The Beauty of Our Weapons

by Jilly Paddock

  He could get a regeneration, Zenni said. Perhaps even regain most of his vision if he does it soon enough.

  Given his beliefs, do you really think he’ll do that? I wiped out the socket as best I could, speaking softly to my squeamish stomach as I worked, then I packed the space with sterile wadding. When I’d done all I could, I leaned back on my heels to look at him. I hadn’t helped him much; he might not now be in danger of bleeding to death, but he was still weak, unconscious, all that beauty wasted, shattered beyond recovery. I wiped my bloody hands on the golden tissue of my costume, suddenly aware of my own weakness. My search for and encounter with Druj had left me drained, then I’d poured too much effort into helping Draoi. My muscles were as useless as candyfloss and I was lightheaded, dizzy with the onset of exhaustion.

  Anna! Zenni’s voice was sharp, breaking into my stupor. At the door!

  Without that warning I would have been dead. She burst through at full tilt and I barely rolled clear as the dagger came down, its blade catching in my skirt, ripping the delicate blue silk. Nansi somersaulted out of the dive and gained her feet, sparing half an eye for Draoi as she caught her breath.

  “You.” She didn’t seem surprised or have any problem recognising me in my fresh colours. “It had to be you, didn’t it? What have you done to our Messiah, unbeliever?”

  I stood up slowly. “His pet demon did that, not me.”

  “Liar!” she said flatly, not breaking from her crouch. Gone was the priestess’ robe; now she was dressed for combat in a matt-black skinsuit that blurred the outlines of her body, her silver hair knotted close to her skull, its sheen subdued under a layer of charcoal grease, more of which was daubed over her metallic skin. Only her eyes were unaltered, two bright mirrors that captured my distorted image, a crumpled doll in blue and gold, with tousled honey-yellow hair. “You’ll die for doing that to him, I promise you that!”

  She levelled the dagger, slanting the blade upwards to slip through my ribs, then hurled herself at me. Zenni and I meshed into combat-mode, putting my weakness on hold. I plucked the weapon out of her hand, teleporting it out of the chamber before sidestepping, seizing her arm at the elbow and using her momentum for a throw. She fell hard, pride hurt worse than her body, and I read her bewilderment at my turn of speed and the fate of the knife.

  “I revise my judgement of you, Anna!” She panted, crawling to her knees. “I’d written you off as an amateur, but you’re bloody good! Fast reactions, a nice line in hand-to-hand and a few spooky tricks up your sleeve. Earth Intelligence have more smarts than I gave them credit for!”

  “We’ll do without the flattery, thank you.” Her attempt to gain time worried me, but not unduly. Neither Zenni nor I could sense any imminent danger. “How was your terrorist attack? I trust the authorities put a spanner in your works?”

  “So it was you who fouled us up? I guessed as much when they were waiting for us at the shuttle. Who did you get to betray us?”

  “I didn’t ask the name.”

  “It hardly matters.” She lowered her eyes. “We failed. None of the devices went off.”

  At least Druj had kept that part of his word. “Why did you come back? You must have expected a reception of some sort.”

  “I came to warn the magician.” Nansi admitted. “Krystallya’s in chaos, with our supporters being rounded up by the cartload. I came back to get Draoi out if I could, but now that I find you here, my plans have changed.” She grinned obscenely. “Now, Ruane!”

  The construct exploded out of the wall behind me like a guided missile.

  Shit! I whirled around. Secret door?

  Sorry—didn’t scan it.

  Ruane was on me, his great hands closing on my throat. I ducked, my feet skidding in Draoi’s blood. No time to think—I teleported across the room.

  Nansi shrieked in frustration at my escape and the construct leapt after me, as light on his feet as a dancer. I body-blocked the giant with TK, backing against the cold marble of the wall as the construct flung itself against my unseen barrier, rattling it.

  The brain is its weakest point. Zenni reminded. Destroy that and the simulacrum is as good as dead.

  I upped the effort behind my blockade, but the giant was super-strong by design and I was so tired. Ruane took a step back and launched itself at the hindrance, managing to gain a yard on me. I cast around for some weapon to use against it, but the chamber was bare. The construct scraped another two paces, striving to raise its arms and crush me.

  Nansi giggled, anticipating my defeat. “Take her, Ruane! Tear her into tiny pieces!”

