Memory Hunter

by Frank Morin

  “What did you do?” Tomas asked, fighting to remain upright as his men toppled to the floor.

  “You know so little of runes, you who suppose to judge us. No one even thought twice about the placement of the other machines.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tomas whispered. Breathing was becoming difficult and his vision was narrowing. His muscles quivered with the strain of just kneeling.

  “Of course you don’t,” Zhu laughed. In his hand, Tereza’s soulmask had darkened, the rainbow mist fading to gray and its healthy shimmer turning opaque. “They make up the key points of a rune web of my own design. My mistress will awaken shortly to find everyone on this floor reduced to a catatonic state.”

  Tomas collapsed to the floor, but fought to remain conscious. He tried to think of a way to fight the effect, but he possessed no rounon gift. He couldn’t even lift his gun and fire a useless shot at the enchanter. All he managed was to shift it a little.

  Zhu leaned over him. “You probably won’t awaken again, Tomas. If you do, it’s only because Mai Luan wishes to prolong your death.”

  Tomas tried to curse the man, to threaten him, but only managed the barest whisper. “I ... Kill ... You.”

  “Good-bye, Tomas.”

  The world is full and waiting to be enslaved. History itself will bow to me. Maybe then I’ll finally get some respect.

  ~Mai Luan

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Gregorios stood, shedding soul coffins, and a heavy machine gun appeared in his hand. He opened fire, the sound deafening. Sarah’s shotgun appeared in her hand again and she fired at the same time. Quentin held a bullpup-style assault rifle and poured a steady stream of lead toward Mai Luan as well.

  She stood unharmed in the center of the deadly storm.

  Bullets ricocheted in every direction, and Sarah ducked when one buzzed past her head, sounding like a score of angry hornets. Gunfire trickled off as the two men realized their weapons were having no effect.

  Mai Luan threw her arms out wide, grinning with ecstasy. The master rune blazed with blinding glory on her cheek. The brilliant, sapphire glow flowed from it to encase her body and a shock wave of energy exploded in every direction. It swept them all away, and blew the roof right off the bunker.

  Sarah’s ears rang, and she blinked against the light, staring in open-mouthed awe at the hole ripped through tons of poured concrete. Unlike the moment when the master rune appeared and the roof just faded to nothing, this time Mai Luan had torn a gaping hole through it. The bunker could have withstood a mortar barrage.

  “Finally!” Mai Luan shouted in a voice so loud it beat through Sarah’s damaged ears and shook her. The light around the Cui Dashi grew brighter and she seemed to swell with power. “Let them try denying me a new name now.”

  “If that’s all you wanted, I could’ve gotten you a new name, freak,” Sarah said. “Fifty bucks and a visit to the town clerk, and done.”

  Mai Luan advanced, her eyes filled with silver light. She flowed right over the pit without falling. “You dare insult the honor of my new name?”

  “Not much honor if you can’t even pick your own name,” Sarah said, backing away and trying to hide her mounting terror. “Who’s going to pick it for you?”

  “She who has the right to do so,” Mai Luan said. The executioner axe appeared in her hands.

  “What if she chooses something you don’t like?” Sarah asked. She stopped retreating because Mai Luan was closing the distance anyway, and she couldn’t bring herself to turn her back on that axe and try to run. “Like Meg or Eunice or—”

  Mai Luan covered the floor between them in a rush and slapped Sarah so fast she never saw the blow coming. It snapped her head around so far her neck creaked. She spun to the floor with a groan.

  As Mai Luan raised the axe for a blow, Quentin crashed into her, a slender knife in his hand. He drove it into her throat.

  Mai Luan tossed him aside, and Sarah could read the pain in her silvered eyes. The rune was granting her tremendous power, but she wasn’t immortal.

  Before Mai Luan could remove the knife sticking from her neck, Gregorios arrived with a wide-bladed spear. It appeared bladed weapons were more effective against her for the moment.

  Mai Luan knocked the spear aside with her axe and shouted, “Bow to me, fools! Can’t you see I’ve won?”

  Sarah leaped to her feet beside Mai Luan and yanked the blade from her throat. Mai Luan gasped and blood gushed from the deep wound.

