Paradigms Lost - eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

  I became aware I was gasping for breath, realizing only then that Verne hadn’t really been running; that I’d been dragging him along instead. Even here, in the place most sacred to him, he had no strength. Technology was winning the battle.

  A rending, shattering sound echoed down the corridor as I dragged Verne to the pool’s far side and dropped him to rest against the obelisk. Slow, measured footfalls clicked down the tunnel. The snake-headed monster that called itself “Ed Sommer” entered the room, smiling at me. “Too bad about you, Jason. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t afford to waste my breath.

  “Tired?” it asked cheerfully as it continued towards me. “Well, it will be over soon enough.”

  As long as he was moving slowly, with full control, I didn’t have a chance. “At least I know you’re not going to survive me by much, Ed or whatever your name is.”

  The slit-pupilled eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I found the location of your laboratory tonight. My TERA-5 got lucky and matched patterns. And if I don’t send the ‘no-go’ code soon, the system storing my data will dump the location and all the info I have on the lab’s operations into every intelligence agency and scientific forum on the planet. It’ll be a lot easier to pry the kid and the mother away from a bunch of squabbling agencies than from one group of demonic crossbreeds with a unified purpose.”

  The lie worked; it fit perfectly with what they knew of my capabilities, was precisely what I would’ve done if I had found the location and had no other choice. The giant figure charged forward. “I’ll have that code out of you if I have to rip it out of your heart!”

  Jesus he was fast! Fast as Klein! But with him charging, everything changed. I jumped up onto the Heartstone and lunged to meet the Ed-thing just as he leapt towards us across the Mirror of the Sky.

  The impact stunned me, and I felt at least three armored spikes go deep into my arms, but I held on. My momentum had mostly canceled his, and the two of us plummeted directly into the deceptively deep pool below.

  A detonation of leaf-green light nearly blinded me as the entire pool lit up like an emerald spotlight; surges of energy whipped through me and I came close to blacking out. Boiling water fountained up and I was flung outward to strike with numbing force on the altar, shocked, parboiled, and aching. Electrical arcs danced around the edge of the water, then spat outwards, shattering the lightbulbs across half the room. A roar of agony echoed from the depths of the Mirror of the Sky. Then the boiling subsided, the eerie green light faded away. Blinking away spots, I looked down. A few pieces of spiky armor, bubbling and dissolving away like Easter Egg dye pellets, were all that remained.

  “One more guess confirmed.” My voice, not surprisingly, shook. I reached down and retrieved my gun from where I’d dropped it near the Heartstone.

  Verne gave a very weak chuckle. “If they were my enemies, they would be the very antithesis of the power I wielded. Yes?”

  “I hope so.”

  Another voice spoke from the entranceway. “And you were quite correct.”

  I felt my jaw go slack as I looked across. “Oh…oh damn. You’re dead.”

  In the bright lights that remained, the Colonel, resplendent in his uniform, walked towards us. “As is oft-quoted, reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. Kafan, poor boy, didn’t realize precisely what I was, so he only damaged my body. As you learned,” and suddenly, without any visible pause, he was there, taking the gun from my hand with irresistible force, “ordinary weapons are rather useless against us. Tearing out my throat was an inconvenience, easily remedied. But it was more convenient to appear to die and hope he’d lead us to the other two children, than to keep fighting him.”

  Despite my struggles, he picked me up and tied me up with rope he had slung over his shoulder. A casual kick from him sent Verne sprawling. “Now we can fix things. Pity about Ed, though. Rather promising in some ways, but a trifle dense. If only I’d been a moment sooner…good bluff, boy. But your mind is a bit transparent.” He set me down on the Heartstone and groped under his uniform. “Now where…ah, there it is.” His hand came back into view, holding a long, sharp, crystalline knife. He smiled.

  I couldn’t maintain my usual facade of confidence here. I swallowed, tried to speak, found that my throat had gone completely dry.

