by Mark Eller
Fox shook. What the hell was that thing? She’d never been attracted to women before. The sensuous feel of the woman’s hand upon her breast lingered, making Fox angry. Her surroundings came back into focus. Around her, a crowd had gathered in hopes of being entertained. One pair of yellow eyes, dark and dangerous, watched her from a furred face. Fox started. The thing was half-man, half-wolf. Fox couldn’t tear her eyes away from the repulsive beast. It moved closer, looking hungry, but for what Fox didn’t know. She raised her still drawn rapier between them as the thing glided closer.
“I’ll issue the same warning to you as I did her, thing,” she ordered. “Stay back.”
The beast’s lip curled. “My, my,Lord Marwin, and what a pleasure it is to meet you. I heard an Anterian noble was on board, a messenger from Ilian’s King. I didn’t expect such a wonderful morsel. I believe we have some business to attend to.”
Fox shook her head. “Not with you, I don’t. Step off fur face or you’ll be missing your snout. I have personal matters of my own.”
It growled. Long sharp canine’s revealed themselves in a snarl. “You would also do well to not offend me, Lordling. I own this city. If you plan to get any further than this wharf, I suggest you play nice.”
Around them, the crowd thinned to ten men and the wolf beast. Each man wore the hungry, hard expression of a predator. Fox swallowed— hard. Even her god couldn’t help with this. Not in this land outside his realm.
She prepared herself for battle as the beast came closer. “I don’t associate with your kind. My king told me to be quick about his business, so move on.”
“Let’s be civilized about this,” the wolf-man said, ignoring her sword’s threat. “I have something you want, and you have something I want.”
Fox’s stomach twisted. “And that would be?”
Moving closer, the beast carefully pushed Fox’s rapier point to the side, invading her personal space. The thing was huge, almost a foot taller than Fox’s five-foot-two inch frame. From this close, its fetid breath heated Fox’s neck and ear on the side with Dakar’s mark. His tongue, wet and rough, licked slowly up her throat. Holding her breath, Fox fought down the urge to kill the beast-man.
“Mmm.” Leaning back, the beast rolled its eyes while bits of drool dropped to the cobbled street from its muzzle. “Delicious.” It blinked and focused its attention once more. “Lordling, you want your freedom, and I want your shadow.”
Fox exhaled sharply, her breath harsh in her throat. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You can’t possess someone’s shadow.”
The beast chuckled. Reaching up a furred hand, it lightly stroked Dakar’s mark. “I thought this a legend— a story told to scare young children. But here it is— the mark of Dakar, just as certain sources told me it would be.”
Helpless against these odds, Fox watched as the beast took her rapier from nerveless fingers. “Who the hell are you?” she whispered.
The thing barred its teeth in an attempt at a smile. Its tongue hung out one side of its mouth. “Matthew Changer, but you can call me partner.”
Chapter 16—Huntress
Tessla sucked down a lungful of cirweed smoke and wondered what it would feel like when she died. Since she presently had nothing better to do, she stared at the dim light of an afternoon sun seeping through the prison’s window, exhaled past the stem of her emptied pipe, and sat up to place her head in the swirl of smoke. The smoke seeped into her, filled her lungs, and crept into the deepest recesses of her flesh. It numbed pain and neutralized the poison of Athos’s curse. The poison tried to curl past the smoke, failed, and retreated to lay quiescent within her cells.
With the help of the cirweed, her poison damaged body began to heal. Torn tissue became firm. Leaking vessels sealed, and rotting flesh became almost pure. The pain lessened, stopped. Swinging her legs over the edge of her bed, Tessla stood and walked three steps to reach her prison door.
Trelsar called. It was time to leave.
“Please,” she whispered to the solid oak door. “Let me through.”
Placing her palm against wood, she repeated her plea. Oak shifted and stirred. Wood grain flowed until a crack formed. With a satisfied nod, Tessla turned her body sideways and slipped through. Behind her, wood groaned, and the door became whole.
Tessla grunted when she saw the blond guard, Lexos, standing halfway down the hall. Fate had dictated he was almost always on duty when she chose to leave her cell. She gave him an empty smile.