  That was the opening Sarah needed.

  Sarah slashed Mai Luan’s face, aiming for the blazing rune. The rune was the key. It provided the overwhelming strength Mai Luan was enjoying, but it wasn’t right. The master rune was seared into Sarah’s soul and she could never forget it. The one Mai Luan had drawn on her cheek was similar, and yet different. It burned with malevolence absent in the rune Sarah had witnessed. Somehow Mai Luan had corrupted it, twisted it to evil designs.

  Most of the rune was the same, but two marks on the right side of it drew Sarah’s attention. One looked Egyptian, like a bent sword. The other looked like a pictograph of a bird. She aimed for these symbols.

  Her knife cut into the rune and slowed, as if the flesh had turned denser.

  Mai Luan screamed and grabbed Sarah’s arm.

  She twisted the knife, cutting a new mark through the two runes, bisecting them and forming a new symbol.

  Mai Lun collapsed, clutching at her face. The rune changed color, now blazing with dark green light. It began melting deeper into her face. Mai Luan screamed, pawing at the rune.

  “What have you done?” she shrieked.

  “I have no idea,” Sarah said, sickened by the sight. “But I’m glad I did.”

  The wall of the office that faced the council chamber exploded. Shards of wood and steel pelted Zhu, knocking him stumbling into the outer wall, bleeding from a dozen cuts.

  The shaking of the floor roused Tomas. He’d drifted into a deepening haze, only conscious through dogged determination. He’d never felt so exhausted in his life.

  Then he wasn’t.

  The drain on his strength and will evaporated. He blinked a couple of times and looked around, clear-headed for the first time since falling into Zhu’s web.

  The wall had exploded. Billowing dust obscured everything, so he couldn’t see what had blown up, but it smelled wrong. He knew the smell of just about any explosive material, but this one stumped him. It smelled sharp, like burning plastic, but with a sweet undertone, like charred sugar. Then another smell registered.

  Burning soulmasks.

  Soulmasks didn’t decay normally. If left dispossessed, souls deteriorated slowly over time, breaking from within. They could be destroyed, usually by smashing with blunt force, but other ways worked. He’d smelled a burning soulmask once when they’d eradicated an entrenched heka cell in the mountains of Siberia. A channeler had led that cell, and they’d somehow acquired two precious soulmasks. When Tomas entered their compound to mop up after blowing the place with several high explosive mortar rounds, he’d found the burning soulmasks.

  Soulmasks were burning nearby, and the stench was increasing.

  Zhu pushed off from the wall, coughing. Tereza’s soulmask had disintegrated in his hand, and he looked confused, afraid. He bent over Tereza’s corpse and pawed through her pockets until he found her phone. He lifted it in triumph.

  He turned to find Tomas again kneeling, rifle tucked into his shoulder, aimed at his head.

  The look of dismay on his face was priceless.

  “Good-bye, Zhu,” Tomas said, and pulled the trigger.

  Whatever had shattered the wall and lifted the rune web had dissipated Zhu’s protective spell too. This time the bullet had no trouble punching through his skull.

  Tomas would have preferred taking Zhu in for questioning, but he didn’t dare leave the man alive while some unknown threat was blowing up the building. He pocketed the phone. Maybe they could glean some useful numbers from it.<
br />
  That minimal effort left him panting. He rested for a minute, breathing through his sleeve to minimize the amount of smoke he inhaled. As soon as his strength returned, he moved into the hall, keeping low.

  He discovered the council chamber was the source of the explosion. The inner wall was gone, the huge conference table reduced to rubble, and a much bigger hole blasted through the outer wall.

  A shimmering yellow light rippled between the three machines that formed a triangle around the perimeter of the room. Everything within that triangle had evaporated except for the council members. Enforcers, heka, and the medical team were all dead, reduced to piles of charred bones.

  Mai Luan and Asoka still lay in their reclined chairs, but their skin had blackened, and the rune on Mai Luan’s face looked broken, and bled huge drops of crimson light, like glowing blood. The facetaker fueling their memory journey slumped over Asoka’s chair, and the purple fire of her nevron flickered only weakly.

