Wolves of the Tesseract Collection

by Christopher D Schmitz

  He grinned at how his sins had not been found out over all those years. He’d not been indecisive—he’d been patient, waiting for his time to come, and he would play his hand better than Nitthogr had.

  Basilisk was an expert at the game—one that he’d finally chosen to play again. He would obey Sh’logath in all things, and bend the outcomes to conclusions he decided would yield his best outcome. For now, that meant applying Sh’logath’s will to the information collected by his spies—contacts embedded deep in the Guardian Corps who were due any day now with a report.

  The hybrid grinned. He was Dunnischktet in all things—but he was Basilisk in will.

  ***

  The combined forces of the Guardian Corps, the Royal Military, and the Veritas burst out of the forest near the monastery. Between the stimulant injectors and a goodly dose of internal grit, most of the wounded casualties came out of the forest under their own power.

  Wulftone and Sam carried Gita between them. As the most petite member of the Corps, it had been painfully un-difficult, almost like carrying an injured child.

  The full roster of the monastery waited inside the gates for the return of the outland warriors. Leaning heavily on his support staff, the old man watched them approach with his keen eyes.

  He rattled off a string of words in his native tongue as Jackie approached. Her sluggish footsteps moved heavy from battle fatigue.

  It was obvious that the old man deduced their mission had been unsuccessful. The elder spoke with passion and insistence as he and Jackie communicated in halting phrases.

  Wulftone caught up to Jackie. “What is he saying?”

  “He insists that we must ‘catch the devil before it’s too late.’”

  Wulftone nodded in full agreement as Jackie tried to explain through the language barrier that they were trapped. “If only we could,” he muttered at the patriarch’s request.

  The old man pointed at the prayer room where they’d entered from the prime and insisted. “Intoarcere. Intoarcere.” He paused and shifted to a word he knew Jackie could translate. “Ritorno.”

  “He wants us to go back.”

  Wulftone nodded at the obvious and pointed at the sky. “Tell him we cannot until the heavens let us.”

  Jackie and the man struggled through the linguistic hurdles.

  The old man pointed at Jackie, then Wulftone, and finally waved at them all. “Destin.” He jabbed his finger back at the prayer room.

  “Destino?” Jackie asked.

  He nodded. “Destin. Destino.” Putting his fist in the pockets of his robe, the elderly patriarch removed a very old spool. A brilliant crimson thread had been coiled around the bobbin carved of darquematter. He placed it in Jackie’s hand and hobbled excitedly to the prayer chamber and beckoned them over.

  "He wants you to go first," Jackie told Shandra.

  The cleric approached the monk and he tied the end of the red thread around her left ring finger. He pointed to the room and urged her, “Destin.”

  “This is a man of sincere faith,” she said, looking into his eyes. “He would be most welcome amongst the Veritas.” Shandra nodded to him, turned and entered the room trailing a thin line of vermillion and stepped through, crossing the line between realms of the tesseract, floating in the void and tethered by the red cord.

  He repeated the act quickly with each of the warriors including Gita and her escort. At the end, only Jackie remained with a small amount of thread tied around the spool. The old man fixed her with a confident look and looped the last length around her finger.

  “Destin,” he insisted.

  “Destin,” she replied and then entered the room, breaking through the veil between worlds.

  As one solid unit, the entangled group of planeswalkers burst back into existence in the Prime. They stood dumbfounded on the main platform outside of the castle, nearly stumbling over the Princess, Zabe, and Tahnak who had just appeared at the portal location.

  An entire battalion of mixed forces surrounded the stone platform where they rested. At their head, Shjikara and Pollando stood surrounded by an array of clerics each dressed for war in their version of the Guardian Corps’ armor.

  Shandra watched Pollando move the arms on his golden armillary sphere several clicks. He used it to calculate which gates should be passable and which were blocked. Raising an eyebrow at the cleric and her team which should not have been able to plansewalk, he put the device back within his cloaks.

