“Looking for someone?”
I spun around, slamming my back into the statue, bringing my sword up. Darkness rushed in around me like a shield. In front of me - two steps behind me, before I had turned - was a figure called up from hell itself.
The man was as huge as the booming voice would suggest. Bigger. He stood inches taller than Grigg, inches broader across the shoulders. He must have outweighed the big Select by fifty pounds or more of solid, bulging muscle. His skin was a deeper red than Yoshana’s, the color of a ripe cherry, almost black. Eyes and hair were dark as the Overlord’s heart.
He leaned easily on a pointed metal staff etched all along its seven-foot length with symbols and patterns. The shaft was at least an inch thick. If it was the solid steel I suspected it was, the weapon must have weighed thirty pounds. Seeing me eying the staff, the giant grinned and spun it lazily in one hand. Teeth gleamed white in that awful smile.
I didn’t doubt for a second I was facing a demon.
“Don’t get a lot of Select through here,” he rumbled. “Don’t think I’ve seen one for two hundred years.”
I edged sideways. Maybe I could put the statue between us. Although I didn’t know how much of an obstacle even solid stone would be to that staff. Much less the Darkness. Speaking of the Darkness, how had he gotten behind me without my sensing him? I didn’t think even Yoshana could do that.
My mouth was open, and some sort of squeak came out. A sensation like a spider skittered across the surface of my mind.
“You’re not totally clumsy with the prant, but not nearly good enough to make it out of here alive,” the demon declared.
I shied away from the thought of not making it out alive and tried to keep the creature talking while I considered my options. “Prant?”
“Psycho-Reactive Autonomous Nano Technology. PRANT. Don’t they teach you people anything anymore? Last thing I thought I’d meet today was an ignorant Select. Y’all are supposed to be smart.” The monster chuckled. “What you call the Darkness, boy. You think that was its name back in the day?”
The demon shifted his grip on the staff, and I tensed. I might possibly be able to deflect the first blow and run as fast I could into the woods.
He stabbed the weapon deep into the ground and stepped forward, thrusting out a massive hand. “My bad. Haven’t been very welcoming. Don’t get much company. I’m Seven.”
I sat on a stump near the fire, three feet from a demon. I was still having trouble processing that fact.
“Ages since I’ve been this close to anyone but the possessed, and they’re lousy conversationalists,” the creature that called itself Seven was saying. “How’d you come to be here anyway? Hadn’t thought to see a Select so near the Darklands.”
“Um.” I wondered what to say. Not the truth, certainly. “Well, no… I, uh, didn’t think the, uh, that is, the Hellguard cared much for the Select.”
“Oh, hell no. Why would we?”
“Um, why wouldn’t you? I never understood that.”
The giant’s mouth hung open for a moment. “They really don’t teach you anything, do they? Do you even know what you are?”
“Of course,” I snapped, then instantly regretted being peevish to something that could snap me like a twig. “We were designed to be… superior. After the Fall, something went wrong. We’re still stronger, smarter, tougher than other people, but now we’re marked.”
Our gray skin, solid black eyes, and white hair had been called the mark of Cain. Considering how popular we were in human society, it wasn’t far off.
“Rich kids,” the demon growled. “Parents wanted their kids perfect. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect everything. Designer babies. You could even pick the skin color, eye color, hair color. Problem turned out to be, the base coat of paint was gray. You don’t insert any genes for appearance, you get -” the demon waved his hand at me, “you.”
“I knew that.”
“Right. You know what I am?”
“No.”
“I’m you. But better. Bigger, stronger, faster, tougher. And a lot more willpower. Did you know there’s a gene for self-control? Turns out there is. And you need a lot of self-control if you want to use the prant.”
“Yo - that is, I heard you were soldiers.”
“That’s right. Special forces. Army created us to be physically perfect, plus able to master the prant. Recon, field medicine, assassination, ops in toxic environments, you name it, we could do it.”
