and his hair caught fire. He fell to the ground, crying in agony, and the woman moved in to finish him off with a second burst of lightning. Osten stepped toward the last guard, the tentacle whip lashing out and wrapping around the woman’s neck. Osten yanked back hard on the whip, and there was a loud crack as the guard’s neck broke. The whip uncoiled and the woman slumped to the floor of the chamber, dead.
Not only had the Overmantle failed to give the hosts control of the symbionts, the reverse had somehow taken place—the symbionts had complete control over their host bodies. More, the energy fed into the aberrations by Elidyr’s device seemed to have made the symbionts stronger than normal. It had taken them only a few seconds to slay the guards, and the hosts—or rather, the host bodies under the symbionts’ control—turned toward Lirra and the others.
Elidyr gazed with stunned disbelief at the carnage the hosts had wrought.
“This can’t be happening!” the artificer cried out.
Standing next to him, Sinnoch pointed toward the air several feet above the Overmantle.
“I believe you have something slightly more important to worry about, Elidyr,” the dolgaunt said with a sickening grin.
Everyone’s eyes—including those of the symbiont-hosts—turned toward the point in space Sinnoch had indicated. The air rippled, distorted, and then a seam opened … at first it was a small tear only a few inches long, but it soon began to widen until it measured more than a foot in length.
“What is it?” Lirra demanded.
“It’s a portal,” Elidyr answered in a frightened whisper. “To Xoriat.”
A chill raced down Lirra’s spine at her uncle’s words. She was looking at a hole in space … a doorway between this world and the Realm of Madness. What awful things lay on the other side of that door—and what if those things chose to come through?
“I thought you said the Overmantle would only create a small portal to Xoriat!” Lirra said.
“That’s right!” Elidyr stared up at the slowly widening portal in complete bewilderment. “I … I don’t understand!”
“You don’t need to understand!” Lirra snapped. “You just need to close it!”
Lirra turned to Vaddon, Ksana, and Rhedyn. “We need to deal with the symbionts before they start moving again. We’ll each take one and do whatever is necessary to stop them.” Her expression was grim. “Understand?”
They nodded and drew their weapons as they chose a target and began their approach. Vaddon headed for the man with the crawling gauntlet, while Ksana made for the woman with the stormstalk and Rhedyn for the woman with the tongueworm. That left Osten for Lirra. Despite what she’d told the others, she was determined to stop the tentacle whip without harming Osten if she could. Twice Lirra’s actions had resulted in Osten being taken over by the symbiont, and she felt it was her responsibility to make up for those errors in judgment—and if it should come down to her having no choice but to kill Osten, then she’d make sure to do the deed as swiftly and painlessly as possible. She owed him that much at least.
The host bodies remained standing motionless and gazing upon the portal to Xoriat. As the symbionts were creatures born of madness and corruption, they doubtless could sense what lay on the other side of the rent in space, and they stood watching almost reverently, as if they were waiting for something to emerge. The thought chilled Lirra, but she pushed it aside. They were lucky that the symbionts were mesmerized by the portal, but there was no telling how long they’d remain like that, and Lirra and the others had to take advantage of the situation while they had the chance.