  Inspiration sang to me then and I frowned, teleporting the construct’s unwieldy bulk. It was hard to do without actual contact, harder still to break all the safeguards. All my internal, habitual alarms screeched at me and I knew I had my sums right. Ruane was swallowed by limbo and then thrown back into reality, bent double, with the top of his head embedded in the solid wall, bellowing out his final lungful of air as his computer brain turned to mush. Although the massive disruption should have killed him instantly, his body continued to twitch for some time, reluctant to let go of its synthetic life.

  I felt sick again, revolted by the stench of horror and death that permeated the closed chamber. Zenni steadied me wordlessly, anxious at my ever-expanding weariness.

  Nansi Ruhanna had watched my display of arcane power with a trained and cunning eye and, although the demon-lord Druj had played me true up until now, I had little faith in the unwilling promise I had wrung from him to erase the woman’s memory. If Nansi was one of the Sisterhood, of which I was almost certain, I didn’t dare let her return to her order with all she knew about EI in general, and me in particular, intact.

  She doesn’t leave Tambouret alive. Zenni agreed.

  I straightened up and took one step away from the wall.

  “I’ll kill you first.” It was a statement not a threat and Nansi delivered it with utmost confidence.

  “Surely not telepathic too?” I mocked, reinforcing my mindshield.

  “I’m not trained to read minds, just faces.” Nansi laughed. “You always were a god-awful actress, Anna-Marie! You give yourself away with every move you make! How did you get suckered into this game? Cold-blooded professional? No, you’re an out-and-out novice—but then murder isn’t on the Eye’s syllabus, is it?”

  “Not as thoroughly as it’s taught by your own order, I’ll bet.”

  “My order?” Nansi tilted her head to one side. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Your true loyalties. You never cared one jot for Draoi’s lunatic cause, just as you have only a passing interest in Transyst-Interworld. Your real profession is assassin, a member of the Sisterhood of Grace—”

  She moved then, as I’d expected, yet her target wasn’t me. She toppled the candle, quenching the flame and plunging the chamber into total darkness.

  Go to darklight, Zenni! I hissed, sliding silently to my left. The velvet blackness was claustrophobic, deadening all sound and locking me into my skull.

  The sensor was concealed in your ornaments, the beads you left with the demon in Crystallia.

  Send me down a spare.

  We don’t have one. You do make a habit of losing them.

  Then we’re effectively blind. I moved again, careful to make no noise, wondering at the delay in Nansi’s attack. Perhaps she intended to let the lack of light disorientate me before she struck. She must be able to see or she wouldn’t have doused the candle. She must assume she has the advantage, but we’ll see about that. I scanned the chamber and found the hazy glow of her emotional aura, pulled in tight about her body, a thin line of smoke grey and dull crimson bound close by tension and concentration.

  Yes, there. Zenni agreed my estimate of her position. She has a small mass of metal in her left hand, carbon-steel alloy—at a guess, another knife.

  Nansi made her second move, the blade destined for my throat. She was so fast and the aura-shadow so indistinct that I misjudged my evasi
on. The knife nicked my shoulder and Nansi caught my wrist with her free hand, using her weight to bear me to the ground. She was wiry and surprisingly strong for her build, but then so was I, and if I was physically drained, I still had psi-skills to cheat with. I drew my knees up, slamming her sideways, flipping the blade out of her hand. We heard it skitter to the far side of the room.

  Go easy on the TK. Zenni warned. You’re near exhaustion and you could easily push yourself too hard. We haven’t much in reserve if we’re to get you back up to Brimstone.

  Okay, okay! I struggled with Nansi and she relinquished her hold, twisting like an acrobat to get back on her feet. As I stood up, I heard her panting a little to my left and used the sound to get my bearings for a charge. She was ready for that and sidestepped neatly, leaving a husky chuckle hanging in the silken blackness. I whirled in that direction and she was gone again, dancing silent circles around me. I cursed Druj silently for taking my artificial eyes, for although I could guess where Nansi might be, I couldn’t get a clear enough image to be able to anticipate her moves. What I needed was light.

  “Desperate now, Anna-dear?” Nansi taunted, each word flying at me from a different point. “Enjoy the sensation. It’s the last you’ll ever have!”

