Stay of Execution

by Glynn Stewart

  “All will pass into ash and dust.”

  “Unless I trust you?”

  “There are other paths,” she admitted. “But mine is the one before you, David White.”

  He didn’t allow himself to hesitate. He stepped forward and took her hand.

  He wasn’t expecting her to pull him back with her, yanking him into the water. He was a strong swimmer, but the water itself defied him, the Lake turning on him to drag him deeper and deeper.

  Even a regenerator needed to breathe.

  He met the gaze of the eyes he could see underwater with him and tried to ask why. It was too late. Water rushed into his lungs as he opened his mouth, and he choked in pain, trying desperately to channel enough power, enough strength, to escape the trap he’d walked into…

  And then David White died.

  20

  And then he woke up.

  He was still underwater. His lungs were full of water and his body was rebelling against its failure to breathe, and yet…the warmth he’d long associated with his regeneration filled him, saturating his entire form and sustaining him even as his lungs failed to find any oxygen.

  He stood on the bottom of Lake Tahoe, the sunlight barely filtering down to him, and felt the presence of the spirit of the lake all around him. He had died. He was, arguably, dying…and yet he stood and marveled at the impossible scene around him.

  The body of a true regenerator rebuilds itself. The spirit’s voice sounded in his head, not his ears. He was inside her, in a sense. She could speak to him here.

  You have died before but not known. Dying and regenerating cleansed your body of the silver…and knowing what has happened has fully awoken those powers within you.

  Mantles are funny things. You humans never did understand them, and they do so much without you realizing it. Yours is a powerful one, an ancient one. Oh, the stories it could tell if the spirit you bear could speak.

  He tried to respond, but his ability to survive down there didn’t stretch that far. He felt Tahoe’s laughter around him.

  You came to me for answers. I have some. Others, though…others require a Seer. Will you lend me your Sight, that we both may See what will be?

  At this point, he was already as deep in as he was going to get. He held out his hand once more and felt the Lake wrap around it, the waters that contained the Pure known as the Tahoe Oracle swarming over his body, into his mouth and ears and eyes…

  Suddenly, the lake was gone, replaced by the jaw-dropping vista of the Rocky Mountains. Snow-covered peaks towered over icy lakes and twisting roadways, and his viewpoint moved, flashing away from roads and down to peaks and valleys far from any human eyes.

  There, Charles floated in the sky, catching an updraft with a deliriously content expression on his face. His wings fully extended, his wingspan had to be a hundred yards or more, and the shadow on the snow beneath him sent small creatures scurrying for cover as the dragon enjoyed his freedom for the first time in decades.

  To David’s surprise, the dragon flipped over in the air, leveling his warm eyes on David’s viewpoint, somehow meeting the Seer’s gaze through the link.

  “David.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “You are learning, then,” he continued approvingly. “And you live, despite the fools who lead your people.”

  The brogue was almost gone. Hints of it remained, but Charles spoke levelly and clearly.

  “Is it time, then?” the dragon asked. “I will come when you call, I swore that, and I meant it.”

  David tried to speak, to tell the dragon Riley’s plan and where to meet them. None of it came out past the water…but Charles clearly heard it anyway.

  “I have no loyalty to Riley, but I will always be your friend,” the dragon told him. “I will meet you, David White, and we will stand guard over this world together.”

  Before David could respond at all, even to acknowledge Charles’s words, his viewpoint changed…but the centerpiece was the same. It took him a few moments to realize it was a different dragon, and a chill ran down his spine as the creature extracted itself from a series of hills.

  Where Charles was red, this one was a dark green, shedding dirt and mud and stone as she tore herself out of the ground. She was shorter and narrower than Charles, her face leaner, her wings and limbs longer and sharper.

  The dragon was bellowing in pain as she struggled against the hill containing her, but another voice was answering it. Magic flared across the forested hills David was now looking down at, someone working spells to help the dragon escape and soothe its injuries.

