Evil Ascending

by Michael A. Stackpole

  You know what you are; that is your strength. In Mong's words, Coyote found the key that unlocked a huge portion of the mystery he still was to himself. He had known, both through what the original Coyote had told him and through evidence of his skills, that Fiddleback had been behind his training as an assassin. His predecessor as Coyote noted that he was one of the top 10 assassins in the world and especially effective against targets that had to be hunted down. I am not merely an assassin. Fiddleback made me into a hunter who could move through the dimensions with a singleness of purpose: killing his enemies.

  That realization brought other things into perspective. When he shifted into Slide, he had appeared behind the getsul not by chance, but by unconscious design. He had used the man's probes to track back on him, and he appeared in Slide at a point where he could have killed the man with ease. Coyote also realized that the stronger and more able the foe, the easier the time he would have tracking him.

  Other things confirmed for him the narrow purpose to which he had been directed. He had seen Crowley move things by the force of his mind, or cause things to burst into flame with a thought. He also knew Crowley could use psychometry to gain impressions about people from things they had worn or owned or touched. Crowley could also lift thoughts from the brains of others, yet another skill denied him. Coyote knew he could do none of these things, and he suspected that Fiddleback, when the time came, would have provided him with the empathic equivalent of bloodhounds to let him begin the chase on a target.

  Coyote closed his eyes and summoned into his mind the image of the Yidam standing over him. Locking that firmly in place, he opened his eyes and began to modify the mental picture until it merged with the one on the wall of the Dukhang. He layered in the solid feeling he'd had in hitting the creature in Storm. He added the sound of its mental contact with him and the ferocity of its attacks. Lastly, he overlaid the tactical diagram he'd imagined in the clutch and changed it to fit and enfold the Yidam.

  The daylight and wind world slowly dissolved around Coyote. Darkness seeped in at the edges and, even though he remained motionless, he sensed himself moving forward and down into the black void he had seen in the temple. This is the Gonkhang—the lair of the Yidam.

  Though he had not given any thought to where a creature like that might live, the place in which he found himself surprised him. The basic architecture proved this place to have been part of the temple since its construction. Thick stone pillars supported the ceiling, and hanging oil lamps provided dim balls of illumination within the cavernous room. The dry, dusty air made the Gonkhang feel more like a crypt than place of worship, yet Coyote still felt the place once deserved reverence and respect.

  Throughout the room, Coyote saw hundreds upon hundreds of tiny tableaux arranged on shelves and tables. Some of the tables were little more than rectangular boxes filled with sand and rocks that had been molded into rolling landscapes. On these Coyote saw vast armies of tiny figures arrayed in battle lines, as if frozen in some tangible holograph on the eve of battle.

  Moving through the room in silence, Coyote recognized some of the armies that had been painstakingly rendered in miniature. Blue and gray forces vied for supremacy in a battle he guessed had taken place during the American Civil War. Brightly colored troops from a Napoleonic conflict dominated another shrunken battlefield. What could have been the bold Spartans bedeviling the Persians at Thermopylae appeared at his left and a scale model of Stalingrad's tractor factory appeared on his right.

  Walking deeper and deeper into the Gonkhang, he saw many more battles and discovered he recognized few of them. Troops had been painted with strange colors, and their shapes had been modified so they no longer resembled any creature he could recognize. While part of him wanted to dismiss these new displays as fantasy encounters, the adherence to detail in the creation of the armies and the care with which they had been laid out told him that they were every bit as real as the conflicts he recognized.

  As he moved past huge conflagrations featuring giant robots and skirmishes between hordes of dinosaurian combatants, a shiver ran down his spine. These fights must have taken place in other dimensions. The scale of destruction is unimaginable.

  A yellow corona surrounded the Yidam's cloaked figure. Coyote found himself approaching the creature from behind, but somehow he knew the Yidam was aware of his presence. Still, the monster kept his head down and continued to work on something sitting on the table before him. Getting closer, Coyote saw several lines of shiny metal figures waiting to be painted and realized what the Yidam was doing.

