by Edward Cox
A creaking filled the air before quickly turning into a multitude of dull pops and cracks. The tree began steaming as every drop of moisture within it was superheated. The greens and browns of its bark turned a sun-baked, clay-like grey. Finally, the strange creature began to crack and crumble. As it collapsed into a pile of broken stone, its purpose served, the empath fell heavily to the floor, where she lay face down and motionless.
Moor stared at the ugly red hole in Marney’s lower back, and then let the scalpel clatter down beside her. He cradled the crimson and yellow flower to his chest, and turned to his fellow Genii.
‘The memories of an empath,’ Asajad whispered.
‘In which lies the location of Oldest Place,’ Moor added.
Neither of them could hide their euphoria.
The moment was interrupted by the wall behind the Genii changing from solid silver to pearlescent liquid and finally to shimmering air. A view into a room within the Nightshade was revealed, along with the considerable form of Viktor Gadreel.
Unlike the thin and bird-like Asajad, Gadreel was thick and wide of shoulders, obese in body, beneath his cassock. Bald-headed and heavy-jowelled he had only smooth skin where his left eye should have been; his right eye glinted with intolerance. Gadreel stepped into the silver cube, his footfalls heavy. The hulking Genii was not pleased.
‘Hamir is still unreachable,’ he announced, his voice a rumble. ‘For the life of me, Fabian, I cannot break through to him.’
The shine of Moor’s elation dulled.
Hamir, the Resident’s aide, the necromancer – he had gone into hiding when the Genii had taken control of Labrys Town. He had locked himself away in the very bowels of the Nightshade, in a room with a door that first Asajad, and now Gadreel, could not open.
‘And now Hagi tells me that the denizens have failed us,’ Gadreel continued. His eye was full of hate. ‘The police that she sent after the Relic Guild were useless.’
Moor’s jaw clenched. To have this moment spoiled by mention of those petty magickers drove him to thoughts of murder. ‘The Relic Guild survived?’
Gadreel nodded, once. ‘They escaped the warehouse. Reports say they just disappeared. Perhaps they found a doorway out of the Labyrinth, Fabian.’
Moor drew a calming breath. ‘Impossible. No human could reverse the Timewatcher’s prerogative. And those magickers are certainly not skilled enough to create a portal themselves. The Relic Guild is still in Labrys Town, and they will be found—’
‘Fabian …’ Asajad’s irritated whisper also carried an air of pleading which was not often heard from the Genii. ‘Forget the Relic Guild. Forget Hamir. We have what we need.’
Gadreel’s one eye narrowed as he considered the empath lying crumpled amidst the ruins of the serpentine tree. He then looked at Moor’s hands held protectively to his chest.
‘It is done?’ he asked.
Moor answered by allowing him a glimpse of the crimson and yellow flower.
Gadreel licked his fat lips. ‘We are ready to free Lord Spiral?’
‘Almost.’ The ghost of a smile returned to Moor’s face. ‘The time is close, my friends. Come.’
Moor strode away from Asajad, past Gadreel, heading toward the room in the Nightshade on the other side of the silver cube.
‘Wait,’ said Asajad. ‘What about her?’
Moor looked back at Marney. Her skin was grey and scarred; the wound on her lower back angry and weeping. Whether she breathed or not, he could not tell. The empath, the filthy human lying naked and stripped of all dignity – she too had served her purpose.
‘Her mind has been erased,’ Moor said. ‘Her body is only a shell now.’
‘And we leave the shell here to die?’ Asajad said hopefully.
‘If it isn’t dead already.’ Moor gave a nod and gazed around at the silver walls that had served as his sanctuary for forty years, at the ruins of the strange tree-creature that had given the Genii everything they needed, and finally at the faces of Asajad and Gadreel.
‘There is nothing left here that we require,’ Moor told them, still holding the flower protectively. ‘And the Resident is waiting.’
Chapter Three
Changeling
It was agony worse than anyone should have to endure.