  His viewpoint swooped, making him dizzy, to focus on the Mage. She was a stranger to him, a tall, willowy blonde clad in a pink pantsuit—but the four “men” around her were familiar. Red skin so dark as to almost be black and patterns of white horns instead of hair marked them as mid-court demons.

  Ix’s contemporaries.

  There weren’t supposed to be four of them on the planet.

  The demons’ presence distracted him, drawing his attention away from the dragon as she finished Awakening. She half-hopped, half-crawled over to the Mage. At some point, someone had dug into the hill that contained her bones, snapping one of her wings.

  She had rebuilt her limbs and body, soil transforming into new leather flesh and immense wings…but she couldn’t fix the broken one.

  The creature was pathetic, plaintive as she dragged her crippled wing behind it. The Mage, however, bowed deeply to the dragon while the demons went to one knee.

  “I can heal you,” she told the dragon. “But there is a price.”

  “There is always a price,” the dragon replied.

  It took David that long to realize that they were both speaking Latin. He didn’t speak Latin…but he understood them today.

  “One year of service. Then you are free. It is a safety for you, as well,” the Mage noted. “The world has changed since the days of Rome, Lady Serena”

  “Rome is a long way away,” the dragon replied.

  “And that is part of how the world has changed. My offer is fair.”

  “It is,” the dragon agreed, then bowed its own head. “I accept.”

  As she raised her head from the bow, however, she focused on David’s view. Before the dragon could speak or react to his presence, however, he was gone, his viewpoint sweeping away once again.

  Dizzied by the motion, he found himself in a sumptuously appointed private clinic. The luxury of the surroundings, however, was a stark contrast to the scene inside. Two men in camo fatigues were blocking the only door to the room, carefully watching a clearly terrified doctor examine a pregnant woman.

  The mother-to-be looked normal-enough human…except that tattoos inked in glowing black ink swirled over her stomach and torso, pulsing with energy across her skin.

  Two more of the dark-red-skinned mid-court demons stood beside the bed, watching the doctor’s every move. Behind them, watching the whole affair with a proprietary air about him, was a familiar figure clad in a dull-white version of a priest’s black cassock.

  John Buckley wasn’t visibly armed, but given the arsenal scattered across his companions, the Mage didn’t need to be armed to clearly be in charge.

  “How is she, Doctor?” he asked calmly.

  “What do you expect me to say?” the doctor snapped. “I don’t know what sick mag—”

  Buckley didn’t move. Didn’t twitch. But in mid-word, the doctor suddenly found herself lifted off the ground, hanging over the bed and gasping for air. She hung there for several moments, but then the Mage released her.

  “How is she, Doctor?” he asked again, as if he hadn’t just half-choked the woman.

  “She’s fine. So’s the baby,” the doctor wheezed out. “She’s a few weeks away from birth.”

  Buckley smiled.

  “Now, was that so hard?” he asked. “Tanstalestra, help her dress. Doctor, your money is on the side table.”

  One of the camouflaged men t
ossed an envelope onto the table in question as Buckley spoke.

  “It’s ten times your usual fee or so,” he continued with a smile, watching the demon help the pregnant woman dress. There was something wrong with her, beyond the tattoos. Her movements were mechanical, stiff.

  “Obviously, if you try and tell anyone about the girl, we’ll kill you.”

  The scene faded into the shadows of the depths of Lake Tahoe.

  This is what is. The Lake’s voice echoed in his head. I can guide you, but the Sight is yours. I have the power, but your connections allow me to See what I might have missed.

  What about the future? David asked, managing to keep his words inside his head and avoid any further choking. He might be alive, but he so far as his body could tell, he was still drowning. The less discomfort he could add to the situation, the better.

  That gift is not mine. The words crashed into his brain like falling rock. I can guide you again…but it will hurt. I cannot guarantee we will see anything of value.

  Can it kill me?

  The spirit’s chuckle echoed around his skull.

