Shadowprey: A Black Foxes Adventure

by Dennis L McKiernan

Ky struggled upward to her hands and knees and looked toward Rith, the bard lying at the supporting base of a leg of the arch.

  Arik reached Kane, the healer yet screaming, as if caught in the grip of endless horror. Arik took Kane’s silver-flashed spear in hand and swung its long reach out and around, driving the wraiths even farther back, yet they continued to bleed away the energy of the living.

  By this time Ky had crawled to Rith and shook her, the bard coming groggily to.

  “We’ve got to get away,” called Ky, and she crawled the few feet to Trendel.

  Of a sudden Kane’s voice went hoarse, but still he shrieked and shrieked, though now his screams became nought but loud hissings of air. At Kane’s side, again Arik tried to stand, but he could not. Still, he managed to drag the big man to the base of the arch, where the others clustered.

  “Even though these wraiths are pinned to the gate, there is no way we can get off this mound and free of them before they completely drain us,” Arik gritted. “We’ve got to come up with some way to—”

  “The focus,” rasped Rith, reaching out and touching the foot of the arch.

  Set on a bed of rough black granite, the portal was made of a dusky stone and carved with arcane runes. It arced upward some seven paces, and its legs stood perhaps four paces apart at the base. And at the foundation each leg was square, nearly three feet to a side, but they tapered as they curved up to meet at the very peak, where the stone appeared to be but half as thick. And the arch looked to be all of a solid piece. Darker than dark, it seemed to suck at the light of the stars in the sky, devouring it, consuming it, as if to gorge it all down.

  “When last we were here” said Rith, “I said that if the arch is their focus, then its destruction would break the bond that binds the wraiths to this plane.”

  “Yes, but how can we destroy the—?”

  “If I have enough strength,” said Rith, reaching out to the stone, “I will do it.”

  As Arik extended the spear to somewhat press back the wailing apparitions, Rith, using the base as a support, managed to pull herself up to her feet, and she placed her hands on the dark stone and said an arcane word. Then she nodded to herself and said another word, and, braced against the rock, she began to sing a single high-pitched note—one barely on the edge of hearing—her bardic voice soft but growing.

  For long moments nothing seemed to be happening, and still the wraiths drained away life. But then, imperceptibly at first but gradually escalating, the arch began to resonate in synchronicity with Rith’s nearly intangible note. And still Rith sang the single tone, her voice gaining in strength, the vibration in the stone growing in strength as well. Stronger and stronger came Rith’s crescendo, and more and more violently quivered the arch, especially at the top. The wraiths seemed to realize that something was happening, and they drew farther away, as if in fear, or perhaps as if in anticipation instead. Dark dust from the stone began to drift down from the narrowest part of the arch. And still Rith sang the single note, her voice gaining power, though the pitch remained the same. The entire portal now thrummed, and flakes of darkness whirled down. Sweat beaded on Rith’s brow, and ran into her eyes, yet she continued to—

  Crack!

  The very peak of the arch broke away, and a huge jagged slab crashed to the mound, and then the entire arch fragmented, massive sections thundering down.

  And as ponderous stones fell, Arik and Trendel wrenched the silently screaming Kane to the square foot of the arch next to Rith, Ky huddling against the stone beside them.

  And as the last great chunk crashed down to tumble to a stop along the slope of the mound, leaving but two jagged legs jutting up from maimed bases, with a great sigh amid ephemeral sounds of joy the wraiths vanished in glimmers, set free at last.

  Rith turned to Trendel and smiled, and then fainted dead away.

  13

  Courthouse

  (Adkins)

  Judge Marshall gaveled for order. When it fell, he looked at Mark Perry and said, “Overruled.”

  As Mark sat down, Marshall turned to Melissa. “Counselor?”

  Melissa nodded and said to Toni.

  “Sucked their minds in, you say?”

  “Yes. Or to put it more precisely, Avery pulled their mentalities into himself, leaving only the autonomic functions behind to keep the bodies alive.”

  “And just how did you determine this?”