  Coyote stopped. "What are you?"

  The Yidam half-turned in his chair and raised the wire-rimmed glasses up onto his forehead. "You really mean to ask what was I, for this work is not that which a Yidam could accomplish. I was a military officer, a tactician and a historian."

  Coyote nodded slowly. "I can see that. I recognize some of these battles, but not others. I know you can travel through the dimensions. These others took place there?"

  "Other places, other times." The Yidam removed the glasses and set them on the table. "I found in myself a fascination with conflict, and I became well known among my peers as a brilliant theoretician. I studied everything I could about war and, eventually, I came to develop a comprehensive theory of war that turned previous admiration into scorn."

  Coyote took a step backward as the Yidam stood. "You saw a common element in wars, or those things that triggered them? You saw something that you could not explain."

  The oil lamps' light stained the Yidam's tusks a dull yellow. "Two things really, but they were related. The first was a spark of insanity that started conflicts. It takes one of two forms: an unreasoning confidence in the assurance of total victory or the unwavering conviction that unseen enemies will destroy you if you do not strike out first. The second thing proved more disturbing to me, and that was the transformation of perfectly normal and sane individuals into savages bent on creating as much pain and horror and suffering as possible."

  "And, like Mong, in this you saw a Dark Lord?" Coyote realized he'd unconsciously balled his fists, so he forced them open. "Yet when you tried to explain what you had seen, you had no evidence, and no one would believe your unsubstantiated conspiracy theory."

  The Yidam nodded. "When I learned of a mission to another star—your star—my wife and I volunteered. I had to learn if there were other races in other star systems, and if they were suffering the depredations of Dark Lords as well, or if they were free of such evil influences.

  "It turns out I was correct in suspecting that a Dark Lord was working here." His red eyes narrowed to bloody crescents. "I was mistaken in bringing my family into danger."

  Coyote tugged at the hem of his left glove. "You said I meant to ask what you had been. Now I ask my original question again: What are you?"

  The Yidam smiled most grimly and his voice lowered. "I am now Kanggenpo's Yidam." His taloned feet spread out as he sank into a fighting stance. "And if you are still a creature of Fiddleback, I will be your death."

  Sinclair MacNeal raised his hand and smiled semi-benignly at the instructor standing in his little study group. "Ms. Markgraf, I'm not doubting what you're telling us about how the United States government shot down and recovered a Gray UFO off Long Island in 1989, but I question the logic of believing in it having happened. If you'll follow me, you've told us that James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense for the US, was one of the first abductees and that he was later killed by the CIA before he could go public with the information about the Grays. That means, especially with the increasing number of abductions going on in the 1980s, that the government knew they were powerless to stop the Grays, right?"

  The matronly Aryan woman rested her hands on her hips. "So, what is your point, Mr. MacNeal?"

  "Well, ma'am, if I knew someone could kidnap me or my family or my friends and really mess them up, and that I would be powerless to prevent the kidnapping and unable to help them out later, and I am
going to piss that someone off?" Sin glanced across the circle at the thoughtful Japanese youth sitting there. "I mean, I understand a ruler's desire to keep his people safe, but there is no logic in shooting an alien craft when retribution is likely to come quickly and be nasty."

  Ms. Markgraf smiled confidently. "Perhaps the president at the time had already been kidnapped and implanted. Perhaps he was acting under the orders of the Grays."

  "Excuse me, Ms. Markgraf," Ryuhito began as he leaned forward, "but there is no logic to the Grays ordering humans to shoot down a Gray ship. Even if a Gray leader wanted the commander of that craft dead, the wisdom in showing humanity it possessed the technology necessary to shoot down one of their craft must be questioned."

  "But, Highness, you and Mr. MacNeal continue to make the error of viewing the Grays while using human logic. They think in an utterly alien pattern, one that makes little sense to us."