  I turned my head, trying to pin her down, knowing the effort was wasted. She was so expert at moving quietly that my ears couldn’t track her. Zenni could offer little aid, confined to my inferior senses, but he fed whatever spatial awareness he could divine from that limited data down the link. I kept moving, trying to avoid both Nansi and the injured magician. A faint smell reached me over the stale morass of drying blood, antiseptic, my own sweat and the hot wick and wax from the candle, a dank smell, sour-sweet and oddly familiar. Nansi’s aura was a scant six feet away, a boiling cauldron of hatred and triumph. I was helpless, a hunter dependent on vision, confused by all this divergent input, unable to quite fit a pattern together.

  Light burst into the room, in reality pitifully faint, but nova-bright to my straining eyes. It radiated from a ball of pale fire nestling in the magician’s palm. Draoi’s face was a mask of agony and his lips writhed as if to scream, but something held the cry back, just as it forced him to sit upright in the centre of the room. An alien intelligence glinted in his eyes, an ancient, cruel amusement. The bale-fire brightened to scarlet, flooding the chamber with eerie illumination.

  Nansi Ruhanna shrieked. Gone were her mirrored protective lenses, discarded to give her the advantage of vision. I saw then what she’d always concealed from the world—she was an albino, with irises of faded rose-quartz and pupils fixed at maximum dilation. Small wonder she could see in darkness; in any sort of light, however dim, the brilliance struck her blind. She squinted at me, weeping at the torture of the minimal light and raising her hands as if to ward it off.

  That’s not natural, Zenni said. Her eyes have been adapted to extend her vision into the ultraviolet, all the better to see at night.

  Clever trick, and probably part of her paid-killer armoury—

  The weapon must have been non-metallic, as Zenni gave me no warning this time. The first I knew of it was a glimpse of a projectile firing in a halo of condensing gas. Instinctively I blocked its passage to my face with both hands and the quill-like dart pierced the centre of my palm, sliding between the bones and breaking the skin on the back of my hand, its velocity insufficient to carry it through. The burning agony of the puncture was out of all proportion to the damage and I didn’t need the added clue of Nansi’s joyous grin to tell me why.

  “Yes, it’s poisoned!” She dropped the single-shot gun, a simple grey cylinder, her laughter as happy and innocent as a child’s. “It’s a new addition to our arsenal, a venom brought from the far side of the galaxy. You should feel honoured, Anna, as it’s never been tried out in the field before.”

  I tugged at the dart and the thing broke, the section under my palm coming free. I transferred my attention to the barbed end, which fell away easily, and I hurled both pieces at the floor in impotent fury. From the flare of pain around the wound I knew that the removal hadn’t been quick enough to stop my uptake of the poison.

  “We haven’t determined the optimum dosage yet, but that carried enough to take out a small elephant.” Nansi squinted at me from beneath a shading hand. “There’s no antidote.”

  I made a heroic effort to slow my heart rate and buy me some time to think, but her lupine glee sowed the seeds of panic. There were voices in my head; Zenni giving gentle but near-hysterical advice, the pretty lies of the archdemon that it wasn’t my fate to die at the hands of the Sisterhood, and a deep-buried memory of a language that was part-growl, part-whimper, spoken by a grey-faced alien with marbled orange eyes, calling me friend.

  “Seventeen,” I muttered absently, then total recall arrived with a crash. “That smell—Xha venom!”

  Such a little stimulus to trigger a chain reaction; all of the snippets of data and a mass I hadn’t realised I’d ever known crystallised into a whole. The impact of it brought me to my knees, grasping my wounded hand and staring at its bloody palm. I was aware of the venom as a ring of inky blackness at the rim of the puncture and as tiny ebony motes dancing like negative snowflakes, moving inevitably towards the major blood vessels in my wrist. I looped a band of thought-stuff around that wrist, tightening it down like a tourniquet until the pressure made me wince. It served the purpose, slowing the flow in the artery down to a sluggish throb and halting the ebb in the vein. I knew I couldn’t hold it there for long, so I pushed at the minute black particles of toxin, amazed at the ease at which they moved. I honed all of my concentration to the task, excluding everything else, including Zenni’s fearful observation. The venom retreated to its entry wound and I loosened my mental tourniquet a fraction, using the flow to wash the last of the poison out. I cupped my hand around the blood with its lacing of death, a little scarlet lake.

