WIth that, Iapetus strode away, never looking back. Rameses watched him go, wishing he had a gun and the nerve to shoot the man down. Then he turned and made his way slowly into the tunnel, his eyes locked on the crumpled shape of the body that lay there on the tiles. Reaching it, he knelt down and rolled it over.
There was just enough of the face left to identify it. Barmakid. The Ecclesiarch. The cultist, if Nakamura and his friends were to be believed. The traitor to mankind.
Rameses took all this in and cursed. Iapetus had killed the one person no one would blame him for killing. In fact, he’d probably be hailed as a hero, if all was as it now appeared.
But the way he’d killed Barmakid...
Rameses shuddered.
Iapetus was an animal. A thug. A barbarian.
And, he swore to himself as he made his way down the remainder of the tunnel and toward safety, a day of reckoning between them was coming. Surely it was. And soon.
17
Agrippa stood on legs grown somewhat shaky from only a few minutes’ combat with the demonic Guardsmen. Blood trailed down his face and his right arm from numerous cuts and gouges. His blast pistol wasn’t working, either because he’d already depleted the battery or because he’d fired it so many times in quick succession that it was overheated. Angrily he reholstered it and cast his gaze about for another weapon.
And he saw one.
He started toward the gleaming shape that lay on the floor nearby, and only as he moved to reach for it did his mind fully register exactly what he was seeing. It lay where the mindless creature that had been the Emperor had flung it in its rage.
A demon leapt before him, interposing itself between him and the weapon. He ducked and rolled, the razor-like claws just missing over his head. He continued his roll between the creature’s legs, coming out behind it. Like a coiled spring released, he dove for the weapon and his fingers closed on its grip just as the demon whirled around to attack again. He sprang to his feet and raised it up before him, brandishing it at the hideous demon. A bright, pure light shone from its gleaming surfaces.
He held the Sword of Baranak.
The demon fell back, hissing and growling, raising a clawed hand to block the light. Agrippa wasted no time; he attacked, swinging the blade mercilessly. It sliced into the demon and sickly-smelling green ichor sprayed out. Agrippa looked down at the sword in his hand and smiled. This isn’t so bad a weapon at all, he realized. If only it could be mine on a permanent basis..!
The demon charged him again, crouching, springing, coming in low. Agrippa met it with a roundhouse swing that lopped its head clean off its shoulders. The grotesque, larger-than-human snake-head bounced and rolled across the fine marble floor, leaving a trail of blood in its wake—blood that sizzled like acid. The body, meanwhile, collapsed and began to spontaneously combust.
Agrippa stared down at the burning demon’s body and a sense of accomplishment swept over him. So, he thought. We can kill them. Or, at least, he amended, raising the golden sword in his right hand and inspecting it, we can if we have something like this.
He started to dive back into the scrum of combat that was happening behind him. It consisted of the rest of the Emperor’s Guard—now in their demonic forms—battling the surviving members of his Phalanx. Before he could move, however, he noticed out of the corner of his eye the predicament General Nakamura and Colonel Tamerlane had found themselves in: they were injured or at least dazed, and two of the demons were closing in on them, about to kill them. The one closest to the general was bending over him even now, grotesque mouth open wide, about to devour him or at the very least bite off his head.
With a cry, Agrippa crossed the space between them in a series of powerful bounds, the golden sword drawn back. As he reached the general and the demon, he brought the blade around with all his might. A weapon that had once belonged to the mightiest of the gods— Baranak, god of battle and lord of the Golden City—it still possessed unearthly power. It sliced into the demon and cleaved the creature in half.
Nakamura and Tamerlane had recovered sufficiently by then that they both made it to their feet again, and both fired their blast pistols at the other demon attacking them. The barrage caused the beast to recoil momentarily, but when they paused, it surged forward again—directly onto the blade Agrippa held out, point-first. Wailing, screaming in a tongue rarely heard on our plane of reality, the demon burst into flames and collapsed into a blazing heap.