“You can’t go,” he protested. “It’s my job if you do.”
Tessla looked deep within his pores. There were things in there, tiny things that ate and grew and multiplied in ways she didn’t understand. She sometimes saw their like within septic wounds. Further in, she saw the small size of Lexos’s soul, light yellow and overcast with gray muddy hues.
Pulling the soul-sucking pipe from her mouth, she slid it into her pouch. “I’m sorry. I won’t return.”
“You have to,” he insisted.
“Kiss me,” Tessla offered and smiled when he stumbled back.
He didn’t try to stop her. Neither did the other guards when she walked past the front desk and out the door. Not surprising. Nobody ever dared stop Trelsar’s Assassin when she followed her god’s will.
When her feet touched the walkway lining Yylse’ main street, Tessla stopped. She stayed still for several moments, breathing in the stench of human waste and dust and animal sweat. From high overhead the sun peered, a small pinprick of light lost in the wasteland of empty dark. To her, the sun’s light barely showed. She lived in perpetual twilight, seeing shadows where others saw faces. She recognized people by the texture of their souls.
Around her, humans walked along the boardwalk and in the street. Delivery wagons beat garbage and animal feces into the dirt. Deep within her body, Athos’s corruption stirred and surged, but the remaining cirweed beat it down. Blocks away, a life she sought flickered.
* * * *
Mercktos pulled his cloak tight about himself and stepped deeper into the shadows. He hoped Tessla was too preoccupied to see him. He scowled. Tessla had changed since her time in Hell. He didn’t know if the change had made her weak or strong. A great deal of his plans and the plans of others depended on the answer. Even when she had resided in Hell as a spawn, she had been formidable. Now that she was free of Hell, Mercktos doubted few hellborn were her equal. After pulling her spawn body from the deep pits, Trelsar had designed Tessla’s new form specifically to battle hellborn in non-traditional ways.No hellborn knew exactly of what she was capable, and he found this scary. Of late, her abilities seemed to have morphed. Scarier yet. If her changes had gone further than most believed, Zorce and Athos could be in danger.
Mercktos cursed. He needed to get back to Grace and warn his god of Trelsar taking an active hand. If Tessla protected the escaped spawn, as he suspected, then Sulya would also need to know. Not that he cared whether the damned similian succeeded, but if she failed Zorce would punish him for not warning her.
Allowing his eyes to roam Tessla’s spare body while she walked away, his scowl grew deeper at the sight of her confidence. He had once owned the bitch when she was fully spawn. Even then, she had been strange. For reasons not yet understood, her spawn body had refused to remain as it was created. Within weeks of its inhabitation by her soul, she became beautiful and smart and graceful, unlike any other spawn he had ever seen. Intrigued, he fought another for her ownership, winning it in a bout of blood and death. Triumphant, he stood before her, expecting her to kneel to his might.
She would not kneel.
Angered by her refusal to cringe, he tortured her almost nightly and attempted to rape her, but she refused to be raped. Instead, she joined herself to him willingly, giving herself with passion, accepting pain and blood, reveling in the joy of sadistic sex. Her giving jerked emotions out of him he hadn’t felt since long before his fall. Soon, he found himself less willing to hurt her, less willing to hate. Be
fore long, their sex became so gentle she hardly ever bled. He found himself thinking of love and realized Tessla had laid an insidious trap. Hellborn did not love.
Except he wasn’t hellborn, not truly. He was a greater devil fallen from Anothosia’s grace, one of the original colonists who had helped nano curse this world by unknowingly carrying Zorce’s creation to it. At one time he had known gentler emotions. Since his fall those gentle emotions had been foreign to him until Zorce, on a whim, stole half his strength by sticking a damned stolen heart in his chest, something Mercktos still didn’t understand.
In the distance, Tessla turned a corner and disappeared. Mercktos pulled his cloak tighter and stepped out of the shadows. Maybe, if he followed her long enough, she would lead him to the spawn.
