“Nitthogr?” Claire asked.
Rob nodded. “I can’t think of anyone else with the knowledge or means to travel the planes.”
After checking the duffel bag, Rob slung the depleted sack across his chest. Their provisions had all but expired. He grabbed Claire by the hand. “If Nitthogr is here, then we shouldn’t be. It’s far too dangerous to risk him seeing you.” He frowned into the empty duffel. “But we’d never make it beyond the Plains on this.”
They skulked through the building, fleeing deeper within as the first carrion crawlers explored the doorway with curious, caustic tendrils. Sprinting through the dark halls, they put some distance between them and the invading creatures.
Pausing for a moment to breathe, Rob wiped the heavy, desert dust from a sign. It showed the layout of the grounds and displayed a network of paths in washed-out lines of color. They led from building to building via buried tunnels or suspended corridors. “It’s a student and visitor’s guide.” He traced his fingers along the faded, magenta line connecting their location to the central building. “Here’s our path!”
Echoes from millions of tiny insectoid feet began reverberating down the hallway behind them. Claire and Rob immediately turned a corner and sprinted forward; they ran up a winding, platformed staircase and into the next passage where a suspended causeway opened.
The suspended, aerial walkway looked in poor repair. Wind had badly battered the bridge over the millennia; it flowed through gaping holes where the glass had long since broken. Rob gave the floor a couple of probing steps. Some of the alloy meshwork underfoot proved spongy; the weather of so many years had oxidized the metal and large rust flakes took root at various intervals.
Scuttling noises in pursuit ensured they had no other avenue but this. One by one, Rob and Claire gingerly stepped along the stronger parts of the corridor, keeping to the edges as much as possible where the structural supports proved heavier.
An immense hole had been torn from the center of the skywalk floor. The breach nearly severed the entire line; only architectural scaffolding tied the two ends of the tube together. Rob first, and then Claire, jumped nimbly across the chasm. The metal framework bounced tenuously under their maneuvers. Once beyond, they fled to the other side just as their terrifying pursuit discovered a way forward, into the mouth of the metallic, skeletal tunnel.
The duo darted down the next corridor and around a bend. Claire ducked, diving into a room just in time to avoid the blaster fire from a Tarkhūn patrol. Rob leapt in behind her; chunks of plaster exploded above him as he dove forward. The echoes of the blaster fire would certainly draw more crawlers! He quickly peeked around the threshold and drew a volley of blasterfire.
“There’s a whole group of them camped at the end of the hall, and two more creeping up on our position.” Rob said. He grunted as his body stretched with a bone-cracking noise. His clothes split open at the seam points and his werewolf form overwhelmed the clothing’s tensile strength. Reaching over his left shoulder he drew the Stone Glaive just as the two vyrm scouts burst in.
Rob slashed the first across the chest with the blade; the sigils flashed when the keen edge tasted blood. Almost instantly the Tarkhūn turned to stone, forever immortalizing the surprised look upon his face; he fell backwards as he turned into a statue. No sooner did his body clear the doorframe than his agitated vyrm compatriots opened fire. Their burning rounds pulverized the stony form, blasting one of their own into hunks of rock and powder.
With a whirling kick, the second Tarkhūn booted Rob in the gut. The vyrm was so massive that he nearly matched Rob, even in his werewolf form. Grabbing Rob by the wrists, he dug his talons deep into Rob’s flesh, keeping the blade far from his reptilian skin. The ground vibrated slightly as the whelming tremors seemed to swell; the carrion crawlers drew nearer.
Rob and the Tarkhūn struggled, crashing back and forth in the room. The walls shook, freeing chunks of plaster and dust; anxiously, Claire dodged the entangled combatants as best as she could. The sounds of the approaching crawler horde began overwhelming the sounds of their struggle. In the hallway, the vyrm opened fire, trying to turn back the larval enemy.
The insect-like worms only seemed to pick up speed, perhaps an illusion based on their increasing number as they burgeoned within the campus. They bled through the windows and other structural cracks.
“Rob!” Claire screamed as the first of the carrion worms broke the ranks of its dead brethren and turned from the small arms fire and slinked into their room.
