“We have lost contact with a number of the seniors.” I gave him their names. “Can you send out runners to try to contact them or their pixies and tell them to join us here. We need to find someone who has detected the hatchery. We’ll wait fifteen minutes. The second meeting place will be the South Lodge Residence.”
It was frustrating. The pixie seniors had been picked off for a reason. I checked the map again. Augustus had been the first pixie to go silent. Regent’s Park was part of the area I had allocated to him and his team. I was tempted to head out and check for traces of a hatchery.
Dena saw my expression and read my mind. “Don’t you dare. We need more pixies to meet us here. Someone must have detected the hatchery odor.”
I succumbed to the pressure she placed on my arm as she twisted it up behind my back. “I’m good, I’ll be patient.” I added ‘for a while’ under my breath and judging by her frown I think she heard me.
The old bus with its load of dwarves arrived, shortly followed by two similar but more modern buses carrying Dar-Iide mercenaries and their weapons. Leopold jogged over; he was at his full height.
“Welcome. Is this a permanent change?” I asked, indicating his height.
“No. Tempus—temporary. Small Army. Ready.”
His men were lined up, ten abreast. Two officers stood in front and I noticed Marcus had joined them, holding his machine gun at the ready. Leopold indicated I should formally inspect the squad. He accompanied me as I headed down each row. The mercenaries all were six feet tall or more and appeared to be very fit. They carried firearms; the front row held machine guns and the remainder held rifles. All wore holstered pistols. At least half carried katanas. Their uniforms varied slightly; I assumed Leopold would organize a standard when he had an opportunity.
At the end, when we walked back to the front of the squad, I said, “Lord Dar-Iide Ren, thank you for your support. I’m impressed by your new recruits.” We shook hands.
Leopold smiled. I’d used the more suitable title given his leadership of the squad. He turned to the squad and shouted a command. The men relaxed and moved out of position.
“Good. Will recognize you. Dena next. What now?”
I explained what had happened and why I was disturbed. More pixies had arrived, including another two seniors. I estimated we had about half the number we’d commenced with. I hoped it was not a final count. I called one of the seniors over and asked if they could check whether any pixie had detected the odor we were seeking. Leopold went with him, to talk to the other seniors and to get an idea of which teams were missing. Before I could join Dena, a shout went up from the pixies and the dwarves, a late arrival, blood-stained, stumbled onto the road. He’d come from the direction of the university.
Leopold quickly questioned him, and a senior pixie signaled me to join the group surrounding the apparently injured pixie. Leopold waved back others who wanted to hear what had happened.
“Sir Zed,” the senior said. His name was Ash. “This young one escaped a trap. There are soul stealers in the university as you suspected.”
“Who was he with?”
Leopold asked the question and the young pixie replied he had been with Augustus. I checked the veracity of his reply. There was something wrong.
“Lord Ren, ask the pixie to recount step by step, what happened, from when they approached the park, including why or how Augustus lost communication with the other seniors.”
The young pixie’s eyes swiveled back and forth. He waited for Leopold to ask his question.
The story was short. The senior pixie and his squad had approached the park, heading toward the university building. As they closed in on the tennis courts, some of the squad detected the hatchery odor and were reluctant to proceed. Augustus pushed them, urging them to keep going; he wanted to verify the precise location of the soul stealers. The odor grew stronger as they moved closer. He led his team along the road until they stood between the Tate Library building and the entrance to the courts. He concluded the hatchery was in the building; there was a sign indicating the library was closed for repairs. The senior instructed his team to backtrack, and they tried to retreat along the road. They were stopped by a group of youngish soul stealers who were acting under the control of someone they couldn’t see. The young pixie thought it was a mage of some kind. In the chaos caused by the pixies wanting to go one way and the hatchlings wanting to direct them into the library, he managed to escape.
The discrepancy was the thought accompanying his statement that he managed to escape. Instead, as the captured pixies were forced toward the library, the young pixie was allowed to escape. He knew with absolute certainty the hatchery was in the library building. The knowledge, I could tell, had been forced on him.
I said to Leopold, “Let him go.” When the young pixie had rejoined some of his fellows, I continued, “They’re setting a trap for us. They’re not in the library. I could see another building, smaller, located before you reach the large building. It’s the one we want. There is a mage of some kind—the pixies were unable to use their weapons. They were controlled.”
I showed the Dar-Iide lord the location on the map. He nodded his understanding.
“It’s about the size of a house, big enough for them to control, and small enough for us to surround, if we’re lucky. We’ll need to protect against the mage.”