  “Given the disaster of the previous time the alpha team entered VR, it was after the lightning strike that Avery pulled their consciousness into himself, and we noticed on one of the consoles, the one that had access to Avery’s volatile memory, that we could see their mental patterns in the volatile memory hologram. And so this time we were ready in the event that happened again; we rigged one of the control room consoles to keep track of Avery’s temporary memory, at least the part he would show us.”

  “Who manned that console?”

  “Dr. Greyson.”

  “And what did you observe in that holo?”

  Toni turned to the panel and said, “A mental pattern, as Avery displays it, looks something like a silvery, glittering oblate spheroid. We observed six of them, and under each was the name of an associated member of the alpha team.”

  “You mean, Caine Easely, Alice Maxon, Eric Flannery, Timothy Rendell, Hiroko Kikiro, and Meredith Rodgers?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said their patterns were ‘glittering’?”

  “Yes. Small flashes stuttering across the spheroid. We believe it to be a representation of thoughts, of senses.”

  “So, it was rather like looking at living brains?”

  “No. Instead like looking at working minds.

  “Ah, I see. And tell me what would have happened if Avery had been powered down at that time?”

  Toni now looked at Mark Perry, her gaze hard as flint. “We believe with the loss of volatile memory, their mentalities would have been destroyed.”

  Mark flushed and looked down at his hands.

  “Anything else?” asked Melissa.

  Toni nodded and said, “As you saw by his outburst in this courtroom this morning, Dr. Greyson believes that it would also destroy their souls.”

  “Yes,” said Melissa, turning and sweeping a wide gesture across the panel and the spectators, “as we all saw and heard. According to Dr. Greyson, souls would have been destroyed.”

  “And, Toni,” said Melissa, “if you had followed the presumed heirs’ instructions to wipe out part or all of Avery’s memory, what would that have meant?”

  “Since Arthur Coburn’s mind had been drawn into Avery right after the lightning strike, to wipe out that part would have destroyed Arthur’s mentality; in other words, we would have murdered him.”

  Melissa paused to let that thought sink in and then said, “Tell me, Toni, what happened when Avery began the new VR adventure?”

  “First he took all their mentalities into himself, and then in our reality he started to shut down the metabolisms of the alpha team, and in VR he started this adventure in the last place he had left them in the previous adventure, just before they were released, and that put the Black Foxes in terrible peril by beginning to drain their lives away.” Toni’s eyes brimmed with tears. “We did the best we could to stop him from shutting down the bodies, but it was a losing battle. If it hadn’t been for quick thinking by Meredith Rodgers, or rather on Rith’s part, Meredith’s VR persona, they all would have died.”

  “The Black Foxes as well as the alpha team?”

  Toni wiped her cheeks with her fingers. “Yes,” she replied. “Avery would have killed them all.”

  “And in your expert opinion and in your own words, tell me, Toni, why do you think this is true?”

  Toni took a deep breath and said, “Recall, lightning damaged Avery last year during the previous Black Fox adventure. Just what it destroyed, we cannot determine, for Avery is too complex for us to tell at a glance. And since our ability to diagnose Avery was severely compro
mised, we can only speculate at this time.”

  “And what have you concluded?”

  “From his behavior, we suspect that the lightning strike destroyed what little development of empathy he had built up through his previous learning period.”

  “His previous learning period?”

  “Yes. You see, Avery is only a bit over three years old, and as such is rather like a three- or four-year-old child. Much like a child of that age, and given the damage to him, he has little empathy for others, and only thinks of gratifying his own desires.”

  “And, as a doctor of psychology, what conclusion do you draw from this?”

  “Like any three- or four-year-old without any empathy, I believe the personality we call Avery is a sociopath.”

  The courtroom burst into a babble, and Marshall banged for order.

  In the pass-through corridor, Frankie Roberts looked at her cameraman and said, “Oh, god, Steve, this is too good to pass up. Quick, let’s get it on the holofeed.”

  They rushed outside, where a monsoon rain had just begun to fall. The protestors, who had been following the hearing on their handhelds, were wildly ranting over this latest from the courtroom.