Rob growled and opened his jaws. He quickly snapped them shut on the vyrm’s face and raked his sharp incisors across the surprised enemy’s eyes.
The giant Tarkhūn howled in pain, staggering backwards and rubbing his blinded eyes. He tripped over the first crawler and fell to his back, screaming in agony as the creatures swarmed over him.
Scooping Claire up in his free arm, Rob leveled his shoulder and charged through a nearby wall. He poured all of his might into ramming through and broke beyond the first wall like a cannonade, and then the second, and a third.
They stumbled through the last wall and into the corridor. Surprised at the intrusion, the encamped vyrm held their position as they poured hot fire into the living horde that pressed in ahead. The Tarkhūn hissed in surprise, but couldn’t spare the gunfire to take a shot at the humanoids.
Rob roared a warning which they seemed to heed. He and Claire turned the corner and didn’t slow for anything, not even the torturous shrieks behind them as the carrion crawlers overwhelmed the vyrm force. Rob finally stopped at a darkened descent into the mouth of an underpass.
Claire nodded to Rob as if saying, yes, I trust you. They cautiously stepped into the shadows. Several steps in, a loud tremor shook the tunnel with earthquake malevolence, and then passed. They pressed ahead through the darkness; what little light their rear exit provided seemed to dim as it writhed with the surging, maggoty legion.
The ground erupted ahead of them as the carrion queen burst up from the ground, barring a forward escape. Rob howled as he leapt towards the behemoth, stabbing the blade deep into beast’s face. The stony wound began to spread its effect across the titan head.
Squealing with an otherworldly panic, it snapped its arthropodic head forward like a whip, dashing Rob to the ground where the Stone Glaive clattered beyond his grasp. The monster thrashed in something like a death roll; lashing ferocious circles, it shredded its own flesh, tearing the stony portion away so that it could not continue infecting the queen with the transmutation.
The tunnel shook and partially collapsed under the violence. A large crack grew ominously above the giant worm as it hissed at its enemies. Closing in from behind, the worm’s children skittered anxiously toward their quarry.
Rob leapt for the ancient blade, but the queen shot a putrid secretion from her mouth; the viscous goo coated Rob’s fist, sticking it to the floor.
He ripped his arm up from the ground and screamed in pain as the acidic slime smoke and sizzled, eating away his flesh. Within a fraction of a second his right hand had been burnt so deeply that only fragments of tendon and exposed bone remained.
Rising even higher within the tunnel the queen splayed her legs and shrieked loudly, laying claim to her prize. Her piercing shriek reverberated so loudly that the walls shook and excited her drones. They chittered and pulsed forward happily, covering over the Stone Glaive, those closest turned to rock as they did so, but only the frenzy of the kill mattered to them.
Rob scrambled away from the powerful sword before the crawlers could reach him. The queen screeched with glee. Suddenly, the ceiling gave way and a large chunk of tunnel crushed the queen, opening the underground passage up to the sky.
With one arm hanging limp, Rob grabbed Claire with his good hand. “Come on!” he yelled, flinging them towards the ramp-like debris.
“But the sword? We can’t just leave it!”
“You are more important than any artifact!” His disabled arm hu
ng useless as he glanced backwards regretfully.
They rushed up the shifting shale slope and broke out into the sky. Below, the wounded creature screeched and flailed, collapsing even more of the ground and opening new sinkholes as Claire and Rob fled.
Leaning against the foundation of the central dome, the escapees panted for air. Claire grabbed Rob’s destroyed arm near the wrist and examined it. He winced against the pain.
She looked him in the eyes, afraid her fearful face would scare him.
“Don’t worry about it.” Torment crept into his voice like the guttural growl of an angry canine. “It will heal.”
Even as Claire watched it, she could see the flesh slowly stitching back together, regenerating at a cellular level. Rob tried to flex it, balling his raw hand into a fist. He drew a sharp, pained breath and then relaxed it, convinced of his hands functionality, even if limited.
“This way,” he said, guiding her around the building, not wanting to lose their momentum. Rob peeked through a once grand vestibule, now drained of all her glory. He exhaled his nervousness.
