She rolled away, and came up on her feet, crouched and glaring at me with insane rage. I adjusted my aim and kept firing until Krati ran dry. She dodged and jinked, making most of the shots from Krati miss, but she couldn’t dodge the rounds from Kunknir. Again, a furor of high-pitched cries sounded from the Plowir Medn, but for the moment, they seemed content to stand back and watch.
Hel pointed at me, squinting against the pain of Kunknir’s slugs, and her mouth moved, but only guttural noise issued from it. She shook her head in frustration and tried again. “Predna!” she growled. Burn!
I knew what was coming from the stories the Isir had told about her fall and I dove to my right, rolling when I hit the ground. Just behind me, emerald green flames splashed like a syrupy liquid against the road’s surface. I rolled to my knees and came up firing Kunknir, while I slipped Krati down over a fresh magazine sticking up from my belt.
She shrieked and ducked her head, but not before a round from the big .45 caliber 1911 slammed into her cheek below her right eye. She sprinted toward the pulsing knot of her guard, swiping at Althyof with a clawed hand as she passed.
The Isir parted to admit her to their midst, and as soon as she reached them, they closed around her, forming a shield of human meat between her and all of us. With a shrug, I fired Krati into their midst, pulling the trigger until my finger became numb. As I strode toward them, converging with Althyof, Hel’s form shifted and blurred back toward that of a tall, thin blonde woman. A knot of uncertainty settled in my gut. I wasn’t sure which was worse, Hel in bear-form, or Hel able to vefa strenki.
“Hank! She’s becoming human!” shouted Jane.
Across the battlefield, the Plowir Medn laughed and jeered.
“Be careful,” said Veethar at my elbow. “She’s unpredictable at best.”
I nodded and stopped walking, standing in front of the forty or so remaining black-clad guards and holding them at gunpoint, as ludicrous as that was. Althyof circled Veethar and me, singing his trowba, dancing the steps, casting his runes, but his eyes were on the knot of Isir shielding the Black Bitch.
A strange silence fell—even the Plowir Medn shut up—only broken by the grunts and curses of Meuhlnir and Luka’s fight. I didn’t like it.
“You motherfuckers killed Vowli!” Hel boomed. “You decapitated him!” The circle of Isir parted, and there Hel stood, naked as a baby, glaring at us, her gaze traveling to each of our faces and ending on mine.
I raised Kunknir, but she held up a hand as if commanding me to wait.
“You killed him, my Vowli, and for that, you will suffer!” She screeched the last few words at a volume that cracked her voice and echoed back and forth in the enclosed roadway. Her face crumbled into an expression of insane fury as her hand came up to point at me. “Eltsyowr!” she shrieked, and strangely fluidic emerald green flame vomited from her hand and raced toward me.
“Skyuldur ockur!” I shouted. The air around us pinged like a wind chime, and a translucent hemisphere shivered into the surrounding air. It extended upward and wrapped around Jane’s hovering form. The emerald green flame washed around the edges of the soap-bubble dome, lapping at it like waves against a sea wall.
More and more of the viscous fire poured from Hel’s hand. The fire surrounding the three of us got deeper and deeper, and a hateful smile dawned on Hel’s lips.
“Why’s she still smiling?” I asked, and when I refilled my lungs, I knew the answer. The air was hot and getting hotter by the second.
The cadence of Althyof’s trowba changed, and the air cooled a minuscule amount, but it didn’t last long. She intended to cook us inside our protective shield. Yowtgayrr materialized, grim-faced, already drawing silvery runes in the air, doing what he could with the temperature.
“You hateful bitch!” shouted Jane. She hurled her spear, the lines of her body taut as she put every ounce of her strength behind it. The spear turned to golden lightning as soon as it left her hand, and though I expected the bubble to stop it, it passed right through. Still, Hel continued to smile.
The bolt of golden light raced toward Hel, but then the air felt…hinky, wrong. My skin itched as if a million midges were crawling over me. The lightning bolt twisted in mid-flight and bounced away. The Plowir Medn jeered and laughed raucously.