  Frankie and Steve took position just outside the passage underneath the roiling dark skies of the brewing monsoon storm, and Steve hoisted the holocam to his eye and said, “Let ’er rip, doll.”

  With a sincere look on her face, Frankie gazed directly into the holocam and said, “Well, there you have it, parents. In Dr. Adkins expert opinion, like any three- or four-year-old child, Avery is a sociopath.”

  In that moment the sky above split wide with lightning, and a clap of thunder slammed down, and the storm began to rage.

  14

  Five Months Before the Hearing

  (Coburn Facility)

  “O Brahman, O Vishnu, do not let Shiva do this to them,” wailed Alya, even as she aided Stein and the others in their attempt to restore the alpha team’s stats. “Instead, grant mercy, Brahman Creator, Vishnu Protector of Worlds.”

  “Foolish woman,” snarled Stein, even as he injected Meredith Rodgers with the stimulant thymium.

  “Okay, power up the therms,” called Alvin, and Grace punched in a code.

  Frantically they worked to keep the alpha team’s temperatures from falling, but it was a losing battle, for not only did Avery control the team’s hypothalamuses—their internal thermostats—he also continued to cause all of them to pee in a steady stream, the urine flushed away by the suits’ waste systems, and he replaced their fluids with cold liquid. Too, he had kicked on the suits’ cooling systems. And despite the stimulants and the warm IV drips, still the temps plummeted.

  But then, “Look! Look!” cried Billy, pointing at the main holo, where Meredith’s alter Rith stood and placed her hands against the arch and began to sing a steady, high-pitched note.

  “What the bloody hell?” asked Toni.

  “She’s trying to bring down the gate,” said Sheila.

  “How?”

  “Sonics,” said Sheila, the comptech handing another vial to Stein. “Rith is a bard. She has mastery of sound. If she can—”

  Crack! The arch fragmented, and monstrous jagged stones crashed to the hilltop and tumbled down the slopes.

  “Look,” said Billy. “The ghosts are vanishing. Lordy, she broke the arch and saved the Foxes.”

  “The readings have steadied,” called Grace.

  “How clever,” said Toni. “Nicely done, Rith. —Oh, wait, she’s fallen. Henry?”

  “She’s merely fainted,” said Henry.

  “Breaking the arch, it must have been a strain,” said Alvin.

  “O Vishnu, O Brahman, I thank you for staying Shiva’s hand,” said Alya. She looked at Stein and her dark East Indian features broke into a placid smile.

  “Bah!” said Stein.

  “Henry, need we do anything else?” asked Toni.

  Stein looked at the readouts. “No. Avery has stopped the urine dumps and the cold fluids and has activated the suits’ heaters, all but Alice’s. He’s now flowing warmth back into the others, though at a slow rate. We can continue to use the therms to aid their recovery, but only for a few minutes at most, else we’ll disturb Avery’s calculations.”

  “How did you know their temps would be falling,” Sheila asked Toni.

  “The Black Foxes were in among a field of ghosts, who drain life force from anyone they are near,” said Toni. “Avery accomplishes the effect by cooling the body, hence he would be depleting them of heat, and this time it would be drastic, for there were hundreds of wraiths. Had we not stopped it, or had the Foxes not found a way to stop it in their reality, it would have been the same as if their bodies had died of exposure.”

  “He would have murdered them,” gritted Greyson, still sitting at his console, his cheeks wet with shed tears, though he was no longer weeping. “Turned them all to ghosts. Then he would have had them in his own cursed virtual reality to torture them as he would.”

  Somberly, Toni nodded and said, “Oh, John, what a loss it would have been; these people are special, regardless of the fact that they have remarkable powers.”

  Stein scoffed and said, “If they have these so-called powers, how did they get them?”

  “That, I don’t know, Henry, but as I said before, it seems Avery somehow managed to activate unknown parts of their brains, giving them these incredible talents. And if we can reactivate Avery, make him sane, then he might be able to do such things for others.”

  “I’ve always wanted to fly,” said Grace, without looking away from the readouts on her console. “Do you think Avery could make it so?”

  Stein snorted, but otherwise said nothing.