A mammoth, double door made of inlaid mineral and precious metals had been blasted open from the inside. It lay twisted ajar, barely clinging to its hinges. A hazy, pulsing light radiated from within, illuminating the interior with shades of brown.
“That door has remained sealed for millennia,” Rob breathed. “It is the birthplace of Sh’logath. No vyrm has dared breach the chamber for respect and fear of the ‘Thousand Elder’s Sacrifice.’”
Rob guided her around the dome’s foundation, trying to keep the building between them and the sounds of chaos and gunfire as much as possible. Creeping into the building via a crumbling access hatch they weaved through the outer court which gave the dome a very chapel-like motif. Creeping up a decayed stairwell, he led her to a rickety, metal catwalk.
Through the broken sections in a wall they could watch two vyrm forces battling against each other on the forsaken Plains of Neggath. Several buildings had been dashed away nearby where the ground reclaimed a large patch of flat land. Embroiled within the conflict, there, Rob spotted the vyrm general Regorik, He ferociously tore his way through his enemies; Rob wondered how long ago Regorik defected to the Black, betraying the Tarkhūn for Nitthogr.
From their vantage, they could see that both of the warring sides were flanked by the ravenous carrion worms. Regorik’s army ignored them while the Tarkhūn rear guard was forced to engage them. Nitthogr’s forces wielded some kind of ultrasonic emitter; whenever the worms drew too close, a vyrm scattered them with the device.
Rob tore his attention away from the battle and cleared away an aperture that lead into the main chamber. Inside was deathly silent. The stadium-like enclosure resembled a mass crypt.
He and Claire stared down at a sight that only two others had seen in thousands of years, aside from the army of the Black which had invaded through the nearby portal just recently. Dust caked the desiccated bodies which lay upon a thousand tables. They’d been arranged in neat rows, all seeming to point to the circle at the center.
“The Thousand Elders,” he whispered. “This is where it all started… where the philosophers and religious fanatics established reality from nonreality and birthed an ageless terror—calling the ancient agod from the purely conceptual into the visceral, yet noncorporeal.”
“Most of those words are antonyms of each other,” Claire stated of his illogical sentence. But the side of her that had melded with Bithia’s thought process completely understood what he’d said. The philosophical concept that God, as a force, must have an equal and an opposite, was mere conjecture—a falsehood according to all religious texts across the Tesseract—and yet the Thousand Elders had found a way around the metaphysical barriers. Through sheer faith they leant their flesh to birth the empirical form of the devourer: Sh’logath.
“This way.” Rob grabbed a long, rusty chain that hung from the catwalk. They crawled down it and he winced each time he had to grasp the chain with his bad hand.
Picking their way through the lines of weather-mummified bodies, Rob traced a finger across the chest of one. The dust was thinner atop the vyrm husk than it was on the table. Suddenly, the body on the nearest table drew one ragged breath, startling Claire.
The body exhaled a death rattle. Rivulets of dust rolled off his chest and settled upon the platform where he rested.
“They are in deep torpor,” Rob said in awe. He examined one only briefly before continuing onward. He guessed they each took perhaps one breath every several years. “Except for that one over there.” He pointed to a crumbling, mummified cadaver slumped in a heavy metal chair near the raised central stage.
Briskly, cautiously, they approached the dais. On the chair’s backrest, Claire could translate the word engraved behind the corpse. “The Voice.”
“This was the one who spoke on behalf of the Thousand Elders. The one who stayed back: their prophet and spokesperson. Legends say he remained in order to watch the rise of Sh’logath and instruct the followers in the rites and rituals to honor their agod. It was he that originally instructed Basilisk and Nitthogr.”
“I guess it took longer than he thought?” Claire whispered.
As they grew near the raised steps, sigils glowed on the floor nearest them. The portal remained active, glowing with a brownish hue. Rob withdrew the frayed chapter from the Grimmorium Nitthogr. He momentarily examined it and looked at Claire.