Tamerlane grinned at Agrippa and Nakamura gripped him by the shoulder, nodding. The tide seemed to be turning.
Then came a bellow that shook the very foundations of the Church of the Reliquae.
All three men looked up and saw that the demon that had been the Emperor had now grown so vast and bloated that its head actually reached up inside the dome itself, while its arms had extended to many meters long and were now flinging about, smashing into the walls and sending chunks of masonry raining down to impact the floor with deafening force. Again it bellowed, the sound like a heavy freighter ship lifting off from a spaceport. In response, the surviving Emperor’s Guard demons bounded across the wreckage of the sanctuary to gather at the gargantuan monster’s feet. They turned and faced outward, howling their wordless rage.
“What are they doing?” Tamerlane croaked, his mouth filled with dust and smoke.
“Nothing good,” Nakamura replied, as Agrippa looked on in silent astonishment.
The demonic creature thrashed hard to its left, its bulk smashing into the walls of the cathedral. The ground shook and more chunks of masonry fell, exploding like bombs as they hit all around the humans. The dome high above cracked . The demon reared back and struck the walls again, even harder, and this time the dome collapsed.
The three officers dove for cover, scrambling beneath the table as bricks and marble plates smashed to the floor all about.
“It wants out, I think,” Tamerlane said.
“I don’t know if this sword will stop it,” said Agrippa, holding the golden blade up before him. “It’s grown so vast…”
“We have another weapon,” Nakamura stated. He motioned to Tamerlane, who nodded. Together the two men clambered back out from under the table as the deadly hail abated momentarily. Agrippa, curious, followed them.
“Colonel,” Nakamura called, facing Agrippa, “if you would be so kind as to attract its attention…?”
“Sir.” Agrippa saluted crisply, then bounded toward the thing’s leg. A Guardsman demon bellowed madly and charged out to meet him, but the blond man hacked it down where it stood. Then he drew back the blade and plunged it into the Emperor-demon’s leg.
The mighty beast unleashed a deafening roar. It spun around, wrenching the sword from Agrippa’s grasp. It bent down, one savage claw reaching for him.
“Now!” cried Nakamura.
Tamerlane stepped up beside his general and together they raised their arms, hands open and palms facing outward. The Power of the Above filled them, transforming as it passed through their bodies, becoming the antithesis of the demonic flame.
The holy fire flooded out, engulfing everything.
BOOK FOUR:
THE TAIKO
1
The golden Sword of Baranak lay on the long marble table where Agrippa had set it when the battle was done, amid chunks of stone and plaster and splatters of blood—all reminders of the nightmare they had just passed through, and out the other side. Some of them, at least.
The holy fire unleashed by Nakamura and Tamerlane had washed over the monstrous demon and dissolved it like a sand castle struck by a tidal wave. Its bones—if bones ever supported its gelatinous bulk—had dissolved within seconds, leaving only bubbling, stinking, putrid gobs of jelly that sizzled for an hour or more after the battle was over. Flames danced here and there, the thing’s mass continuously reducing as it burned, melting away—or perhaps returning from whence it had come.
Within minutes, all that had remained of the behemoth was a black smear acro
ss seemingly an acre of the marble tile.
Now Tamerlane stood near that awful stain, leaning over the sword and the table that supported it. He gazed down at it in wonder. It seemed to radiate power from every inch of its gleaming form. With the battle over and it’s immediate expediency done, no one dared pick it up; it was a sword of kings, of emperors, of the gods themselves. And now all of those who might claim such titles were dead—dead or gone beyond the reach of Man.
The acrid smell of smoke and blood and other, more unspeakable things, still hung in the air. Tamerlane wrinkled his nose at it and scowled as he stood near the spot where, only a short time earlier, the Emperor had held court. Now that man—the unquestioned ruler of the Anatolian Empire—was dead, along with his wife and children. The thought of it all nearly staggered the colonel, and he could merely shake his head slowly as he gazed across the chamber at the destruction that had been wrought by the battle with the demons.