Yoshana had told me before, but I still struggled with the idea that the monster had actually been created this way on purpose. “So what happened?”
The demon leaned back on his wooden bench and sighed. “Seems like it’s always the Germans that screw things up. When the civil war in the Islamic Republic spilled into the northern Med, all hell really broke loose. We were on the ground bumping off radical cell leaders. Nasty work. Dangerous. You know something about the prant. You can’t control it past maybe two hundred yards - not you, not me, not anyone. That puts you pretty close to the action.”
He sighed again. “The Northern Concordance got in on the fight. Afraid if southern Europe fell, they’d be next. So they deployed their own specialists. But they’d been casualty averse for a century. Thought they could extend the range of the prant through sarns.”
I must have looked blank.
“Semi Autonomous Relay Nodes. The idea is you float a drone with a basic AI and a heavy nucleus of the prant about a hundred, hundred and fifty yards out.”
I didn't understand half of what he’d said, but I nodded anyway. He went on.
“That gives you a link in a chain. Then another, and another. With the sarns, the Concordance operators could sit back a mile away from the action. Great idea. Except the links weren’t strong enough. Got too far out, they lost control of the prant. Some of it went rogue. Some got taken over. What went rogue started to spread, reproduce. About the same time terror cells set off the nukes here on the eastern seaboard. Little ones, tac nukes really, but somebody’d wrapped some nasty isotopes around them. The fallout was bad. The bigwigs pulled us out of the theater, put us on reclamation duty at home instead. Went from dodging bullets to hip-deep in radioactive waste.”
The dark eyes lost focus, staring into an unhappy past.
“That wasn’t much fun. ID’ing bodies from pieces and DNA kits. Folks that survived but were too sick or hurt to make their way out, and we’d find ’em. Mostly dying from radiation sickness. Lots we found too late - survived the blasts, but coughed their lungs out. Or too weak to get to water and just dehydrated. The kids were the worst.”
I didn’t remember much of the Books of the Fall, but that part I remembered. “Then came the great fires that burned the capitals, and the air itself was set aflame. And sons could not find their fathers, nor could mothers find their daughters. The great cities were cast down, and those that lived were covered in sores like leprosy, and died soon after. The leaders of the people perished too in the fire. Those that remained said, Let the Hellguard go forth! Let the demons and the Darkness reclaim what we have lost. For are we not masters of every power?”
“Heh. Yeah. It wasn’t that poetic being there in it, but that’s the gist of it. Book of Arvan, right? You know the part that comes next?”
I didn’t recall it as well, certainly not to quote it. “Something about the Darkness being unleashed across the western sea?”
“Yup. I remember I got interviewed once by some general in the Central Republican Army, years before it all went down the toilet. Our guys were trying to explain why you needed the genetic engineering and training to control the prant. He wasn’t buying it. They were always in a hurry, and they got spooked when the nukes went off. The Central Republic was closer to the action in the Middle East than we were, and I guess they thought it was only a matter of time before someone lit them up. Idiots. Four thousand year old civilization, you’d think they’d have learned some patience. They figured if a few hundred of
our guys with the prant was good, a few thousand of their guys was better.”
The demon shook his head. “That did not go well.”
He turned to me. “You’ve seen the possessed.” I nodded. “It went quick over there. They thought their psych screening and a few months of training were enough to control the prant. They were wrong. Really wrong. We never did know how many lost control. It was a lot. There were mutinies. And then it got out into the population, and then it was all over the country there, faster than you can imagine. And that’s when it all went wrong.”
“Sounds like it went wrong long before that.”
He gave a little snorting chuckle, almost like a bull. “From our perspective, I mean. The Hellguard’s. I guess living three centuries don’t make you any less self-centered. Probably more, if anything.”
There was a little smile on his face, but his eyes were locked on mine, and there was no humor in them. I had been growing more comfortable with the giant as he talked. I was reminded suddenly of what sort of ancient, deadly thing he was.