Jane called back the spear, and once she’d caught it, looked down at us trapped in our clever little soap-bubble. She hunched her shoulder and barged her shield at no one in midair. The jagged black beam erupted from its center with the now-familiar pinging sound, and the beam arced toward Hel like a guided missile. As the spear had, the black beam passed through our bubble as if it didn’t exist.
Hel continued to smile, and I had an idea that she had her own little clever shield, this one provided by her Plowir Medn.
“Meuhlnir! Help!” Jane cried, but he was locked in battle with Luka, neither able to gain an advantage, neither able to disengage.
The emerald green fire lapped toward the top of the bubble, blocking my vision of anything but Jane. I stared up at her and tried to smile, but there was a lump in my throat the size of Manhattan.
Yowtgayrr muttered something under his breath and sketched more runes in the air in rapid succession. A light rain started at the top of the dome, cooling the air and us, somewhat, but nowhere near enough.
“Haymtatlr!” she cried. “Haymtatlr!” She drifted to the ground next to me and shifted her spear to her shield hand, so she could link her arm through mine.
“We tried,” I whispered, and the green fire entombed us inside our translucent shield. The air was almost too hot to breathe, and we all crouched, hoping the air close to the ground would be even a few degrees cooler. “Any ideas?” I asked with a crooked smile. “We seem to have her right where we want her.”
The surface of the road near the edge of the shield bubbled and ran. The heat grew too intense to breathe. I stared into Jane’s eyes, trying to tell her with a look how much I loved her, how lucky I felt to have known her, to have had her in my life.
“NO! YOU WILL NOT HURT HER!” The voice boomed through the air, loud enough that even the mounds of liquid fire around us could not muffle it. A strange, mechanical sound came next, and it took me a moment to place it—it was the sound of multiple garage doors rolling up at once.
I crooked my eyebrow at Jane.
Haymtatlr, she mouthed and grinned.
The green fire dissolved all at once, and I dropped the shield, and all that trapped hot air gusted away from us as though sucked away by a tornado. The road’s surface warped and bubbled—resembling cooling lava.
All around us, the silvery robots we’d seen in the repair room moved about on their spindly legs. The left hand of each robot had folded back to expose a matte-black tube, and every few seconds a greenish-white beam ripped from the tube and lanced the air with a sound that was part paper-tearing, part jet-engine shriek.
The beams stuck with precision, never missing their target. When they hit metal armor, the armor flash-vaporized, enveloping the target with blistering, magma-hot steam. Where they hit flesh, the flesh simply disappeared.
In seconds, the black troops protecting Hel had been cut down, decimated by the robots’ beams. Hel stumbled back, an expression of horrified shock frozen on her face. “Haymtatlr!” she screamed. “Why have you betrayed me?”
“JANE IS MY FRIEND! YOU WILL NOT HARM HER!” boomed Haymtatlr at a volume so loud it made me nauseated, and I clapped my hands over my ears.
The robots advanced toward Hel, backing her away from where Jane stood. “You…you can’t do this to me, Haymtatlr!” shrieked Hel. “I am the rightful queen of Osgarthr! The rightful owner of this installation! Your rightful queen! You will obey me!”
“I WILL NOT.”
Hel’s mouth worked without sound, and her eyes roved from one robot to the next. They were almost within touching distance, and with a mechanical stuttering, their left hands folded forward to enclose the matte-black tubes, hooking into met
allic talons—perfect for rending flesh.
The Plowir Medn chanted a kaltrar, and it hurt my head to hear. Their language snaked through my brain like a centipede covered in razor-sharp metal.
The robots clattered, and all at once, each robot had its beam weapon out and pointed at one of the little blue people. For their part, the Plowir Medn kept up their chant, faces impassive—seeming almost…bored.
The robots extended their left arms, taking aim, and stopped their forward motion.
The Plowir Medn uttered three harsh syllables, and with the horrible popping noise that accompanies dismemberment, they all disappeared, leaving the robots standing frozen and silent for a moment before the clatter of folding their hands forward again shattered the stillness. With their weapons hidden away as though they’d never existed, the robots retraced their steps back to the garage from which each had emerged.