  “Don’t bother trying to speak. You see, a ritual sacrifice on this stone will negate its very nature, ending the power of this shrine, which is quite painful to me, and in his weakened condition it should also destroy the priest. So you, by virtue of your very bad fortune, shall be the one through which we cleanse the world of the last trace of Eönae and her nauseating priests.”

  “So why are you bothering to tell me?” I managed to get out. “Just a melodramatic villain with a long-winded streak?”

  He laughed at that, a cheerful sound all the more macabre because it was so unforced and honest. “Why, not at all; a purely practical reason, I assure you. You see, fear, despair, and the anticipation of death are part of what strengthens the ritual. They are antidotes to life and endurance and all the other things that this shrine represents. The more I allow you to muse upon your end, the more you see your friends weakened and destroyed, and the stronger my final sacrifice will be. If it were just a matter of killing you, I’d have had you shot weeks ago.” The blade rested on my Adam’s apple, pricking my skin coldly. He drew a line down my throat. I felt a warm trickle of blood. “And your little seer friend, the girl…she, too, has a part to play in this.”

  “She’ll see you for what you are, and get away.”

  “I think not. We caught her earlier this evening, actually. I was anticipating the priest’s incapacitation this morning.” He raised the knife, brought it towards my right wrist.

  A blurred motion swept past me, pushing the Colonel away in that instant. A confused set of motions later, the Colonel and the blur separated and stopped.

  The Colonel regarded Kafan with tight-lipped amusement. “I must confess I didn’t expect you quite yet.”

  Kafan answered in Vietnamese; the two squared off. “What do you hope to accomplish, boy?” the Colonel asked. “You failed the last time. What is the point of fighting me again?”

  I began wiggling my hand towards my Swiss Army knife. If I could just get it out…

  “This time you’re not coming back,” Kafan growled. He and the Colonel exchanged a blinding flurry of blows and blocks, neither of them touching the other.

  “Really?” the Colonel said. He swept Kafan’s feet out from under him and hammered the smaller man’s face with his elbow. Kafan barely evaded the next strike and rolled up, throwing a punch at the Colonel that left a dent in the wall. They circled each other, Kafan spitting out blood as the Colonel’s grin widened, the teeth sharpening. “And why is that?”

  “Because now I know what I am.”

  The Colonel hesitated fractionally. Not quite as much as Kafan obviously hoped for, but even so Kafan’s instantaneous lunge nearly decapitated him. As it was, the Colonel’s preternatural speed pulled his head aside barely in time; Kafan’s claws scored his cheek with five parallel scratches. “Feh! Kr’lm akh! What difference is that, boy? So you were meant to be a Guardian! Without the Goddess behind your power, what are you but a simple thug, one whose blows are nothing more than stinging sand?” I’d hoped his words were boasting, but seeing how those five cuts were already healing, I realized that the Colonel was speaking the truth.

  Kafan returned the Colonel’s grin, with interest, his form fully changed into a tailed, fanged humanoid. He straightened slightly and brought his arms into a strange, formal stance. “I don’t need the Goddess behind my power. All I need are two words, given to me by the Master who taught me.”

  The Colonel tensed.

  “Tor.”

  At that word, the Colonel stepped back.

  Not fast enough. Two slashing movements
of Kafan’s hands, too fast to follow, ripped aside blocking arms and a third strike against the uniformed chest sent the Colonel flying into the wall with a combined sound of shattering stone and breaking bone.

  While the Colonel slowly rose, bones forcing themselves back to their proper positions and healing in moments, Raiakafan sprinted to the section of the wall nearest me. “And Shevazherana,” he said. He pulled the sheath from the wall and drew out the immense, squat-bladed sword.

  The Colonel’s eyes widened. His form began to shift and he leapt away, towards the exit.

  Raiakafan stood there, impossibly having crossed the room in the blink of an eye. “No escape for you, monster. For my father—this!”

  The first slash took off the changing form’s right arm. What was formerly the Colonel screeched and tried to stumble backwards. It ran into something, spun around to find itself facing…Raiakafan again. “For my children—this!”