  No.

  Then let’s see what we can find out.

  The shimmering darkness of the bottom of Lake Tahoe faded again, more slowly this time. True darkness overwhelmed David and lasted this time. He couldn’t see anything. Feel anything. Hear anything.

  It seemed to last an eternity…and mere moments at the same time. Suddenly, he was hanging over a city, one on the coast. It looked vaguely familiar, but it was hard to be certain through the smoke and flames.

  It was definitely an American coastal city and it was definitely on fire. Entire suburbs were engulfed in flames, and tanks were rolling down the main thoroughfares. Jet fighters appeared in the air, slowing from supersonic as they came in for precise firing passes on…something.

  Then his brain, experienced with service in ONSET, finally caught up to what he was seeing. Fifteen-foot-tall stone golems, animated by demonic ichor, brushed aside tank shells like children’s snowballs. Machine-gun fire didn’t even seem to register as the creatures advanced on the tank squadrons.

  The lead M1 Abrams became weapons, wielded as awkwardly shaped clubs to smash their compatriots into pieces. Armored personnel carriers turned, trying to run or disgorge their passengers to some semblance of safety, but familiar-looking shadow demons swarmed out of the ground and the side buildings.

  Inch-thick steel plating failed like tissue paper against granite fists and demonic claws. As David watched, an entire battalion of tanks and mechanized infantry disintegrated under the demons’ assault.

  Then the jets came back around, clearly intending to avenge their ground-pounding brethren—but the demons had already learned.

  David wasn’t quite sure what the creatures that emerged out of the buildings were. Like the golems, they were probably technically Awakened, creatures of stone and earth—or concrete and metal, in this case—given life by the borrowed ichor of the Pure.

  They were four-legged things that lacked heads or faces, just a single massive tail lined with metal spikes that had probably once been the rebar in concrete. As the jet fighters dove to release their precision munitions, the tails flicked into the air, releasing the metal spikes in massive swarms that crashed into the sky with a hundred sonic booms.

  The fighters never stood a chance. A dozen supersonic spikes slammed into each plane. Most simply disintegrated, and even the intact ones crashed down, scattering flaming debris across the fallen city.

  Pain tore through David’s body now, as if the spikes were hitting him directly, but he tried to focus, to see more of what was going on. His view shifted to a sports stadium. People were being funneled into it, a massive crowd under guard by black-coated men and women with blank faces.

  Behind the black-coats were lines of toad demons, the big monstrosities looming over their minions and prisoners alike. Scattered through them were the red skins and white horns of mid-court demons, a final backup against any escape or assault that made it that far.

  Inside the stadium, the prisoners were being divided into groups. Children and their mothers were shuffled off in one direction, out of the stadium. The old and the infirm were dragged in another direction…and David couldn’t bring himself to follow that line to see what happened.

  The third group, the able-bodied adults who weren’t mothers, were dragged into the center of the stadium, where a grotesque mockery of an old court had been assembled. A strange-looking young man, with perfectly white skin and a small “circlet” of black horns around his hairless scalp, sat on a throne, studying the people brought before him.

  At his left stood John Buckley, clad in an identical white cassock to the one he’d worn in the prior vision. At his right stood the woman from the vision with the dragon—and the dragon herself was curled up behind the throne, watching the scene with lidded eyes.

  A group of a hundred able-bodied men and women were brought forward and forced to their knees in front of the strange youth. He rose and spoke to them. His words…didn’t process. David wasn’t sure if it was the language he was speaking or a side effect of the vision of the future, but the youth’s voice didn’t come through intelligibly.

  The youth—this had to be the Herald—waited for a moment, then spoke again, his sharp tones coming across the gulf of time.

  When no one responded, he raised his hands and black light flashed out, striking the foreheads of the assembled prisoners. Their screams echoed through the vision link. Some fell, never to rise again. The rest…

  The rest rose as one, their movements mechanical now, and shuffled off to one side, unguarded. There, David spotted racks upon racks of the same black coats worn by the guards outside…and the newly controlled people put them on, hiding whatever clothes they had been wearing under the shield of the standard garment.