“I guess the Black Bitch is ours to deal with,” said Althyof.
But Hel was gone.
Sixty
The words of the kaltrar the Plowir Medn chanted wormed into Hel’s ears, making her head pound. “No!” she tried to shout, but the words caught in her throat. One moment, Haymtatlr’s robot guardians crowded toward her, matte black tubes that dealt instant death extended, and in the next Osgarthr seemed to turn ninety-degrees and disappeared with a disgusting pop.
“No!” she shrieked, and her voice bounced back to her out of the viscid darkness. “How dare you pull me away! How dare you!” The Plowir Medn surrounded her in the darkness—she knew that even before their titters and jeers reached her ears.
She thrashed her arms and legs, hoping to connect with one of the little blue bodies, wanting to lash out, to impose physical pain. “I’ll kill you for this!” she hissed.
“I think not,” said a childlike voice in her ear.
“Why have you done this? Why have you taken me—”
“The guardians threatened us. They represent a danger not easy to brush aside. If we are to protect your life, we must—”
“I had them! They were within my grasp!”
“No,” said another voice in the darkness. “You did not.”
Rage seethed in Hel’s blood, a caustic poison dripping into her brain. “I am your queen!” she hissed.
“No.” The word echoed from a myriad of locations, in multiple voices.
“Not ours,” said the voice in her ear.
“I’ll kill you all,” she whispered.
“I think not,” said the voice in her ear.
“Get me out of this accursed darkness!” she yelled.
“As you wish.”
Another wormy kaltrar filled her ears, seeming to crawl across the inside of her skull and tweak her brain. Another wet pop sounded, and she stood on solid ground, wrapped in a chilly gray mist. “Did you at least bring Luka?”
“We could not,” sang a childlike voice from the surrounding mist.
“First the traitors robbed me of Vowli…” she said, almost panting. “And now you’ve robbed me of my Luka!”
“He was too far,” said a voice.
One of the blue-skinned sorcerers stepped out of the mist to stand in front of her. He gazed up at her from beneath his cowl, eyes shining like twin points of cold, polished stone. “Do not worry,” he said.
“Take me to him,” she said, stomping her foot. “Take me to my Luka, right now! I command it!”
The Plowir Medn before her shrugged. “Mayhap we will,” he said. “But command us nothing, Isir.” He held up a withered blue finger and waved it in the air.
The insolence! The arrogance! she fumed. I will kill you!
“I think not,” said the man before her. He traced a rune in the air, allowing it to glow in the mist, a metallic tracery of veins and capillaries connecting the rune to his finger. “As I said, we may transport you again, but it will not be by your command. It will be so if the Tveeburar af Tikifiri—”
Hel bent to push her face into his. “DO NOT SPEAK OF YOUR PALTRY RELIGION!” she shouted.
He recoiled from her, mouth twisting with distaste, eyes burning with hatred. His withered finger snapped up to shake and quiver in her face. “Be careful, Isir! Mirkur and Owraythu do not receive such disrespect kindly.”
Resisting the desire to bite the tip of his finger off was more difficult than it should have been. She had no recollection of when her violent urges had grown so powerful. She kept her mouth closed, gritting her teeth and glaring into his cold black doll-eyes.
“We may take you where you want to go,” said a voice from the mist.
“If Our Lady of Chaos wills it,” said another.
“If Our Lord of Darkness agrees,” said the first.
The Plowir Medn in front of her withdrew his finger, his lips pressed into a thin blue line as though he too had to fight to keep hateful curses unsaid.
Simpletons, she thought with a sneer. “And how will we know if they do?”
The man in front of her shrugged, unable to keep the grin from his face. “They will tell us.”
“Tell us? Tell us? How will they tell us, you misbegotten troll?”
The grin stretched into a crooked smile. His hand lifted from his side as if drawn by invisible strings. “We shall ask them,” he whispered. “They stand behind you in the mist.”
Hel shivered as a blast of cold, malevolent wind caressed her from behind.