  Shahrokh and Meryem lay on the floor in the center of that deadly triangle, their hair singed off, their clothes charred, and their bodies blackened. They still lived, for their faces were locked into grimaces of pain.

  Aline lay beside them, her body melting into the floor. It was her soulmask that he smelled burning. It was already blackened and cracked, the rainbow mist burned away. It had to be some kind of rune, but he’d never heard about anything like this.

  He could shoot the facetaker, which would destroy the memoryscape Asoka and Mai Luan were traveling through, but that might wake up Mai Luan, and he lacked the strength or the weapons to take down a fully conscious Cui Dashi.

  So Tomas shot Mai Luan in the head.

  As Mai Luan writhed on the ground, suffering from the broken rune, Sarah retrieved the fallen axe.

  Quentin joined her, limping and dirtied, but determined. “Would you like me to do that for you, my dear?”

  “Thanks,” she said. “But I’ve got this.”

  “You unworthy mortal,” Mai Luan shrieked, and staggered to her feet, hands outstretched to grab Sarah again. The silver light had fled her eyes, and she seemed to have trouble focusing, but no doubt she still possessed the strength to rip Sarah apart.

  Sarah swung the axe, but Mai Luan knocked it aside.

  The Cui Dashi took one angry step forward, then stopped, her body rigid in shock.

  Sarah took advantage of the momentary distraction and struck again, shouting, “I’ve got a new name for you!”

  The blade tore through Mai Luan’s cheek, shearing the rune away before plunging into Mai Luan’s shoulder.

  Mai Luan screamed and snatched for the fallen rune, real fear in her eyes for the first time. Her skin burst into flame and she screamed again.

  Sarah released the axe, leaving it driven into Mai Luan’s burning torso, and focused. Her M4A1 rifle appeared in her hands, with the grenade launcher tube already loaded with the room-clearing giant shotgun round. Sarah pressed it against Mai Luan’s chest.

  Their eyes met and Sarah said. “Scarface. Suits you perfect.”

  She pulled the trigger.

  The blast threw Mai Luan backward, her chest vaporized. She screamed one final time, a long, tortured sound, then simply disappeared.

  Glorious silence filled the now-empty torture chamber. The air that had been smoky, filled with the stench of death and blood and gunpowder changed, becoming crystal clear.

  Gregorios stood and laughed. “The least I can do.”

  Quentin, limping and dirty, swept Sarah into a hug.

  “My dear, as you Americans are fond of saying, that was awesome!”

  For a second after Tomas shot Mai Luan, nothing happened. Her skull didn't explode like it should, and only a little blood trickled out. So he shot her again. For good measure, he emptied the magazine.

  He dropped the empty and reached for a replacement, planning to keep shooting until something happened.

  The machine exploded.

  The other two machines exploded a split second later.

  The blast catapulted Tomas down the long central hall and he slid all the way to the elevators on the far side. He lay stunned for a minute, staring up at the expensive chandelier hanging above the foyer. He wondered how it had survived the devastation, apparently undamaged.

  A huge hand grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet.

  "You all right, Captain?"

  He hadn't seen or heard Anaru approaching. He recognized the signs of being shell-shocked, but tried to focus his thoughts.

  "I think I'm alive. You?"

  "Barely functional, sir," Anaru said with a frown. "How'd they disable us?"

  "Some kind of rune web," Tomas said. "The enchanter's dead, so I have no idea how he did it."

  "I started waking up in time to see most of the heka run," Anaru said. "Didn't even have the strength to kill them."

  Tomas glanced at the elevators. He hadn't heard the heka make their run for it. "They're the least of our worries. We'll track them down once we clean up this mess. Come on."

  He led the way back to the council chamber. More of the enforcers began emerging from the side offices or rising from where they'd collapsed in the hall. The machines were destroyed, the little that had been left of the chamber reduced to rubble. Shahrokh and Aline had succumbed in the final explosion, their bodies broken, their soulmasks cracked and smoking.

  "What could do this to facetakers?" Domenico asked, poking the disgusting remains.