  Pollando fixed Shjikara with a gaze that Shandra knew meant the mute psychic was speaking to him directly. She could hardly take in the sight of the army arrayed nearby.

  As a matter of protocol, there had never been more than a handful of Veritas permitted beyond the abbey at any time: it housed the largest stockpile of arcane artifacts second only to the Chamber of Mysteries. That collection needed protection at all times—the overwhelming presence of the Veritas proved exactly how dire the situation had become.

  For the first time since Nitthogr fell from their ranks, the Veritas had prepared to go to war.

  ***

  As Jackie helped the medics transfer Gita to a hospital, a cargo shuttle landed to house the leadership team as they tried to concoct a frenzied battle plan. The team needed to depart as soon as the portal would allow them entry to the location nearest the Hidden Temple in Earth’s Central America. According to Pollando’s calculations, the astronomical alignment would allow them passage in about an hour.

  The reverse thrusters on the shuttle fired and kicked up a gust of sandy air as it landed. Bithia looked away to protect her eyes and spotted Sam Jones who made a beeline for her.

  “Father?” She gushed with emotion. Bithia had lost her own father years before Nitthogr’s conquest and Sam was his spitting image. She leapt into his arms as Sam embraced her. The princess couldn’t rein in her heart even though she knew that this was not her father, the king… this was her father, Sam Jones.

  “Claire!” He clapped her into a bear hug and squeezed her tightly. Sam released her and looked into her eyes. “Claire?” He noticed the change like only a parent could.

  She bit the corner of her lip and slowly shook her head.

  He whispered, understanding he’d unraveled a royal secret. “Bithia?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I… I’m sorry. I don’t know where Claire has gone,” she said honestly. She only knew the reasons why, but refused to acknowledge the dark truth: that she’d flexed her psychic muscle in the Darque when a wave of energy pulsed through her and it forced Bithia’s will to the surface.

  Sam stared blankly at the woman who was, but was not, his daughter. The doors to their makeshift operations center opened and they both knew time remained too short to ask those difficult questions that demanded hard answers.

  Yardi stood in the doorway, propped up on a cybernetic leg. His face still bore the horrible marks from the wounds he’d gotten so recently. Pink flesh puckered around stitches and fresh cuts.

  Zabe asked, “We have you to thank for this?”

  Yardi nodded. “As soon as the Hall of Mirror’s burned, Tay-lore knew we had to prepare for the worst.” His voice rasped hoarse and gravelly from his damaged voice-box.

  Bithia took a seat alongside Zabe and Wulftone. Chira, Yardi, Sam, and a host of others organized themselves. A digital clock at the head of the transport ticked down with a timer indicating when the portal would allow them access.

  Shjikara stood at the front of the room and called up a slide of several ancient glyphs recovered from old texts in the Veritas’s records. “We do not know exactly where the enemy has gone,” he stated. “These writings from the pre-Sh’logathian Mae’le-ggath reference a ‘Hidden Temple’ of the vyrm.”

  The Veritas’s leader turned to Trenzlr who they hoped could guide them. “Do you know the location of this temple?” Shjikara’s voice didn’t try to mask his usual suspicion of the turn-coat vyrm.

  “No,” he said
woefully. “By Maetha, I would certainly tell you if I knew.”

  Sam stared at the ancient scribbles while Shjikara explained that they would have to send troops through every portal on Earth to try and ascertain the location and such a division of their forces would almost certainly result in failure—as if he could somehow guilt Trenzlr into somehow procuring an answer. The vyrm could only shake his head with regret—he truthfully didn’t have the knowledge they needed.

  “I recognize that writing,” the archaeologist stated. “I’ve seen it before—three years ago… right before Caivev’s team captured me. I know exactly where this temple is hiding.”

  Chapter 21

  Shjikara spoke as if he was struck by genuine fear. “I had a vision—and that is why I brought the Veritas here… to this portal at the Prime’s Worldgate. In my vision, the statue of the Architect King stood upon this site and the ground shook so violently that his stone form crumbled to dust. I knew then that all would be lost if we did not come down from our hill. And so we came down, and when as we arrived, the android and the cripple had already gathered the military.”