Possessed, Tamerlane thought, astonished. The entire party that we rescued from the Below—the Emperor and the Guard—all of them possessed by demons.
It’s partly our fault, then, he concluded. If we hadn’t gone in after them... if we hadn’t brought them back out from the depths of subspace, where we already knew evil entities dwelt...
But such thoughts were meaningless. Of course they had gone into the Below in search of the Emperor. Of course they had brought him back out. They could scarcely have done otherwise.
And it was done. The only question they faced now was, What next? What was to become of the Anatolian Empire that Janus IV had until today ruled?
“This Empire is dead.”
Tamerlane looked up, startled from his thoughts by so unfathomable a statement. “What?”
Planetary Governor Rameses had approached while Tamerlane was deep in thought and now stood before the broad table, hands on hips, face a mask of disapproval and disgust. The colonel straightened instinctively, while simultaneously taking the man’s measure. At some point in the last few minutes he had traded his ceremonial Egyptian-style robes for an officer’s uniform of the Empire. Tamerlane noticed, however, that the usual various Imperial insignia were missing from the lapels. An aide stood behind him, holding his crooked, red-and-gold-striped staff.
“It’s all done,” the ruler of Ahknaton said, turning from the table to glance at Tamerlane for a moment, then looking away again. “Finished.”
This rankled Tamerlane more than he could have imagined it would have before it had been said aloud.
“No—with respect, Governor,” he said, the anger within him welling up nearly into outrage. “It’s not dead.”
“Ridiculous,” Rameses snapped, this time not bothering to look Tamerlane’s way. Instead he turned toward the sound of boots crunching their way through the rubble, and nodded to the approaching form of Governor Tokugawa, the ruler of Edo. “It is time for the planetary governors to assert direct control over their territories—would you not agree, Iyesu?”
Before Tokugawa could answer, Tamerlane stepped forward and cut him off. “That would lead to chaos. Our enemies would descend upon us—pick off our worlds, one by one.” He glared at Rameses intensely, until the governor had no choice but to look back at him. “The Empire is not dead,” Tamerlane repeated. “It merely needs a ruler.”
“You forget yourself, Colonel,” Tokugawa snapped, appalled at Tamerlane’s manners. Rameses meanwhile regarded Tamerlane with an expression of scorn and contempt.
“The entire royal family is dead,” Rameses almost shouted. “There is no one left to lead it!”
The others in the chamber were taking note of the conversation—and its elevating tone—and turned to watch. At the far end of the room, General Nakamura frowned and started toward them.
Tamerlane saw him coming and knew the general intended to shut Tamerlane up. But that couldn’t be allowed. Tamerlane understood very well that all of history turned on but a few moments—moments of vast consequence and import. This, he knew in his bones, was one of those moments. The very Empire itself hung in the balance. If things were going to be said and done—things Tamerlane had long believed in, quietly—they needed to be said and done now. Now, or not at all. There was no more room for manners, for niceties, at this crossroads of history. No time for that at all. This was it. There would surely be no second chance.
“When I desire the counsel of a mere colonel,” Rameses was saying, his tone reflecting the impatience of a man whose plans are being disrupted, “I will be sure to—”
“One moment, Amon,” said a short, stocky man in flowing robes of purple and gold, who had just slipped up behind them. He reached out and placed a hand on Rameses’s shoulder—something that caused the ruler of Ahknaton to jerk around, before he realized it was the ruler of Bursa, bloodied and bandaged from the recent events but still alive, who addressed him.
“Suleyman,” Rameses almost gasped, restraining himself. He frowned. “You wish to encourage the radical politics of this—this soldier?”
Governor Suleyman Mehemet allowed himself to smile. “We were all soldiers once—and so much younger than we are now. Less set in our ways. More open to new ideas.” He winked at Rameses. “And the young must have their say—no?” He turned his gaze slowly to Tamerlane. “Please—go on, Colonel. I for one am not entirely convinced as to who here is the radical—and I am most interested in where you are going with this.”