* * * *
Turning to her right, Tessla walked past street venders and storefronts. She walked past alleys and ignored a side street leading to the Hellhole Tavern. From the information given her, her prey had escaped the tavern’s environs. It now wandered the city searching for the escaped spawn.
She traveled down Wanderer’s Lane and turned left when she reached the Warrens. Here the buildings grew closer together until the street became too narrow for a wagon. After walking three blocks, she passed two dead dogs lying against Mother Brood’s front door, flies buzzing lazily around their heads, worms burrowing into their bodies. Tessla kicked the carcasses aside, opened the door, and stepped within.
Inside, her lover waited. His soul, pale blue and translucent orange, was the largest she had ever seen.
“I’ve been worried,” Del said. He tossed her a small pouch. “This is all the cirweed I could chase down.”
Nodding, Tessla tucked the cirweed behind her belt. Del appeared expectant, so she gave him a kiss which seemed to make his senses reel. It did nothing for her. She seldom felt anything since her escape from Hell, and when she did it was mostly discomfort and pain. Sometimes, when the cirweed faded, when the poison eating her almost broke free, sometimes she felt a faint stir when they fucked. Affection, maybe, but she wasn’t sure.
She pulled away from Del’s arms and shook her head at his expectant, sex hungry look. “Hunters seek the spawn. They need to die before they discover Jolson left Yylse.”
Dell’s expression grew wary. His features firmed. “I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t want to start now.”
“You won’t kill,” Tessla laughed, “but you don’t hesitate to maim. I’ve seen your arena fights.”
Del shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“No,” Tessla agreed. “You only take pieces of people’s lives away when you steal.” Smiling, she gently touched his shoulder with black talons. “I’m the one who kills.”
She studied his hazel eyes after giving a quick glance to the side where two of Mother Brood’s children stood. “I need help finding my prey.”
“Harlo would be perfect for this,” Del noted.
“Yes,” Tessla agreed, “but he is not here right now. He is busy playing bandit while shepherding that worthless lordling of his.” She looked toward the children. “No, this time I must use these.”
“Broody will get mad,” Andro, the boy, said. “She doesn’t like it when we go back to the streets.”
“Does she have to know?”
Andro scratched his head and shook a small shower of dandruff free. “Suppose not. She won’t be back for a few hours. Who are we looking for?”
“Something from Hell,” Tessla answered. “That’s all I know. Look for something only a few weeks or months out of the hole.”
The girl, Yarlen, released a quick laugh. “Take your pick. There’s plenty of hellkind wandering around right now. I’ve heard the king ordered them left alone unless they start killing too many people.”
“Most stay near the Hellhole,” Del added. “I’ll take that area. The kids can concentrate on the rest of the city?”
“Agreed,” Tessla said.
While Andro gathered seven children to help with their cause, Tessla settled into a padded chair and waited until each was brought before her. When they came to her, she touched each child, attaching them to the invisible tendrils of her web. Finished, she bid them on their way, and then Del gave her a perfunctory kiss before following out the door. Tessla remained behind, palms flat upon the chair’s arms, fingers spread, an invisible thread stretching from each finger to connect with a searcher.
Feeling like a relaxed spider, Tessla closed her eyes and felt each thread’s vibration. An hour passed, and then two. Finally, she felt a faint stirring along two strands, Yarlen and Andro, only a block apart, and Del was nearby.
After marking the terminus of their threads, she sent a recall along the others. Rising, Tessla stretched and placed the stem of her freshly filled pipe between her lips. Cirweed smoke entered her, centered her, and numbed her pain. She stepped out of Mother Brood’s home, closed the door, and put her pipe away. One of the dead dogs was gone. She smelled the bitter stench of gnome.
* * * *
Mercktos watched Tessla emerge from the human home and had to admit she looked lovely with her black talons and white hair. Her appearance was, he knew, another trap she had set to ensnare hellborn. He refused to be affected by her allure. The bitch had almost trapped him once with false promises of passionate love. It wouldn’t happen again. He had avoided the first trap by gifting his recalcitrant spawn to Athos. For the next year he listened to her scream, and those screams had cost him dear. Never again would he put himself in such a position, especially with her.