  The other arm flew off in a fountain of red-black blood. Screeching in terror, not a trace of humanity left on its bony, angular form, the thing flapped feeble wings and flew upwards, away from the implacable hunter. A hunter who disappeared from view while both the monster and I stared.

  And once more, the creature that had been the Colonel rebounded from something that had appeared in its path. Falling along with the stunned demon, Raiakafan shoved it downwards so it landed prone on the grassy floor of the cavern. “And for my wife.”

  The great sword came down once more. In a flash of black light, a flicker of shadow that momentarily erased all illumination, the thing dispersed.

  A pile of noisome dust sifted away from Kafan’s sword, dust that slowly evaporated and turned into a smell of death and decay…and faded away to nothing.

  “Get up, Father,” Kafan said, helping Verne. “It’s over now.”

  I staggered wearily to my feet, feeling the warm trickle of blood down my arms. “No. Not yet. They’ve got Sylvie!”

  Kafan cursed in that ancient tongue. “But where?”

  “Only one guess. She’s got to be at Ed’s place. At least, I hope so, because without the Colonel to tell us, it’ll be a long hard search if she isn’t.” And I couldn’t afford to think about that.

  “Is it not…possible that he was bluffing?” Verne said weakly.

  “Do you think he was?”

  Verne didn’t answer; his expression was enough.

  “Neither did I. He wouldn’t bluff that way. He was smart enough to set things up ahead of time.”

  Kafan looked at me. “You’re not in any condition to fight.”

  “Don’t even think about keeping me out of this. Who else are we going to call?”

  Somehow we got to the top of the stairs. Morgan, with his usual imperturbable expression denying the very existence of his torn clothing and bloodied form, smiled slightly as we emerged. “I’m glad to see you’re all still alive.”

  “Can you drive, Morgan?”

  Morgan raised an eyebrow. “Certainly, Master Jason. I presume there is some urgency?”

  “If any of these monsters are left, they’ve got Syl.”

  Morgan snatched the keys from my hand and half-dragged me along. Verne was moving easier, but it was plain that neither of us was up to a fight with a half-dead Chihuahua, let alone a group of demonic assassins. The fact that neither Morgan or Kafan said anything told us that they knew that we’d never allow ourselves to be left behind.

  The drive across town was excruciatingly slow. It seemed that every block was ten times longer than I remembered. We entered Morgantown’s main district, crossed through, and continued. Though only fifteen minutes had passed, I felt as though precious days were passing. Syl. How could we have left her unguarded?

  Ed Sommer’s house was lit up like a full-blown party was going on inside. The fence around it looked normal, but I could tell it was stronger than it appeared…and electrified, too. A contractor like Ed wouldn’t have had trouble installing all sorts of bad news for intruders.

  “Hang on, gentlemen,” Morgan said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Going through the gate, of course,” he said calmly, as the engine on Verne’s limousine roared and we were pressed back by acceleration. “Without being in suitable combat condition, our best chance is…”

  With a rending crash, the limo shuddered but tore through the gateway.

  “…total surprise and uncompromising speed. Prepare to attack.”

  Expecting a counterattack, we dove out of the limo. The front door of the house popped open. Arms screaming in pain, I still managed to bring the gun up, sighted on the target—

  —and immediately dropped the gun. “Don’t shoot! It’s SYL!”

  Sylvia emerged from the doorway, stepping gingerly over the limp body of a demonoid as she did so. As I raced up the steps and embraced her, she smiled and said, “I see you missed me.”

  “We should hurry, Master Jason,” Morgan said. “There may be others pursuing her.”

  “There aren’t,” Syl said with calm certainty.

  Chapter 46: Explanations

  “I must confess, Jason, that there are a few things which remain unclear to me.”

  Rebuilding Verne’s mansion was taking some time. It had also taken a lot of fast talking to keep Jeri from poking her nose too far in; even though the mansion was relatively isolated, the battle between the Colonel’s half-demons and Verne’s household had been more than loud enough to draw a lot of attention. Now, a week later, we were meeting in the repaired living room.