The bullet had shattered Clara’s hipbone; but it felt as if half her body had been ripped away too. She searched inside herself for a sign that Marney was still with her. She asked for guidance to calm the panic, begged for soothing medicine to ease the pain. What she found was the empath’s box of secrets, alive and vibrating at the back of her mind. It told the changeling to let go, to submit to the inevitable, to accept that this was a good thing …
Clara recoiled from the advice like it was counsel offered with a poisonous sting.
Alone, bathed in silver light, slumped upon the hard and wet cobbles of a foul-smelling alleyway, she was finding it too hard to recall who she was, to remember all she had learned. Hot blood slicked her skin; her heart thumped a fiery tempo. The pain had sapped her strength and she couldn’t open her eyes, let alone move. And in this state, lost and incapacitated, Clara decided she would die.
That was when the first growl came to her throat.
‘Clara! Did the avatar give you a symbol? Quickly!’
She recognised the voice, but could not remember the man who spoke. She wanted to reply, but the blood in her veins had turned to molten metal, and only a groan passed her lips. Her temples pounded, her muscles cramped, her skin felt too tight for her skeleton.
‘Do not touch her,’ another man hissed.
Clara growled as her magic gathered momentum. Broken bones began to knit; torn flesh began regenerating. An ache pulsed in her jaw; her teeth felt long, her tongue a fat slug in her mouth. Skin burning as hairs sprouted from follicles like thick, hot needles, Clara made a supreme effort of will to pull from her pocket a tin filled with tablets of monkshood, the medicine she had taken for most of her life to keep her inner monster buried.
Greasy fingers struggled to open the medicine tin, but she had no real control over her actions. When the lid gave, the tin slipped from her grasp, and her medicine spilled in a cascade of tiny white pills. With another growl, she looked up and forced open her eyes to meet the glaring silver disc of the moon, high and cold in the sky.
Vision painfully sharp, Clara faced the two men in the alleyway. They stood either side of a slim pedestal. One of them, metal plates covering his eyes and dressed in simple black garb, held a cane made from glass so deeply green its facets seemed to ripple in the moonlight like emerald waters. The other man seemed older, his short hair and goatee practically white, his face lined with age. He wore a long brown coat, and held a rifle in his hands, its glowing power stone reeking of thaumaturgy.
Both men were covered in grime, and Clara could hear them breathing. She could taste their fear. Didn’t they know they should be running from her?
‘It’s coming,’ Clara warned them.
She tried to scream in anguish, but the slow-burning fuse of her magic touched the explosive, and it was a howl of triumph that escaped her mouth.
A series of dull creaks and pops filled Clara’s head as bone and cartilage shifted, broke, grew, and the brutal reorganisation of her skeletal structure began. Clara’s face stretched forward, cracking loudly as it snapped into its new elongated shape. With each white-hot break and pop inside her, a cough-like bark escaped from her constricted throat. She thrashed on the floor as muscle and sinew morphed, expanded, ripping clothes at the seams. For a moment, her boots refused to give, but then the leather split and buckles bounced off the alley walls like a spray of bullets. She scrambled forward onto all fours: her arms were now powerful forelegs, covered in thick silver hair; hands were now meaty paws, tipped with nails, long and sharp.
She waited for that moment when the monste
r strangled her humanity, that moment when animal rage drowned all memory of who she was. But, within Clara, Marney’s box of secrets opened just a little more. When the agony and suffering subsided, the usual moment of forgetfulness did not come.
She was the wolf.
Yet with a slap of recognition, she remembered the men before her, and remembered them well. They seemed puny now.
Van Bam stood with his back to Clara, looking down the alleyway that stretched ahead. Samuel didn’t seem to know where to look, and the aim of his rifle swung between Clara and what his friend was watching. He directed his desperate eyes to the stone box that sat atop the pedestal.
‘What’s the damned symbol?’ he hissed.
A sharp crack filled the air, followed by several more, like ice breaking under pressure. Ahead of the two men, a barrier of green magic blocked the alleyway from wall to wall. The barrier was already fractured by a series of jagged lines. It groaned as it bulged outward, and then the magic shattered into a hundred pieces that swirled away like smoke on the breeze. A blackness was revealed, scratchy and darker than shadows, its surface uneven and studded by sharp objects like shards of night. The clamour of distant violence reached Clara’s erect ears; the already cold air turned to bitter winter. A stench of age and corrosion filled her nostrils … along with the reek of wild demons.