“Claire, you have a decision to make,” Rob said evenly. He didn’t want to try and influence her choice with his own desires. He could not bear the guilt of any repercussions. “This door leads to a couple possible destinations.”
She could sense his thoughts. “One of them is Earth?” Her thoughts turned to her father. She couldn’t stop thinking of Vivian, Caivev, torturing him.
“Yes.”
Claire grimaced and blinked back hot tears. She took Rob by the hands, carefully holding the wounded one which had almost completely healed by now. “I trust your judgment,” she said and then she embraced him, pressing her head against his midsection. “Do you still say that we must go to the Prime?”
Rob’s form melted down into his human shape, seamlessly continuing the embrace. “It is the only way we stand a chance,” he whispered into her ear.
“Then, we go to the Prime.”
Next to the goggled Doctor Walther, Jacob Sisyphus stood at the shimmering portal alongside a trio of heavily armed mercenaries. All four wore their Heptobscurantum lapel pins upon their breast. The remainder of The Seven except for Bruce Cannon stood gathered behind to see their wizard off.
Nearby, a number of homeless drifters had been strapped to a bank of vertical braces making a long chain of blood donors. They could keep the gate open as long as reasonably necessary. Catheter tubes connecting the machine to the suppliers were not easy to miss; they snaked across the floor, daisy chained together so that when one donor was drained, the next would begin to flow without a drop in supply.
Cannon descended the stairs with Vivian in tow. Vivian locked eyes with Adams; she glared at him. She had protested this mission only slightly, however, and accepted it under the premise of vindicating her precious herald in the eyes of The Seven. A small contingent of Heptobscurantum mercenaries followed them, pushing a blindfolded man forward; he was bound at the hands and gagged at his mouth.
Doctor Walther looked giddy, pleased that he could finally begin. He took up an additional control module he’d rigged to the machine since the last visit. The control board had been pieced together out of three arcade golfing machines; one roller ball controlled lateral movement of the gate on the plane it was opened to. The other rollers controlled vertical and the forward-backward movements in that space. Walther moved the portal around in three dimensions, giving them a view of a besieged, smoking castle that flew the black flag of Sh’logath.
Greyson smiled at Vivian. “Glad to see you got here as soon as possible. You came here straight from your
last mission?”
Vivian positioned the man between her and Greyson. “See to it that Nitthogr’s prize is not damaged. He will need this one for leverage,” she spat with disdain. “As soon as I vindicate his name, Claire Jones’ father will be turned over to Nitthogr. He may prove important to the Herald’s plan as leverage.” She pushed the blindfolded hostage into Greyson’s arms.
Greyson replied calmly. “He will be in the care of The Seven until your return, and maybe we finally learn why the Awakening would require any leverage at all—especially when brute force has been typical until now?”
Vivian scowled at Greyson and then nodded to Sisyphus’s crew. They gave her room as she stepped near the gate. “I’ll return by own methods,” she told them. “I will meet you at the table, either with my master or without.”
Sisyphus looked her over. They hadn’t met yet. He smiled at her lecherously as an invitation. She didn’t pay him any attention.
Walther turned a dial and the portal enlarged. The blood donor closest to the machine groaned slightly and shuddered as the machine demanded more power. “Don’t touch the edges,” Walther warned. “Unless you don’t want those body parts anymore.”
Vivian dove through the gate and landed in a somersault. She sprinted off into the shadows as Walther wheeled the gate around into a relatively hidden location.
“Doctor.” Sisyphus nodded and gave Walther a salute that he’d made famous in his wrestling career. He flashed him a smile to brandish his two vampiric teeth implants, and then he leapt through the portal. His team followed suit.
Behind The Seven, the first vagrant trembled and then gasped, completely drained. The beeping scanner mounted to the rack near his head flat-lined with a squeal.
Greyson pulled the newest prisoner over to the chain of vertical beds that held their prisoners upright and strapped him in; a few empty beds remained open. “I’m afraid that we don’t find that leverage is as valuable of a commodity as some of our peers, Doctor Jones.” He carelessly jammed the intravenous blood tube into the wrist of Claire’s father who cringed at the piercing pain.
Wolf of the Tesseract Page 18