  The bale-fire flickered, disturbing my trance. Draoi’s abused body convulsed, unable to cope with both its injury and its possession. I felt the demon shrug, yet he must have realised that my need was past, for he released the magician. The flame guttered out and there was a dull thump as the vacant body hit the floor. Nansi sobbed in relief at the passing of the light.

  Anna? Zenni struggled past my block on the link.

  I’ll live, I said, listening to my would-be assassin’s recovery. The stuff on the dart was Xha venom, but I’ve expelled all of it.

  At first I thought you were delirious, then you wouldn’t respond to my questions... I thought you were dying! His terror leaked past his controls and he quashed it. How did you deal with the poison?

  I just flushed it out. I never realised before how easy it is to move molecules, even single atoms. At our parting of the ways, Seventeen left a secret package of data in my mind, and I think I triggered it just now. He would have asked me more, but I shushed him. Nansi’s back in action.

  The woman dragged herself up. “So, my enemy, the tables turn again and the deal passes to me. Not that you care—poor Anna-Marie, you’re past all that now.”

  I moaned aloud, past master at the old dramatic death scene.

  “Still alive?” Nansi gasped, rushing to investigate, just as I’d known she would. “How can that be? The toxin should have finished you by now!”

  I waited until she bent over me, her hot breath on my skin, then I shaped the blood in my right hand into a ball and hurled the missile straight into her eyes.

  For one long, elastic moment there was silence. I was in motion when her squeal broke it, wriggling clear as my blood trickled through her fingers and dripped to the floor. When I stood, my knees wobbled but held. Nansi’s shriek went on and on, ragged with fear, and I felt the vibration through the pentacle as she fell. I ’ported a flashlight down from the ship, shaking with the effort it cost, and turned a cone of minimum brightness on the assassin. She rolled on the floor, whimpering, her gore-covered fingers clawing ineffectually at her eyes, and even my lamp didn’
t seem to distract her. When I felt for her pulse it was irregular, her skin clammy and fever-hot under my fingertips. My touch roused her and she brought her hands away from her eyes to focus on my face. The faded pink of her irises was paler still against their bloodshot whites, and her eyelids were swollen and blood-encrusted, not all of it mine.

  She looks awful! I exclaimed inwardly, taken aback by her rapid transformation from victor to snivelling wreck. What’s wrong with her?

  You threw the poison directly into her eyes, and like cobra venom, it would seem that it’s rapidly absorbed by that route. Zenni guessed. She’s fading fast.

  “So, the honour falls to me to die by my own bane!” Nansi coughed, an ugly, liquid rattle. The paroxysm passed and she bared those horrid black teeth in a snarl of loathing. “An ignoble death for an assassin perhaps, yet it’s fitting that my final curse be on your head. May the grim-faced goddess, our Lady of the Long Hand, she who will not be denied, stalk you and all those you hold dear! May she steal your friends and family, rob you of your lovers, destroy the children of your body, and finally catch up with you in some far, desolate place, devoid of help and comfort! I curse you, Anna-Marie Delany, and I spit upon you, you and all of your ancestors and descendants! May fear and madness follow you for all the days that remain of your miserable life!”

  “Fine words, Nansi, but empty,” I said, as she panted for breath after her ritual speech. “To make a curse stick you need power, and you have none.”

  “Our Lady has power enough!” She hissed. “I swear this, Anna, that the Sisterhood shall exact dreadful vengeance upon you for my death!”

  Her pulse raced under my fingers, her body racked by violent tremors, then her back arched and her mouth gaped for one last scream. The cry froze in her throat as all her muscles went into spasm and locked rigid. I dived into her mind, steeling myself against her extreme pain and terror. The chaos of her dissolving consciousness was sickening and although it was lunacy to willingly experience such raw agony, as lunatic as rolling naked in broken glass, I pressed deep, carving my way through the murk like a shaft of fire. The memories I sought were decaying even as I reached them, so I retrieved what I could and withdrew. The essence that was Nansi wailed in anguish at my departure, poised alone at the edge of the pit. I shrugged off her forlorn grasp and cast her down into that abyss, down to the fiends she imagined awaited her at the end of her fall. Her screech echoed in my ears as I kicked free, sliding back into the limits of my own body.