  If Tay-lore could have glared, he would have. Yardi resented being called a cripple and glowered enough for both of them.

  Bithia stood to take over the meeting at the same time as Zabe. She looked at him for a second and then quickly sat, deferring to him as Claire would have done while trying not to draw attention to her change. The last thing they needed was further distraction.

  Zabe glanced at the trickling clock and continued as if nothing had happened. “Trenzlr doesn’t know anything about the nature of the Awakening that the Brothers of the Winnowing will perform. As long as we remain alive there is a chance we might still prevent it, but we’ll have to throw everything that we’ve got at it. Akko Soggathoth is as devious as he is deadly.”

  Shjikara frowned. He'd never approved of Zabe's elevation to his father's position. "So your plan is to run straight into the home of an enemy that you've been unable to defeat thus far and try to figure it out?"

  “I’ll hit him with my sword,” Zabe spat.

  “How do you know that will work?”

  “Have you seen it? It’s a really big sword.”

  Shjikara glared at him while they turned to the commotion at the doorway as Tahnak tried pushing his way past the guards at the door. They’d tried to keep as much confidential as they could, still under the suspicion that they had a mole in their company, and kept the circle small.

  “I know how to banish the Brothers of the Winnowing,” he yelled.

  Zabe waved the guards off. “You’re supposed to be getting medical help.”

  Tahnak waved his concern away and tossed a small, bulging sack into his hands. “Darquematter shards. They can’t touch these things without experiencing a violent shift back into the Darque.”

  Zabe ran his fingers through the collected hunks of twisted metal. They varied in size and shape.

  “The ones you got from inside the Darque Prime?”

  He nodded. “When I wandered for all those years I felt compelled to gather as many as I could find. There’s about sixty of them.”

  “How do you know all that?” Shjikara squinted at him suspiciously.

  Tahnak tossed him the old journal he’d found during his wanderings in the fallen dimension, even though nobody they knew could decode it. “It’s all in there.”

  Zabe nodded. He trusted Tahnak—even though he’d recently tried to kill him. “So we have a plan.” He passed out handfuls of the metallic shards to those in the room. “Make sure you distribute these to your best troops. We only need to stop one of the seven in order to succeed… now we just need to get to them.” He turned to Tay-lore, hoping the android had an idea of the location.

  Tay-lore shook his head. “I am sorry, but I have been unable to…”

  Sam Jones interrupted him. “I know where they’ll be.” He typed some coordinates into the display and pressed a button. The digital map overlaid on the wall panned to center on the recently emancipated country of Chiriquí. It zoomed in to focus on the excavation site where he’d been stationed several years prior during his daughter’s first engagement. He glanced momentarily at Bithia and his gut twisted with heartache. “This satellite imagery is old,” he stated, “but below this stone formation here is a buried pyramid similar to the one we found Shandra in at Antarctica. We should assume it has been at least partially excavated since the time the rebels chased us out and Caivev kidnapped me.”

  Tay-lore interfaced with the image and a glowing dot pulsed a few kilometers to the north. “The gate will open up here and allow travel to this site in approximately twenty-nine minutes,” he stated. “It is as close as we can go, and is as soon as we can go.”

  Sam recognized the location. “That’s where the rebels were headquartered during all the political unrest. The secessionist statists who are in power now formerly operated from that region.”

  “Then we should have every reason to believe they are working with Caivev and will bring their full force to bear in order to prevent us from getting to that temple in time,” Zabe deduced.

  “The portal is a choke point,” Wulftone pointed out. “How will we be able to get through without them mowing us down as we arrive?”

  Tay-lore piped up, “I may have an idea about that.”

  ***

  Alberto wiped the sweat off of his mustache and stared at the Crag, a supposedly mystical ravine that split the earth near the old rebel outpost. “I’m telling you Carlos—I heard General Nyagittari has lost his mind. I have a friend who works for him in the capital. She saw him one morning and said it looked like his face was melting off. Maybe he’s on drugs or something.”