Samuel had decided exactly where to point his rifle now. With a degree of disgust, Clara noted the old bounty hunter’s hands shook as he took aim at the doorway to the Retrospective. Van Bam stood beside his fellow agent, clutching his green glass cane, facing the danger with courage that Clara sensed he did not truly feel.
With the way ahead blocked, and a dead end behind, the sole option left was to stand and fight. This did not displease the wolf.
‘Here they come,’ Samuel whispered.
The Retrospective opened its door. The jagged studs parted and the fluid blackness clung to a crippled form that pushed its way through. When the Retrospective finally released its denizen, the monster stumbled into the alleyway with a low belch, as if it had emerged from a burst bubble of viscous liquid.
Spindly and hunched, the wild demon paused to taste the air with a fat, lolling tongue, dripping grey saliva. With a round mouth opened wide and full of sharp teeth, it turned its elongated head one way and then the other. Insectile eyes, as large and smooth as the metal plates covering Van Bam’s sockets, settled on the Relic Guild agents. The demon stepped forward, dragging clubbed feet over wet cobbles, and raised its long arms, displaying sharp horns for hands, like monstrous rose thorns.
Clara growled.
The demon screeched.
Samuel’s rifle flashed and spat.
The bullet smashed through the creature’s gaping maw, and the hairless bulb of the back of its head burst with a steaming spray of oily blood. Its scream abruptly silenced, the demon dropped to its knees and fell backwards. The doorway to the Retrospective boiled, reaching out with tentacles that wrapped around the corpse and dragged it back into the depths. No sooner had the body disappeared than the doorway opened again. Three more demons stepped into the alleyway. They differed in shape and size from the first, but each of them had monstrous horns for hands, and faces mostly comprised of gaping fang-filled mouths and large, insectile eyes.
Two more followed them.
Van Bam stabbed his cane down against the floor. With a high, discordant chime, three fist-sized globes of green sped down the alley and punched three of the demons onto their backs.
Clara barked and bounded forward to meet the two still standing.
With a screech, the first demon struck at the wolf with its horned hand, swinging the sharp point in a wide, clumsy arc. Clara easily dodged the blow, and the creature stumbled. She set about the second, leaping into it and bowling it over to the floor. She felt its cold rancid breath as she trapped its head between her huge jaws. She growled and crushed and shook and tore the monster’s head from its neck. The demon’s flesh and bone had a damp, pulpy texture, and filled Clara’s mouth with the taste of rot.
Spitting out the mauled mass, Clara launched into the second demon. Rising on her hind legs, she used her forepaws to shove the monster back against the wall. Its head cracked black brickwork, and it sank to the ground. Clara again used her powerful jaws to rip its head loose.
The other three demons had recovered from Van Bam’s assault. They clambered to their feet, shrieking with quick, stuttering voices, and converged on the wolf.
Samuel’s rifle flashed and downed two in quick succession. Clara disembowelled the third with the sharp nails of one paw, and tore away its chest with the other. The corpses quickly melted to thick oil that ran along the cobbles to be sucked back into the Retrospective.
The wolf howled to Silver Moon in victory.
‘Stand clear,’ Van Bam shouted.
The illusionist tried to cast another protective barrier. He failed. As soon as his magic spread across the liquid doorway it fractured, shattered, and blew away on the cold air. Slurping like feet pulled from mud, the surface of the Retrospective began lapping in folds, excited, agitated, preparing to unleash its next monstrosity.
Had she been able, Clara would have smiled.
Legend said there were an infinite number of wild demons within the Retrospective, a never-ending horde of merciless beasts whose passion for violence and blood knew no limits. Clara wanted them to come; she was ready to fight them all, and she faced the doorway with battle-lust raging in her ears.