We worked through a plan with the officers Leopold had recruited and in consultation with the dwarves. York Road ran alongside the house on the right-hand side when facing toward the building and the Tate. A path ran to the left, curving along the side. The back of the house adjoined the library. Boundary hedges provided protection from passersby. We instructed a squad to take position to the north of York Road, near the front of the Tate: we allocated half the dwarves to that chore, plus fifteen of the Dar-Iide recruits. A second squad would take up position on the path toward the rear of the house, where they could control both the rear and the path. This was the responsibility of the remaining dwarves and another fifteen of the Dar-Iide. A third squad consisting of ten Dar-Iide, with myself, Dena and Leopold, would approach from the front, through the front door, as it were. We located pixies, two hundred or so, protected from whatever spell the mage was using, further out as a backup for all the squads, to catch any soul stealers who managed to get past our first layer of attackers.
Why me, Dena and Leopold in the vanguard? We were the strongest mages and Dena’s ability with her two katanas almost matched mine.
I instructed the two Tir-Kiran mages, after I informed them the soul stealer hatchery was in the main library building, to wait further down York Gate in case any soul stealer managed to get away from us. I thought the further away they were from the center of action, the better off we’d all be.
I was aware of that ancient adage, that a plan survived until the first contact with the enemy. We still had forty or so Dar-Iide recruits unallocated. They were our protection, if somehow the soul stealers were trying to lure us into the house while they attacked from behind.
We were confident the soul stealers would be either in front of us or behind us, or both. We didn’t mind which.
oOo
Chapter 21
When everyone was in place, I led the way along the narrow path to the front door of the house. I could smell the hatchery; indeed, the odor had been detectable for the last ten minutes. Dena followed. Marcus paced along, his machine gun at the ready, while Leopold was having a nervous fit, as he tried to determine how to protect Dena and me. His team of ten Dar-Iide mercenaries followed, armed with machine guns, ready for action. The blue painted door was firmly shut. I sketched a sigil and the door burst inwards, splinters of wood flying everywhere. It was one way to make an entrance.
The stink of rotting flesh combined with the nauseating soul stealer odor washed over us. Dena retched. One or two of the Dar-Iide paled. I stepped inside; Dena, struggling to breathe, was at my shoulder. We were armored and armed. The hallway opened to a
large living room. It was full of hatched, part-hatched, and unhatched eggs. Soul stealers hissed and struggled to gain their feet. Some, older, flexed their black bat-like wings. The young were about eighteen inches or so tall and would rapidly grow into adults up to five feet, weighing a hundred pounds or so. The adult wings enabled short flights, typically allowing them to gain height from where they could drop onto their unsuspecting prey. They had two arms, which folded like a praying mantis and ended in sharp spear points. These arms had jagged saw-like spines top and bottom, enabling them to grab and hold their victim whether the arms were reaching out or retracting. Their four legs each ended in claws and were used to clutch their prey. Their heads were all mouth and pointed teeth and their eyes were large and multi-faceted.
Two adults, at the back of the room, about five feet tall, saw us and roared their hunger for souls. Marcus stepped past Dena and I, and opened fire. His bullets chopped up the two adults. He tried to move to one side as the ceiling creaked, groaned, and collapsed, dropping a hundred or more hungry hatchlings on top of him. He scrambled out of the way as more dropped down, released his gun and, using his katana, began a one-man murderous attack. Body pieces flew everywhere.
The hatchlings didn’t mind. Food was food. They were carnivores and cannibals; indeed, they fed on any kind of flesh. I had a brief look around the room. Human body parts, in various stages of consumption and decay, were scattered everywhere. Some hatchlings were chewing on dead meat while trying to approach us. The room was a slaughterhouse.
Dena stood with me, katana in hand. Leopold had pushed forward to the other side of me and he was hacking at hatchlings. I was searching for another adult; there had to be more than two in the nursery. Suddenly, the hatchlings stilled. They were receiving a communication. Their heads turned, and they examined us, the intruders. As one, they focused on me, while their screeching increased in intensity and volume. They dropped whatever they were feeding on and moved forward, gathering pace. I was their target.
I imaged a flamethrower and aimed the fire at the hatchlings. Their bodies curled and sizzled as the fire scorched the life from them. I waved the flame back and forth, narrowly missing Marcus. Dena copied me and had her own flamethrower, lighter and the flame more focused. While I incinerated ten, twenty, hundreds of hatchlings, I also boiled unhatched eggs, leaving more foul odors and charred debris behind.
At last, I succeeded in tracing the source of the flow of communications guiding the hatchlings and I altered my flamethrower, forming a fire lance, super-hot. I aimed it at a section of the ceiling on my right. I took less than a second for the super-heated lance to burn through the plaster and timber supports and a larger soul stealer dropped to the floor. The fact its body was on fire didn’t prevent it from leaping at me. My fire lance caught its head and the body crashed to the floor, its claws narrowly missing Dena. She attacked the lifeless corpse with flame.