“You asked why we don’t like the Select. See, after what went down in Europe and Asia, no one trusted us anymore. They figured if the prant could get loose there, it could get loose here. The public started calling for the Hellguard to be shut down. For our kind of people, ‘shut down’ don’t mean a retirement villa in Tuscany.”
I swallowed. “And the Select?”
“You might have thought… we thought… the Select would defend us. We were the same, but what was done to you for your damn vanity was done to us for our country. You might have thought that… but you’d have been wrong. There were politicians everyone knew were Select. They could have spoken up for us. But they were the loudest saying we were dangerous.”
Of course they were dangerous. This one was looking very dangerous right now.
He heaved a deep breath. “Looking out for number one, I guess. Must have figured they didn’t want to be associated with us. Tarred with the same brush. Decided the only way to protect themselves was to be more Catholic than the Pope.”
The demon laughed. “Guess that didn’t work out so well for you in the end.”
There was a brief thrashing in the woods. I twitched, almost reaching for my sword, almost extending the Darkness. I did neither.
My host stood up. “’Scuse me. That’s lunch.” He stalked off into the trees, completely silent for all his bulk.
I waited in place for a moment, but found I couldn’t sit still. I walked over to the statue. The craftsmanship continued to impress me. From the front, I could see the woman’s face was beautiful, but anguished. On the base were carved the words, “I Told The Priest, Don’t Count On Any Second Coming. God Got His Ass Kicked The First Time He Came Down Here Slumming.”
The Hellguard chuckled behind me. I hadn’t heard him return. He carried a dead boar slung casually over his shoulder.
“That’s Wendy,” he said. “My concrete blonde.”
He grinned, as if expecting the words to mean something to me. When I didn’t react, he sighed. “Never mind. It isn’t funny if you have to explain it.”
“You made this?”
He nodded. “It’s amazing what you can do with the prant and a little patience.”
“You carved this with the Darkness?”
“Yep. No finer tool.”
I was side by side with one of the world’s most ancient horrors. The kind of creature that seared the will from the minds of its human slaves. A terror greater even than Yoshana. I took a breath and plunged in. “Can you teach me to use it that way?”
The demon’s smile widened. “Let’s eat first.”
He roasted the boar on a spit, seasoning it as it turned. The meat may have been the best I’d ever had.
“Where did you get salt?” I asked.
“I’m pretty near immortal, kid.” Darkness crawled over his outstretched hand, forming a mesmerizing pattern before it dissipated. “I’ve got a tool that can filter chemicals pretty close to the atomic level, and nothing but time. There’s not a lot I can’t do.”
He nodded at the statue.
Powerful as he was, the demon didn’t terrify me the way Yoshana did. Not that I thought he was any less deadly - but he seemed somehow less likely to kill me on a whim.
It wasn’t a safe question, but I asked anyway. “So why are you out here?”
He cocked his head at me.
“I mean, we, that is, I didn’t think demons lived in the Sorrows.”
“First off, let’s you and me make a deal, kid. I don’t rip your arms off and beat you to death with them, and you stop calling me a demon.”
I swallowed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean - I didn’t think you minded. I heard you call yourself a Hellguard.”
“Not the same word at all.”
“But -”
“Hellguard’s just a name. Like Devil Dogs.”
I blinked at him.
“Ignorant. Just plain ignorant,” he muttered, shaking his head. “They called the Marines Devil Dogs. Story is it was ’cause they fought so hard in the first world war. Apparently the Marines made that story up, but that’s par for the course for those jarheads. Anyway, that’s what the Army called us. The Hellguard. ’Cause we’re scary. Doesn’t mean we actually come from hell, or that we’re demons, or something.”
“Sorry,” I repeated.
“I mean, just ’cause a guy’s six and a half feet tall and red, and commands the powers of Darkness…” It began to coil around his arms, and the demon - the Hellguard - flashed me another grin.