  Verne was back to his old, debonair self: black hair glistening sleekly in the lamplight, dark eyes as intense and deep as they ever were. “Firstly, Jason, how did all the people gain entrance without us knowing of them?”

  “Since the house was bugged,” I answered, reaching out for an hors d’oeuvre and wincing slightly from the pain in my arms, “Ed and the others heard me come in. When I said to shut down all the electrical power in the house, that took out the alarm systems. Your own personal alarms—the mystical ones—were weakened along with you, of course. I’d presume that they had some ability to subvert magical wards as well. And, of course, once the shooting started, none of us would’ve noticed an alarm much anyways.”

  Verne nodded. “True enough. In my condition, I wouldn’t have noticed much, nor cared, I admit. Now, second…Lady Sylvia.”

  Syl grinned from ear to ear. “It was almost worth being kidnapped by those things to see the expressions on your faces. Jason, dear, you try to take me seriously, but like so many people—men and women—you see my gypsy facade and my crystal earrings and pendants and forget what I really am.” She paused. “So did they. They didn’t search me at all; I didn’t resist except to scream and struggle a bit. Then when they had me locked away”—for a moment her face had a grim expression on it, one I’d never seen before; I wasn’t sure I liked it—“I prepared myself, and then I…left.”

  “Indeed, milady. But how?”

  “You trust my visions. So do I. That’s because I’m not a fake.”

  I remembered Elias Klein dropping me in agony because the touch of a rock-crystal amulet burned him. I thought about what that meant.

  So did Verne. “My apologies, milady.”

  “No apologies needed, Verne. You saw me as I prefer to be seen; a somewhat airheaded, gentle mystic with no taste for war and a hint of the Talent. But when my friends are in danger, I’m not as gentle as I look. The truth is that they weren’t ready for a real magician, even a very minor one. And that was fatal.” She looked ill for a moment.

  “It’s okay, Syl,” I said.

  She looked up at me. “You’re not too shocked?”

  “It’ll take a little readjustment, I guess. But not that much. You carry a gun. I’ve known that you’re smart enough not to carry something unless you were sure you could use it if you had to. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that you’d be able to fight in other ways, too. I’m glad it still bothers you, though. A
s long as we’re both bothered by it, we’re still human.”

  Verne nodded solemnly. “Killing is a part of life at times. But it is when we come to accept it as a matter of course that we give up a part of our souls.”

  “I have a few questions of my own,” I said. “Kafan, what were those words you said that made the Colonel back up?”

  Kafan glanced at Verne, who inclined his head slightly. “Well, ‘Shevazherana’ is the name of that sword my Master gave me, the one Verne kept after I disappeared. It means…Dragontooth, Dragon Fang, something like that. The other word, ‘Tor’…it is the name for the method of combat that I was taught. Why, exactly, it scares demons, I don’t know, but it does.”

  Verne shrugged. “It was the technique of combat used by the Royal Family of Atlantaea and their guardians. And demons had good reason to fear that family’s vengeance after the fall of Atlantaea. And the one who taught you…oh, there are excellent reasons for them to fear anyone who knows that word.”

  All of us could see that Verne might know more, but wasn’t going to continue. I decided I’d delved into more than enough unspeakable mysteries in the past few weeks. This one I’d leave alone. “When you were fighting the Colonel, you…” I paused, “you seemed to move, but not move, if you know what I mean.”

  Kafan smiled. “You mean, teleported. Yes, I can do that. In combat, I can do it very quickly, to anywhere I can see or directly sense. Out of combat, I can go much farther, to anywhere I have been often enough to have…well, call it a sense of what the place is really like.”

  “So my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Still, that’s a hell of a power to have.”

  “And not one I recall you having to such an extent in the old days, Kafan.”

  For an instant, there was a flicker of that dead black look, but it disappeared, leaving Kafan simply looking cautious. “No, I didn’t, Father. But I can’t talk about why, not now anyway.”