During that long ago time, Athos had raped and broken her body every dimming, but each lightening found her complete, without blemish, proving yet again she wasn’t a normal spawn. The only change Mercktos had seen was to her white hair. Washed nightly in blood, it became, at one time, dyed the same color, but even this change had not been permanent. During the first few years after her escape, her hair gradually morphed from blood red, to pink, and now back to its original white.
Tessla was unique. Not even her year in Athos’s hands was enough to make her spirit waver or break. Not once did her resolve wander despite all the deliciously horrendous things Athos did to her body. Frustrated, Athos eventually concentrated so completely on her he ignored Hell’s other spawn. He tortured Tessla until her screams became a regular sound in his halls, but she refused to cringe. She refused to crawl. Athos grew furious. He cast his curse, gave her his poison, and waited for her to die.
Instead of dying, she escaped.
Mercktos had never seen Athos so angry. Hundreds of demons and their lesser ilk were ripped apart in his attempt to discover which beings had helped her. Muses were called to track her essence.They cast out seeking webs only to discover she was invisible to them. Further questioning uncovered the fact she had served Flinstar, the neutral god, for a thousand years before being captured by Hell.
Once escaped, Tessla’s loyalty had passed to Trelsar because Flinstar had disappeared during the time of her imprisonment. Some said Flinstar was dead, but Mercktos had his doubts. He knew Flinstar from long ago, from back when he was Eric Flynn before the landing. He knew somewhat how Eric thought, knew something of the twisty pathways of his mind. At one time they had been friends, almost brothers, and so Mercktos knew Eric would never have taken his own life. If he had been murdered, the murder would have been accompanied by explosions strong enough to shake the world.
Only Athos’s discovery of Tessla’s former allegiance to Flinstar allowed Mercktos to avoid the purge. Now, decades later, a spawn had murdered a handler and stolen Athos’s Hook. No god claimed this spawn, no otherworldly being, but, like Tessla, it didn’t exist to the Muse’s seeking spells. Jolson didn’t bear Athos’s mark, missed when Athos had ignored marking thousands of his new spawn while concentrating on breaking Tessla.
The murder of a mage was of no account, but the theft of his hook shamed Athos before Zorce, his father. Because of this humiliation, Athos cracked Hell’s
vents wide long before the original plan called for, releasing his hunters into the middle world, ordering that none return until the spawn was dead and the hook returned.
So Mercktos watched Tessla in the hopes she would lead him to the spawn. He watched her look one way and another. Shaking her head, she ran.
Waiting until she was almost out of sight, Mercktos followed.
* * * *
Tessla ran.
She ran tirelessly up streets, down allies. She ran until a mile lay behind her, until she reached an intersection free of venders and traffic. Block buildings and discarded garbage lined the street. Two men serviced one unwilling woman against a wall while a dog urinated nearby. Half a block later Yarlen struggled and cried, captured in the arms of Heriod, the giant Belthethsia had enslaved. Yarlen’s pockets bulged. Cocking her head to one side, Tessla watched curiously while Yarlen screamed. When Heriod violently shook the child, Yarlen stilled.
“I don’t know where he is,” Yarlen said, her voice unnaturally calm.
“He wears a green hook,” Heriod insisted, “and he’s tall.”
Looking within, Tessla saw the giant’s small and shriveled soul. It was caged, struggling, and almost gone. The blood flowing through his veins had become thick sludge. Hell had enslaved. He was doomed.
“I know where the spawn is,” Tessla broke in. She took two steps closer and stopped when Heriod threw Yarlen from him. Striking the street with a roll, the girl scrambled away and disappeared around the corner, taking Heriod’s money pouch with her.
Heriod strode up to Tessla, grabbed her by the neck, and shoved her up against a hard stone building. A protrusion jammed into her back. Another scratched her ear. Frowning, Tessla wondered why she found the sensations irritating while Heriod’s grip tightened around her throat. Blood pounded in her head. Tessla grinned when her lungs stopped working. Almost, she allowed herself to die, but her god’s bidding could not be denied. Disappointed by Trelsar’s will, she grasped Heriod’s wrists and pulled his hands away.