  Ryuhito nodded sharply. "This is apparent, Ms. Markgraf, because your explanation of their motives is utterly without logic. At the same time you claim we shot down a people possessing crafts capable of spanning the gulf between stars, humans were beginning the successful use of genetic therapy to combat congenital defects. You claim the Grays came here to steal our genetic material to replenish their own deteriorating DNA, but the chances of such an exchange working are miniscule. Moreover, the level of technology needed for them to travel here and determine that our DNA was harvestable and useful to them is well beyond that level needed to solve the problems for which they were going to steal from us."

  Sin nodded and leaped into the fray. "Another thing, Ms. Markgraf, you've said we had high-tech weapons being developed to take out that alien craft. I think you said one was a sound-based weapon developed under the codename JOSHUA. You said it was used to shoot down the Long Island UFO, yet there is no record of that same weapon being used in the Gulf War with Iraq, or in any conflict, for that matter."

  Looking flustered, the large woman fingered the whistle hanging around her neck on a yellow cord, "It only works on Grays."

  "Bah, nonsense." Ryuhito imperiously waved away her explanation. "JOSHUA was a weapon that concentrated sound waves. That technology has been used for the past 25 years for ultrasound scans and to pulverize kidney stones. High and sharp sounds have been employed in various forms for crowd control. Repetitious playing of simple rock 'n' roll records were enough to drive Manuel Noriega from the Papal Nuncio during the American invasion of Panama. What works on kidney stones would work on bunkers, and Saddam Hussein was not that different from Noriega. If the United States had possessed such power in 1989, they would have used it in 1991."

  "Well, well . . ." Ms. Markgraf wiped her forehead on the short sleeve of her gray T-shirt. "I think these are good questions, and you should pose them to Mr. El-Leichter. It is time for you to break anyway and dress for dinner, so let us leave things that way until later."

  Sin followed her gaze as she looked up at the figure standing in the picture window overlooking the large training arena. Arrigo El-Leichter waved benevolently at her and the study circle sitting in the middle of the AstroTurf field. He nodded at her, then gestured as if to urge her to continue.

  Ms. Markgraf swallowed audibly, then licked sweat from her upper lip. "As I said, you will be dismissed." She raised the whistle toward her lips and gave them a short blast that lacked the sadistic intensity of earlier in the day. "Give me four laps, then go to your rooms. I will see you this evening, and you will have answers then."

  Sin glanced up again at El-Leichter and, despite the distance, saw a self-satisfied smile on the man's face. Either Markgraf did something very wrong, and earned our group as the punishment, or we are being set up to feel superior. Perhaps both. He increased his speed a bit to catch up slowly with Ryuhito. At least they're not impressing the emperor's grandson, yet. And a bit part of me hopes I'm not there to see what they will do to impress him.

  Arrigo El-Leichter turned from the window and walked over to his XR-8500 desk. His left index finger stabbed the curtain icon on the LCD screen, and the curtains slid closed. He brought his hand down to another icon and hit it.

  "Yes, sir?" asked the disembodied voice of his secretary.

  "Janny, dear, I will leave from here directly for the dinner tonight. You can finish up now, then go off home. Please set the phones up so I won't be disturbed."

  "Yes, sir." An electronic hum filled the air as the woman hesitated. "Does that include your wife's private line?"

  Arrigo's nostrils flared for a moment, then he regained control. "Yes, Janny, it does. Call Raoul and tell him I don't think it is necessary for my wife to attend me tonight. And, Janny, prepare yourself because you will join me for dinner tonight."

  "Yes, sir! Thank you, Mr. El-Leichter."

  "Ari from now on, Janny."

  "Yes, Ari."

  The tall man punched the lockout button on his desktop. Locks on the doors and windows snapped shut, then the surface of the desk changed. A darkness swallowed the normal icons on it and replaced them with strange sigils and images that appeared to be the stuff of nightmares. His hand drifted above all of them, then he touched a spot on the screen that had no visible icon on it at all.