Behind her, Samuel and Van Bam were arguing about a House symbol. The weakness in their voices angered the wolf, the desperation that searched for some way out when it was obvious that all options led to the fight. Her tail, pointing to the ground, was rigid as a rod of iron; her front quarters lowered, hackles raised, Clara – huge and fierce – bared her teeth with a series of barks. Once again, the Retrospective opened and sent forth its warrior to meet the wolf ’s challenge.
The sickly green colour of disease, a monstrous worm slumped onto the cobbles like a flaccid limb. Its blubber splayed across the alley, pressing against the walls, blocking the doorway. Patches of thick hair grew from its glistening skin like tufts of wild grass. Slowly, as though yawning, the worm opened its mouth: a gaping hole filled with row upon row of finger-sized teeth. A putrid stench invaded Clara’s nostrils as she gazed into the filthy maw. The worm hunched the segments of its body and slid towards the wolf with the greasy sound of slimy flesh over stone.
Clara stood her ground.
With half its body still buried in the Retrospective, the worm raised its mouth high, preparing to descend and swallow its enemy whole. Muscles bunching, the wolf prepared to pounce.
‘Clara, no!’ Van Bam shouted.
Clara ignored the illusionist, but her assault was checked by a glare of blue light.
It appeared suddenly, blazingly, filling the space between Clara and the demonic worm. The wolf recoiled from its glare. The worm hissed putrid breath, its body contracting and shying away. The light coalesced into the vague shape of a human surrounded by an aura of sky blue. It waved limb-like tendrils that spread from wall to wall, separating the combatants.
Clara backed off a few paces. The vision tugged at her memory, its aura and shape, the black eyes that leaked tears of smoke …
‘The avatar,’ she heard Van Bam whisper with awe.
Clara knew that was important, but she didn’t care; she only wanted to stand her ground, to face this avatar and show it her full might. But energy radiated from the spectre, a force that raised the hairs on the wolf ’s body and frightened the worm. This energy pushed Clara into further retreat, and she hated her weakness in the face of it.
A pale tendril of light waved towards the wolf, snaking in the air as it passed over her. Clara followed its path, watching as it engulfed the stone box atop the pedestal in a blue glow.
V
an Bam and Samuel stood transfixed as the avatar’s light intensified around the stone box. Both men flinched as a crackle of energy filled the air. It was followed by a low hum. A few paces behind the pedestal, a large disc of shadow had appeared on the floor. The men flinched again and wheeled around as, with a wrenching of stone and a rush of air, a circle of brickwork on the dead end wall crumbled and swirled away into the glassy surface of a circular portal.
Around the pedestal, the aura of blue light sputtered. The avatar blinked in and out of existence a few times. And then it disappeared.
Clara’s ears were filled with a hissing, and rancid breath assailed her nostrils. The worm’s fear of the avatar had not caused it to flee back into the Retrospective. It slid forwards once more, mouth open and eager to devour the wolf.
‘Clara, we are leaving,’ Van Bam bellowed.
Clara scorned the idea of backing down from this fight. She showed the worm her teeth.
‘Clara!’
‘Leave her, Van Bam,’ Samuel shouted. ‘We can’t control her.’
‘Clara, listen to me!’ Van Bam begged. ‘Come with us now, or you die here!’
Flashing her teeth and spitting saliva, Clara began barking at her foe as it pushed its blubbery body ever closer.
The idiot’s quite right, you know, a voice said in the wolf ’s mind.
Confused, Clara skipped back, feeling as though she had been slapped on the snout by an invisible hand.
This really isn’t a fight you can win, Clara.
The voice felt harsh and intrusive in her head, and it brought images of a man’s gaunt face, his expression hard, his brown eyes maniacal.
Don’t get me wrong, child, the voice continued, I admire your courage, but it truly is time for flight, not fight.
With the worm still pushing towards her, Clara looked back at Van Bam and Samuel. They stood upon the disc of shadow on the alley floor. Van Bam’s expression was pleading as he reached out to her.
‘Please … you cannot survive this.’
Clara faced the worm again, and saw that it was within four paces of her. Some of the fight had left her, but she still bared her teeth and stood her ground. If she used the alley wall as leverage, she could jump up onto the demon’s back and bite and slash until it was slaughtered—