Others were approaching now, as well. Colonels Iapetus and Agrippa moved in closer, listening intently. Majors Barbarossa and Vostok exchanged troubled glances. Behind them all, Inquisitor Stanishur and his aides swept forward, black robes flowing. Within seconds a crowd of dozens of men and women of the military and the Imperial government had closed in around them, looking and listening.
“My position is simple,” Tamerlane called to the assembly. “We cannot allow the Empire we have all fought and bled for, our entire lives, to evaporate because of this incident. On the contrary—this incident proves that all of mankind faces a much more formidable foe than we had ever suspected. We need unity now—more than ever—not division.”
“We need the strength of our individual worlds, each at its most efficient,” Rameses countered. “With the central government dissolved and power devolved to the planets themselves, we can more effectively fight whatever enemy we face.”
“We can more effectively die, one planet at a time, each one of them alone,” Tamerlane stated.
“I will not debate this matter with a common foot soldier,” Rameses barked.
“Foot soldier?” Nakamura exclaimed. He moved forward. “Governor—while I am not pleased that my subordinate is making a spectacle of himself here, I do believe that he—a full colonel in His Majesty’s military—deserves some measure of respect and—”
“His Majesty is dead,” Rameses snapped, cutting the general off. “Just like his empire.”
Governor Tokugawa moved between them, hands raised to settle them both down. “There are others to be heard from,” he said, looking out at the crowd. “What is the Church’s view of all this? We must have the opinion of the Ecclesiarch before we can go further.”
“The Ecclesiarch probably won’t be addressing that, or anything else, I’m afraid,” Agrippa observed in his booming voice. “The pretender, Barmakid, is dead. My men just found his body in a side passage.” He snorted. “Someone took out a great deal of hostility on him before he died.”
“The priests are all dead,” Major Barbarossa added, nodding to the carnage around the big table. “And as for their little army—” He snorted a laugh. “They ran away and still haven’t come back.”
“There is no one here to speak for the Church,” Rameses concluded.
For a moment the impromptu assembly was silent. Then Inquisitor Stanishur moved forward and intoned, “I can speak for the Holy Church—and I will.” He looked toward Tamerlane momentarily and a hint of a smile touched his lips. “Both Church and Inquisition have always supported the Em
pire, and we will continue to do so. The Empire must endure!”
Some of the others turned to one another and nodded, muttering words of renewed hope and confidence at Stanishur’s proclamation. Rameses, however, shook his head. “No one here disputes the importance of the Inquisition, Stanishur,” he stated. “But you do not speak for the Holy Church.”
At that, the crowd dissolved into loud and increasingly angry argument.
The Grand Inquisitor raised one bony hand and held it aloft until they silenced themselves. “The Ecclesiarch has been revealed to all as a traitor and a heretic,” he stated in solemn tones. “A cultist and worshiper of Vorthan. A servant of the dark forces. And the Emperor was taken entirely—may Those Who Remain accept and preserve his soul. We cannot know how deeply the taint reaches—how many others within the Church have also been swayed by the dark powers, or possessed outright. The Inquisition therefore relieves the Ecclesiarchy of its authority—for now, pending a full inquisition into its members and practices—and assumes for itself that authority within the Empire.”
More shouting and confusion greeted this.
“There is no more Empire,” Rameses asserted angrily, above the din.
Stanishur ignored him. Again he motioned for silence, and it was a testament to the esteem with which he was held—and the fear his organization perpetuated—that the throng quickly silenced itself. “It is as Colonel Tamerlane has stated it,” he said. “The Empire endures—it merely requires a new ruler.”
Rameses glared at the older man. “And it is as I have said: There is no one left to rule.”
“Then we must find someone,” Stanishur replied, his flinty eyes gazing out at the crowd of soldiers and politicians surrounding him. “Someone that all can accept, and respect, and obey.”
Now everyone in the room was looking at everyone else in the room. Had the plots and machinations being mentally conceived at that moment made actual sounds, the hall would have been filled with a deafening cacophony from the sheer number of them.
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