  The glass-panel doors on the centermost, floor-to-ceiling bookcase opposite his desk closed and locked tight. The top of it tipped toward the floor and, like a Murphy bed, the whole case rotated toward the ground. Numerous dark cables snaked from a hidden area behind it and might have appeared, had Arrigo ever allowed a casual observer into the room, to be electrical lines. He knew this was because, in their current dormant state, they looked black, exactly like most power cords.

  As the bookcase touched down and locked into position on the floor, the substance clinging to the back of it quivered. Arrigo recalled thinking of it as black Jell-O when he first saw it, but that opinion had been modified by years of contact with it. At its heart he saw a green glow that began to pulse sluggishly. Ghostly green lights shot off through it, backlighting fibrous structures in the slowly swelling matrix. The cables thickened and, as they did, began to glow with jade energy.

  As the green light began to pump faster, the glossy goo shifted shape. Sharply pointed things began to poke up like skeletal fingers. They never managed to pierce the gangrenous gelatin. Instead, it spread out between them like fleshy webbing, and that webbing, as it thinned to translucency, revealed the connective tissues binding the tall spires together into a bizarre, slime-laden skeletal hand.

  Arrigo licked his dry lips and tried to tell himself he had nothing to fear, this time. Removing his clothes, he assured himself he had done well. He had done his master's bidding and even exceeded it. His master would be proud. He knew it, and he knew he would be rewarded.

  He stepped forward and lowered his right foot into the amoeboid mass. He fought the shiver that the first cold touch always brought with it, but he failed. Deep down inside he knew he was reacting to more than the temperature. Despite the way the goop pulled heat away from him, he began to perspire.

  Turning around slowly to face his desk, he lowered his body onto the giant palm and pressed his spine against the elongated middle finger. He let his head drift back until he felt the ooze's cold kiss through his hair. He shifted once to more comfortably accommodate his shrinking scrotum, then he raised his hands and crossed his arms across his chest. Capping each shoulder with the opposite hand, he closed his eyes and forced himself to breath normally.

  The throbbing began at the base of the chair, but quickly started up through the middle finger. Inch by inch it vibrated its way up his spine, and he found himself shivering as it reached the middle of his shoulders. His scalp began to itch as the vibration rattled his teeth. At that point he clamped his jaw shut tight and concentrated on breathing in and out of his nose. Like a horse snorting after a gallop, Arrigo El-Leichter braced himself.

  Greenish sludge dripped languidly down over him from above. A thick, choking mask poured over his face and the fetid s
cent of decay filled his nose. He wanted to scream, but he managed to keep his mouth shut. Tasting that stuff, he knew, was the only thing worse than smelling it. It filled his ears, then drenched his shoulders and clung like honey to his chest. It coursed down his body to his loins, then cascaded down over his legs.

  Once it had coated him completely, it became even more turgid. His wife, having once discovered him in communion with his master, had told her doctors he looked trapped within a diseased placenta. The image had not much pleased him, nor had the complication of having to deal with her because of her discovery, but he did acknowledge the accuracy of it. Through this I have been born again into power.

  The membrane surrounding him palpated his body. Two tubular tendrils shot up his nose and snaked their way down his windpipe to his lungs. He swallowed reflexively against the sensation, but he much preferred it to the burning in his lungs that they alleviated. The membrane tightened slightly around his chest, and his lungs no longer pumped.

  «What have you for me, my pet?» The telepathically communicated question came not in words as much as colors and scents and feelings blasted straight into his brain. «Have you the godling you promized?»

  Arrigo tried to nod, but he did not possess the strength needed to make the elastic membrane move. «I have him, master, as I told you I would. I have him in an Alpha group, and he believes himself superior. He is impatient, and his frustration will make him leap at what you offer.»

  «Exzellent, my pet.» It felt as if something wonderful had exploded in his brain. Intellectually, Arrigo knew his master had just caused his pleasure centers to fire, but the rest of him craved more and more. «What elze have you, pet? I senze zomething elze.»

  Arrigo felt barely able to contain himself. «That Alpha group has another who is as strong as Ryuhito. He comes from America and has many corporate ties. He is a security expert.»