  He couldn’t fight the pain anymore. It crashed through him in waves, his Sight wavering. There had to be something he could identify. Something he could use to prevent this from happening.

  A cathedral spire. A lighthouse. The ocean… He lost it, falling into darkness.

  21

  David woke up again. This time, at least, he wasn’t still drowning. He was in fact, he realized after a moment, tucked inside a sleeping bag next to a fire as night fell on the gravelly beaches of Lake Tahoe.

  “You’re awake,” a familiar voice said warmly. Before he could try to rise, Kate Mason had left her folding beach chair and knelt down by his head. “How are you feeling?”

  He considered as he slowly stretched his limbs one by one. Despite drowning repeatedly and, apparently, dying, he felt fine. Better than he ever had, in fact.

  “Good,” he admitted. “That seems…weird.”

  Kate chuckled.

  “Given that I found you tossed up on the beach like driftwood, that’s something of a surprise,” she told him.

  “Please,” another familiar voice interjected. “I was far gentler than that.”

  David looked over by the fire to see the figure of Lake Tahoe’s main avatar occupying a second beach chair. She was wearing a tight-fitted dark blue dress this time, which barely left more to the imagination than her complete nakedness before.

  “You drowned him,” Kate pointed out. “I’m still pissed over that, to be clear. You killed my boyfriend.”

  Tahoe laughed.

  “Insomuch as the caterpillar kills itself when it crawls into its cocoon,” she replied. “He is complete now, as he had yet to become. You can feel it, can’t you, Battle Seer?”

  Two words that ran down David’s spine. He’d never thought of himself that way before, no one had ever described him that way before…but it fit.

  “Battle Seer, huh?” Kate said. “I like the sound of that.”

  “It feels right,” he admitted. “What did you do to me, Tahoe?”

  “Nothing,” the Pure spirit replied. “Well, I killed you. Everything else was you. You are complete now. What you always were, b
ut now you understand.”

  David shook his head as he took Kate’s hand and rose to his feet. She embraced him and they kissed.

  “No more secrets, huh?” she said. “No more hiding.”

  “There are still secrets,” Tahoe pointed out. “Your government conceals that you ever existed.”

  “It won’t last,” Kate replied. “With the Canadians, the British and the Europeans in the open…none of the secrets are going to last.”

  “It could last three, four years—long enough for this Congress and President to win the next election,” David said. “And politicians don’t think past the next election.”

  He shook his head.

  “But what I’ve Seen…they’re not going to stop it with a Special Forces company and conventional troops,” he continued. “You saw all that I did, didn’t you?” he asked the spirit.

  “I did,” she confirmed. “You may be out of time to prevent the Herald arising.”

  “What is the Herald?” David demanded. “I Saw him, but I don’t understand. Is he a demon?”

  “No more than you are,” Tahoe explained. “He is a Mantle, an Awakened, a Pure. All of these things. A human body, shaped in the womb by either magic or ichor. Grown to adult size by absorbing anything he can consume—dirt, metal…people.

  “Ensouled with a custom-built mantle forged from the souls of the Masters Beyond. He is a Pure. But he is also a Mantle, claiming a body built like an Awakened.”

  “So, he’s more powerful than anything they could bring through a portal,” Kate concluded.

  “More than that,” David whispered. “He is a portal. Linked to the other side of the Seal, accessing a portion of the power of the Masters themselves. Every moment he walks this Earth, the Seal weakens. His soul is the gateway that will allow their invasion to begin.”

  “Exactly,” the Pure told him. “The Seal has weakened enough that humanity will accept magic again, but it cannot be permitted to break.”

  She looked sad at that. Tired.

  “My people are gone. Their energies consumed to produce the legions the Masters will invade this world with. Even the Masters are not what they were.”