“But still - I thought the Hellguard stayed out of the Sorrows.”
The smile vanished like a torch blowing out. There was something like pain on his face. “We do. Well, the rest of ’em do.”
“What happened?”
“I guess I didn’t finish the story. When the recall order came, we didn’t answer. Not a big deal, at first. Not much anyone could do about it. Sure, it was mutiny, and the idea didn’t sit so good with some of us, but we weren’t going to let ourselves get put down like dogs. And with everything else going on, the Army wasn’t going to mount up a brigade in environment suits to hunt us down. Couldn’t bomb us out either - so much of the sensory grid was fried out here, they really had no idea where we were once we stopped transmitting. So that was okay. Everything north of DC and east of the Appalachians had been evacuated. We had eight whole states to ourselves. Not a bad deal.”
“But?”
“But. There’s always some nut job that can make any bad situation worse. This set of nut jobs called themselves paleos.”
“I know them.”
“Yeah. I hear they’re still around, which is amazing and shows there ain’t no justice in the world. Big group of ’em decided to move in and squat in what looked like open territory. Which would have been fine. There was plenty of room. But these guys were fanatics. Hated anything to do with technology. Which included us. It’s pretty funny when some morons start throwing spears until one of ’em actually hits you.”
“They threw a lot of spears at the Select after we started to look like this. They hit a lot of us.”
The Hellguard winced. “Yeah, like I said, you guys didn’t wind up doing so good out of the deal. Obviously they couldn’t kill any of us, but they pissed us off bad enough that some of the younger guys hit ’em with the prant. Which would have been fine if we’d killed all of ’em. But we didn’t.”
“And the survivors spread the Darkness.”
“Yep. Well, there was sure as hell no going back after that. We’d pretty much destroyed civilization on this continent because some of the guys couldn’t keep their prant in their pants.”
His mouth twisted sourly. “Thought that would sound funnier.”
It was hard to make a good joke about the Fall of human civilization.
“I assume you know what happened next,” he said.
“To the rest of us. Not to you. Not to the Hellguard. We don’t really know an
ything about you. At least - no one outside the Shield and the Darklands does.”
“Just demons, huh? That’s sad. But I guess it’s no surprise. See, when the prant started to get out of control, everybody pulled back into towns, built walls around them, stripped or abandoned whatever was outside. Afraid of infection.”
I nodded.
He went on, “No trade, no gas, no electricity, no water purification… everything fell apart real fast.”
“The Age of Fear.”
“Yeah, good name for it. But you got even more of the nuts that didn’t want to be cooped up in some town. We got another wave of paleos moving in on us. And that’s when most of my guys… turned.”
“What do you mean?”
The huge man took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’ve got to understand. The world had turned on us first. Our own government was going to kill us, for God’s sake. And those people… some of those paleos weren’t much better than animals.”
I didn’t disagree. I liked pigs better than paleos - and I didn’t like pigs.
“There were only ten of us, in the beginning.” I didn’t understand, but didn’t interrupt. The Hellguard seemed lost inside his own mind. “Primus, Secundus, up through Decimus. The first ten created. I was Septimus. Seemed kinda pretentious, so now I just go by Seven. We’d been around longer than the others. We knew more… regular humans. And most folks had treated us decent enough. But the newer guys, they’d never known anything but growing up in the lab, and training, and war. I don’t think they saw the paleos as people at all. The paleos weren’t like us. They were just animals. Just things. Time went by, some of our crew started to think about everybody that wasn’t us that way.”
His eyes were on the fire, not focused on anything in this world. “And once a person’s just a thing… it doesn’t matter what you do to him anymore. Or her.”
The dark, red face turned back to me. “I couldn’t take it. I don’t think the other originals liked it either, but there were three hundred of the new guys, and only six of us left. And the new guys were stronger - hooray for progress. The other five went along, but I wouldn’t. So I left.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 35