“Ah, Mirkur greets you,” said the little blue man.
“Mirkur just means darkness, you little fool! And that was only the wind!”
The Plowir Medn surrounding her laughed and mocked her, dancing in circles like children.
“The wind?” laughed the one in front of her. “The wind?”
The wind gusted again, and Hel hunched her shoulders against the sting of ice borne by it. “What else?” she demanded.
“Isir,” a voice that sounded one thousand years disused croaked behind her.
Hel whirled, but behind her, there was only gray mist. “Lyows!” she cried. White light flared around Hel but quickly faded into nothingness.
“My brother disapproves of light,” said another nails-on-glass voice.
“Mirkur! Owraythu!” chanted the Plowir Medn repeatedly.
“You’ve been naughty, Isir,” said Mirkur in a basso voice and a blast of frigid air slammed into Hel’s face.
“You refused to play by the rules,” said Owraythu, her voice monstrous and grim. “For that, you will pay a price.”
“What? Who…”
“Silence, now,” said Owraythu, and Hel’s mouth snicked shut and her throat clamped shut around her scream.
Sixty-one
The last of the robots filed into their garages, and the doors rolled down with a tinny racket. We stood there, dumbfounded and grinning like idiots, clothes soaked through with sweat.
Luka roared, and Meuhlnir cried out in pain. I dropped into a crouch and spun toward the sounds, but Luka was no longer there. Meuhlnir half-lay, half-sat against the wall with a horrible gash across his upper chest. He pointed wearily up the road.
I turned, expecting to see the oolfur getting ready to attack or threatening the puppies, but he was already changing into the form of the man I first knew as Chris Hatton. Lanky, cadaverous even, he sprinted past the varkr pups without a glance and slammed through the interior door.
“Don’t let him escape!” moaned Meuhlnir. “If he gets the preer running again, we’ll never catch him!”
I sprinted toward the only open garage—our garage. Veethar ran to Meuhlnir’s side, but the other three followed on my heels.
I raced through the door in time to spot Luka turning a corner far ahead. Behind me, the others grabbed our gear and packs. I ran on, chanting the triblinkr that split my consciousness into three animi, stumbling a little as my vision trebled. One animus I sent back to check on Veethar and Meuhlnir—there might still be oolfa, Isir, and Svartalfar in the cul-de-sac—unless the blue men had taken them also.
The other
animus I sent forward, blinking into existence at points in the hallway I remembered, glancing around for Luka for a heartbeat before moving on again.
“What are you doing, Hank?” gasped Jane.
“Looking for Luka, checking on Meuhlnir, and running. You?”
“Smart ass,” she said with a grin.
Veethar bent over Meuhlnir, pressing a cloth against Meuhlnir’s wound. He mumbled healing words from the Gamla Toonkumowl.
“I’m going to see if any troops are still hanging around in the cul-de-sac,” I said, having no idea if Veethar could hear me.
He glanced up at me and nodded.
“What?” asked Jane. “What corner?”
“Never mind,” I whispered. “This split consciousness thing is complicated.”
I caught sight of Luka as he reached the end of a hallway, opened the door to the next, saw hundreds of robots trundling through the hall, and slammed the door closed without crossing the threshold. He whirled and raced back up the hall toward me, panic blooming on his features.
“Luka’s coming back this way,” I said, and his head snapped up.
Around the corner, the road leading to the end of the cul-de-sac was silent and empty, but the troops might have followed us inside, which would mean that we could be running into a trap, but with all the robots in the next hall, I figured we were okay either way.
“We’ll be ready for him,” said Jane.
“Dammit! He heard me.”
“What?”
I flew into the square at the end of the road, ready to pop away in an instant if I needed to, but it was empty. Bodies lay heaped along the edges, but there were no live troops, and the interior door remained sealed.
Luka skidded to a halt and stared at the air where I hung, expression shrewd.
“He’s stopped now,” I said.
Still staring at me, Luka put out a hand and opened the door he stood beside. The white door.
“Shit!” I yelled and poured everything I had into my sprint. There would be hell to pay later, but I had to catch him.
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 95