  "We'll find out when we track down those heka," Tomas said. "For now, let's find survivors and treat the wounded.

  Behram pushed through the enforcers to face Tomas. "You made a mess of this, Captain. All you had to do was follow orders."

  Tomas punched him in the jaw. Behram collapsed.

  "Tie that idiot up before I shoot him."

  A voice-ripping scream turned Sarah around. For a second she feared Mai Luan had somehow returned to the memory, that she’d actually survived.

  It wasn’t Mai Luan.

  It was Asoka.

  He stumbled into view from behind an overturned cabinet. Bloody wounds covered him, but instead of healing, he was beginning to melt into the floor.

  “What’s happening to him?” Sarah cried, sickened by the sight.

  Asoka staggered toward them, dripping hands held out in a plea for mercy.

  “Something’s happened in the real world,” Gregorios said. “Their bodies just died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  Asoka whispered, “You were supposed to die this time.”

  Then he collapsed into a crimson pool on the floor.

  The three of them clasped hands and the bunker reassembled. Gregorios led them upstairs and outside where a pair of bodies burned in a nearby ditch.

  “Who’s that?” Sarah asked.

  “Memory’s back on track,” Gregorios said. “Those were the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun that the allies discovered.

  “I’m done with bodies,” Sarah said.

  “Me too,” Gregorios said. “I really hate Berlin.”

  Then he looked up into the sky. “We’re done, love. Bring us home.”

  The memoryscape faded.

  Sarah awoke to the sound of distant sirens.

  What keeps me going after so many lives? The same thing that drove me in the first. The love of a special woman who I know I can kiss for centuries without getting bored.

  Don’t ever tell her I said that. It’s more fun to show her.

  ~Gregorios

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  One week after the nightmare battle with Mai Luan, Sarah entered the art gallery dining room at Quentin’s mansion. She had healed quickly from the bruises and physical effects of the confrontation, the process accelerated by her healing rune, but she was still struggling to cope emotionally. She felt almost normal today, having actually slept well instead of suffering nightmare dreams filled with death and torture. What they’d done had been necessary, but
it had been ugly.

  Gregorios and Eirene sat at one end of the table, just finishing a late breakfast. Sarah hadn’t seen Gregorios much in the past week. He’d spent most of his time at Suntara, consolidating his new position as council chair, overseeing repairs, and dealing with government investigations into the explosions. The scene had been labeled a terrorist attack, and he had actually applied for government assistance to help fund repairs.

  When Sarah had asked him why he bothered, since he was probably richer than any billionaire the world new about, he had shrugged. “Need to keep up appearances, don’t we?”

  Sarah hugged Eirene, whose color had returned.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine, dear,” Eirene said with a warm smile.

  “You look a lot better.” Eirene had collapsed as soon as they awoke, and hadn’t awakened for four days. The strain of maintaining the connection so long, particularly after they’d strayed so far from the true memory, had nearly killed her. If Alter hadn’t lent his strength, she would have died and probably destroyed their minds in the process.

  Sarah had decided to forgive Alter for abandoning them in the memory battle. Mai Luan had actually strengthened their position when she’d tricked Alter into returning to Eirene.

  It still blew Sarah’s mind to think Eirene was Alter’s great grandmother.

  “And you look radiant, my dear.” Quentin swept into the room, dressed in camouflaged military pants and a tight fitting black t-shirt that showed off his excellent physique. He wore the simple outfit with his usual style, making it seem somehow far more formal and elegant.

  He bowed over her hand and kissed it lightly.

  “It’s not going to work,” Sarah said, grinning. “I’m still going to out-shoot you today.”

  “I applaud your optimism. Add me to your card as many times as you like.”

  “I’ll do that,” she promised. She had only resumed sparring with Tomas and Alter the day before, but she’d trained with Quentin nearly every day. Under his tutelage, her shooting was progressing in speed and accuracy. They had begun running a gauntlet of moving targets, and yesterday she had posted her best score, only five points behind his. She had learned that his reference to her card was an allusion to days long past when women would carry dance cards at formal affairs and men would jockey for chances to get their name onto those cards to secure a dance.