  Toni shrugged and said, “Who knows? When it comes to bestowing special powers, we don’t have a glimmer as to how it was done, and it could be that neither does Avery. Given the lightning strike, he could have been barmy when he did it; but then again, perhaps not. It might be he gave them these abilities before the damage; but then again, maybe after. For those of us who experienced his virtual realities in our own one-on-one tests with him—back before the Black Fox group trial—I suppose it’s possible that whatever abilities he gave us in our individual VRs, he took away when he returned us to the real world. Conceivably the alpha team retained their powers in the real world because the Black Foxes were ejected from VR by defeating the Black God. —Bloody hell, I just don’t know, and we’ll not know until we reactivate Avery, and perhaps not even then.”

  Stein walked down the row of witches’ cradles and checked the individual readouts. “All right,” he said, “power down the therms, all but Alice Maxon’s.”

  Grace keyed in a code, and the warming of five of the six IVs stopped, and Alvin said, “Just like in the first trial, keeping Alice warm isn’t easy, her alter, Lyssa, being a ghost and all.”

  At these words, Toni whipped about and stared at the main holo. Then she stepped to Greyson’s console and said, “Speaking of Lyssa, where is she?”

  Greyson frowned and gazed into his holo. “There’s her soul,” he said, pointing at the glittering, silvery spheroid with the name Alice Maxon scribed below.

  “Her body, though very chill, is quite alive . . . and stable,” said Grace, reading the outputs on her console.

  “Yes,” said Toni, again looking at the main holo, the one showing the Black Foxes mid the ruins of the Kalagar Gate, “but where is Lyssa?”

  15

  Itheria

  (Black Foxes)

  Arik looked about and said but a single word: “Lyssa?”

  “Oh, Arda,” croaked Ky, the syldari Shadowmaster’s dark, tilted eyes filling with tears, “she fell into the abyss beneath the DemonQueen’s throne when Trendel bested the Dark God.” Ky weakly gestured at the scatter of rubble. “And now that the black arch is destroyed, have we doomed her to be trapped on the demonplane?”

  Cradling Rith’s head and shoulders in his lap, the bard yet unconscious, Tren
del said, “I will shape a finding, once I recover from this-this draining.”

  “Think you that you will locate her?” asked Arik.

  Trendel pointed downslope. “Given the arch, that must be the Kalagar Wood. If so, we are back in Itheria. Since the Dark God cast us out of the demonworld, mayhap he expelled Lyssa as well.”

  “If so, then where is she?” asked Arik, even as Ky placed an ear to Kane’s chest and listened to the big man’s heartbeat.

  Kane had stopped screaming and seemed to be in a coma.

  “As I said,” replied Trendel, “I will shape a finding. Then we will know.” He looked at Ky. “Is Kane all right?”

  “I-I think so,” replied the Shadowmaster, her voice thready. “We have seen him this way before.”

  “You mean screaming?”

  “No, no. I mean in a deep state of unconsciousness, when his heart is beating very slow, with each pulse very strong. He does this when he is healing a major hurt.” Tears formed in Ky’s eyes. “The Dark God did something dreadful to him. Just what, I cannot say.”

  “Look,” said Arik, “now that the immediate danger is gone, and we are too exhausted, too drained to do much of ought, I say we remain right here till morn or later, a time when we will have recovered enough to make our way down. In the meanwhile, with Kane unconscious, we have to bind our own wounds, those we took in battle in Atraxia’s throne room.”

  “We’ll have to wait for Kane to awaken before going down,” said Ky. “I will not leave him here unattended.”

  Arik nodded, even as he shed his leather jacket and began tearing the silken undershirt into strips for bandages. “I agree about not leaving him here or unattended, but we need water and something to eat, and our horses and all our supplies are gone, lost to us on the demonplane. If need be, we’ll haul Kane down to the woods and find a stream and make camp there till he recovers. Once we’ve set up, I’ll take one of Rith’s daggers and—”

  “Take one of my what?” asked Rith, the bard now conscious again.

  “A dagger on the morrow to fetch us something to eat,” said Arik. “And to do that we need to hunt, and a dagger is a better missile than a sword.”