I checked; there was still something—or someone—here, who was radiating hate and fear, directed at me. It—or he—was in the next room. I signaled to Leopold, who now carried his own flamethrower, that I wanted to explore. He frowned, shrugged, and moved forward, taking the lead. Marcus automatically took up the rear. I strengthened all our shields. Fortunately, there were electrical sources here I could access, to help me maintain my power. Dena moved forward beside me.
Leopold crashed through the sliding doors into the next room. I could see it was full of body parts and soul stealer hatchlings, far more mature than those in the first room. In the instant, their entire focus switched to me. I identified the source of their instruction—there was a blank spot at the far wall, near another door. I focused; it was a cloaked mage, a human or near -human. I raised the fire lance and burnt a hole in the blank space, forcing the stranger’s shield to fail. He screamed and died.
I glimpsed, very briefly, a soul stealer arm exit from the middle of my chest.
I woke, struggling to think. My mind transited from some kind of deep immersion to full consciousness in a brief moment. I was on a stretcher and presumably it was on a gurney, and I and it were in a medical care room. Various instruments were reflecting my body state. I wondered why someone would need such primitive tools. I closed my eyes, half tempted to return to the blackness.
A voice, strangely familiar, stopped me. “Zed, wake up.”
I opened my eyes wide. Standing next to my stretcher was someone I knew. “Michael?”
“Of course. I had to snatch you away from your soul stealer mayhem. You died. Well, almost. You’ve been in treatment stasis for a month. I need to return you to that moment. This time, make sure all your shields are at full strength, okay?” He removed all the monitoring links. A small white feather dropped to the floor as he moved to a bank of instruments.
I stood and picked up the feather. Michael punched buttons and set dials. I felt a rush as the world spun past, backwards.
Dena had dropped her flamethrower, responding instead with her katana. I sensed her swing directed at a larger adult soul stealer that in turn was trying to stab through my shield. It fell, not unlikely when its head and body were no longer attached. I checked. We had destroyed the monsters in this room. I used my senses to try to detect if we had more hatchlings or adults to deal with. Some, apparently, had attempted to flee, and were being dealt with by the dwarves and Dar-Iide mercenaries waiting outside. Our support team were mopping up the hatchlings we had missed; fortunately, without incurring injuries. I signaled Leopold.
“Let’s get outside. This building should suffer a major—a total—burnout. There’s too many body pieces and soul stealer corpses here for us to allow mundanes to enter.”
Leopold agreed, and I handed him my fire lance. Dena, Marcus, and I exited while he methodically flamed each room until he had to follow us or risk becoming a victim of his own pyromania. I reached out and locked the entry gates to York Bridge; I didn’t want the fire brigade to dampen our celebration.
The police were waiting outside. I disappeared our flamethrowers and the machine guns carried by the mercenaries. Marcus looked surprised, until I said I’d return their weapons later. The word spread quickly, and the men relaxed; their sudden disarming had startled them.
I saw Mowers, beckoned him over, and said, “We found the hatchling nest. They put up a fight and as a final act, they set the house on fire. I’ll leave you to take control and we’ll get out of your way.”
Mowers said, “Good work, and I don’t want to know what you did. That’s a super fire; I don’t think we’ll discover much evidence by the time the fire brigade puts it out. They’re apparently having problems getting their engines close enough.”
“Sad,” I said. “You owe me a very large breakfast, sometime.”
“Done. By the way, the young constables like whatever you did to the chief super. You have at least two fans, there.”
The heat from the fire increased, forcing us to move further away.
“We’ll head off.” I signaled Leopold and he organized our withdrawal. I checked—the two Tir-Kiran mages were still in position, further down York Bridge. That deferred any issue, although the embassy would be disappointed. They’d also probably seek revenge—I had not only upset their plans but also killed one of the more senior mages. One less to deal with, I thought.
Dena and I walked to the end of the road to where our car was waiting. The two Tir-Kiran mages had already left, presumably aware of the death of their senior mage. Dena was holding a white feather she’d found somewhere. It looked familiar.
Leopold and Marcus organized a medical squad that was checking for anyone, whether pixies, dwarves, or Dar-Iide, who had suffered injuries and required treatment. Leopold signaled for me to continue home; apparently, he thought I could safely travel without an escort. In addition, he had organized a search for missing pixies. Some, we knew, had been captured by the soul stealers, but as yet we had no idea of the number. Augustus was still missing, as was his squad. I feared for the worst.
Dena put a sound shield in place as we walked to our car and asked, “Was that mage who I think it was?”
“Nova?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Oh. So, we have to take on the Tir-Kiran?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
First, though, I wanted to explore how Dena and I had managed, that morning, to end up in bed together. Afterwards, it was time to relax.
Well, perhaps for a day.
oOo
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Soul Mayhem: Zed's Chronicles of the Parallel Universe Disruptions Page 14