  Carlos looked at his friend and adjusted his weapon. He shrugged. “Maybe, but Nyagittari has been right all along up until now.” He looked into the jagged pit where generations of Brujería had amounted to piles of bleached bones half-filling the deep maw of the Crag. The ancient washout had hosted many years’ worth of witchcraft since the days of Cortés and his secret cabal of conquistadores that flirted with dark powers.

  Alberto shuddered. “Still… he’s got to be a madman to commit almost one hundred percent of his military to guarding a pit in the middle of the jungle.”

  A few of the other nationals surrounding Alberto and Carlos murmured their assents.

  “What if he’s right?” one of them asked. Two days ago Nyagittari had redirected the soldiers here—a wildly unpopular political move with the Chiriquí’s borders still ill-defined amongst its neighbors. “What if the devil and his demonic legions are really trying to break through a portal from hell?”

  Alberto glanced sidelong at him and noticed the tattoos covering the man. He was typical of the naïve, native countrymen whose superstitious streaks ran a mile wide. Alberto frowned; he’d been to university. As such, most of such fantasy had been ground out of him by academia. However, he understood why his kindred obeyed the order—but Alberto couldn’t understand how someone so tactically brilliant as General Nyagittari, the freer of his people, could possess such a frail mind.

  “Correction,” said Carlos smugly. “One hundred percent or more.”

  Alberto scrunched up his face and looked over his shoulder at the billowing clouds of dust kicked up by Nyagittari's motorcade. His entourage led a huge crew of their remaining forces that piled out of the transports. They began setting up heavy artillery equipment and arranging troops to surround the Crag.

  Cursing, Alberto ran his fingers through his oily, slicked hair in disbelief. He lit a cigarette and laughed incredulously. “Why doesn’t he just set off one of those nukes they say he smuggled out of Korea and be done with it!”

  A man in the distance pulled the tarp off a giant flatbed truck and exposed a missile on the vehicular mounted launch system. It might not have been nuclear, but it was impressive, nonetheless.

  “You were saying,” Carlos laughed at
the irony.

  Alberto’s cigarette dropped from his mouth in disbelief. “We’re all going to die today because of a madman,” he moaned.

  “He’s only a madman if he’s wrong,” the tattooed soldier commented pointing to the Crag as a flash of light flared in the distance. “What the heck is that thing?”

  ***

  Wulftone caught up with Trenzlr and Tay-lore as Zabe released them to make their final preparations and give any farewells that were due. They discussed an encrypted message that some unknown party had been able to send to the vyrm by name. It had been broadcast into the Prime on all frequencies. The android had just intercepted the message and held it for decoding and safekeeping—though it paled in priority to this conflict.

  “Can I speak with you, Trenzlr?”

  The vyrm heretic nodded and they stepped aside. “How can I help you?”

  Tay-lore bowed. “Pardon my leaving, but I have a weapon to prepare.”

  They nodded and watched him hurry away.

  “Recently, I caught some snippets of conversation between Akko Soggathoth and his Akko Sxkakzacros—talk of brothers and mothers and fathers. Is it important?”

  Trenzlr shrugged. "Not from a military standpoint. The legend of Akko Sxkakzacros might be important because it informs us how dangerous he is. In their early years he devoured his youngest brother, Akko Quarnyk… Akko Soggathoth is not actually the youngest, but Akko Sxkakzacros ate the youngest and gained all of his brother's power, becoming much more powerful than the rest. How did you hear about it?"

  He pointed to his ears. “Really good hearing, at least when I’m in my lycan shape.”

  The vyrm nodded. “As for mothers and fathers, you need not worry about some even more powerful threat. Their primary purpose is to summon Sh’logath after they’ve paved his way through the chaos they’ve created in nature.”

  “They have no origins, then?”

  “Yes and no. They were not birthed like you or me. There is a kind of family structure—remember that these are creatures of pure evil—and so they must abide by law rather than love, which is foreign to them.”