by Zachary Adam
“Yeah,” Prodigal said calmly, as he began to fire into the onrushing swarm. “He does that sometimes.” “I know,” Niles said. “I think I’ve been on the receiving end once or twice.”
--
“Were those Grey Angels?” Vidcund glanced again in the direction of the door, leading his team at something of a run down a service corridor off of the main atrium. “Sure looked like it. Prodigal and... I’m not sure of the other one’s name. Seen him before, though.”
“We aren’t engaging?”
“They aren’t the enemy. And even if they were, they wouldn’t leave themselves that badly exposed unless they wanted us to attack from that side.”
A stairwell in the service corridor spanned the gap to the next level up, admitting them onto a balcony that fed the second tier of this particular collection room. For a single terrifying moment, Vidcund thought that he had sprung a trap by moving through that door, and dove to the edge of the balcony for what little cover it would offer.
He was still in mid-air when he realized the great rending he had heard was the glass ceiling caving in, raining down fragments of small, cubed glass. At least, he thought, the glaziers who had installed the ceiling had been smart enough to use proper safety glass. Looking up, he frowned. From the eclipsed sky, there descended a coterie of strange, winged things, with heads like emaciated equines, membranous wings, and digigrade legs which none-the-less ended in webbed feet. They dove quickly through the window, landing at the centre of the room, where they flopped along on their four feet toward a pair of figures who seemed the only calm, atease persons in the room.
“Oh,” he said, bile rising in the back of his throat, “Like Hell.”
He rose, his fellows taking his lead, and drew just one of his handguns. He was going to need both hands for stability, which he would need for range, but he was damned if he was going to let the apparent perpetrators escape.
One of the figures looked, and time slowed to a crawl. Vidcund could not recall having seen another figure like him – a tall, noble-postured man, whose brocaded vest of gold on black bore that three-armed triskellion which Research had warned the Special Director about. What was most shocking, however, was that Vidcund couldn’t make up his mind about the man’s face. It seemed absent, as though protected by a mask, but a mask quite so grotesque he could not recall having ever seen outside of Hollywood. It pulsed with veins that shone through pallid skin, and yet those veins were of such ornate arrangement and implausible design that Vidcund could be excused for doubting they had a natural cause.
He became aware, even as his mental conditioning kicked in and prevented him from caring over-much about that particular detail – a question resolved as easily from a dead body as a living one - that he and his team had been translated down to the centre of the battle, where they stood on a level field with the nobleman and the gownedand-masked lady he seemed to be defending.
The man, from his position of having his hand on his hip, now drew his sword. “It is not polite to stare, Vidcund Därk. I knew we would cross paths again.”
Behind him, Vidcund was intuitively aware of his fellows piecemeal discarding their drawn firearms to draw out their batons – clearly, an enemy who could alter the arrangement of space was going to be hard to shoot. For his own part, he did the same. “Under my authority as a duly-appointed agent of the College of Judges, I order you to remove your mask and submit to lawful detention.”
The woman laughed derisively, which inspired a chuckle in her swordsman. “I wear no mask.” Vidcund, intending to press his advantage so far as was possible, withdrew, mentally. He did not leap far, however, for the first time ever, aiming for a point between all of the bodies he had in the room, intending to control them all at once. He could then fight with impunity, live or die, and what was more, fight with an uncommon and impossible level of co-ordination.
He was not prepared, though, for the alien landscape – or perhaps a mind-scape – of that peculiar position between brains. He had anticipated difficulty in the early seconds, in dealing with multiple and contradictory sets of sensory inputs. It was a known problem, and one he had thought was hinted at in the limited passages of his dossier that he was able to obtain. Nothing had hinted at this landbetween-the-lands, or the strange, undulating, and silently malevolent creatures that pulsed and swam at will through the mindscape.
Having realized his mistake, it was now terrifyingly late to correct it.
--The breakdown of an appropriate level of fear was expected by Archangel, and his scythe was not for show. It was a peculiar weapon, one you did not expect to see in a fight and, frankly, a tool that was not particularly suited to the acts of war. Still, he used it briefly, and reaped his way through the throng of Invaders, whose soft grave-worm bodies offered little resistance to the surgically-sharp blade.
In fact, thus far the battle was so easy for Archangel that he felt no need to further tax his arcane reserves, and bore his might in the body rather than the soul, as he cut his way to the centre of the room. He had, in the moment of safety his fearful aura had given him, spied two figures at the centre of the room who had stood apart.
Rituals had components. In Archangel’s experience, he could save a lot of sweat by taking out a ritual’s leaders, sparing him from having to hunt down each reveller in turn, at least in the short term. Nits bring lice, after all...
Therefore, the two had become his targets, and he was coming, inexorable and indefatigable as Death itself. The grave yawned when his anger was kindled, and centuries of heritage simmered in his boiling blood.
You need to be careful, came a voice in the back of his mind. I showed the man to Prince, and I have seen the video myself. That is his Masked Man, from the morgue. And his is no mind fit for reading.
I’ll be careful, Eli thought, knowing Scion would keep reading his mind for a moment or two, listening for a
response. Though no answer came, he was willing to lay significant money on the fact that Scion would have muttered something about Eli always saying that and never doing it.
Archangel simply had a different definition of careful – a somewhat self-destructive one. After all, carefullydelivered bombs still exploded when they were in place.
The last row of pus-fleshed interlopers fell beneath his sword, as did one of the curious winged demons that had recently arrived, before, with a final burst of speed, Archangel surged forward, blocking a swing of the Masked Man’s sword on the back of his artificial arm.
“For behold, I have come in fire, and my strike is like the whirlwind, and my anger and fury rebuke you with fire. For I shall execute my judgement with the sword on all flesh, and those slain by me will be many.” Archangel intoned, in a deep and resonant tone that was as much play-acting as it was the statement itself.
The creature stood back, somewhat, and in his peripheral vision, Archangel saw Scion doing something over the fallen men who had been about to be put to the sword. The swordsman seemed no more uncomfortable than he had been a moment ago.
“... You are no God,” he said at last. “You are not even the Archangel you claim to be.”
“Truth,” said Archangel, “is relative. You will kneel, before the end.”
He knew this enemy by reputation, and the only way to beat the Phantom, or indeed any manifestation of the Yellow Psychosis, was to beat it at its own game of theatrics.
--For her own part, Cassilda did not understand what was happening. None of it was going according to her script, and she was increasingly concerned that somehow some greater power than even the King was at play here – though the tenacity of humanity was, to humans, well known, it was rarely an excuse for her own failures.
Maria, on the other hand, wanted nothing more to do with this situation, and almost found herself rooting for the masked assailant who had come, ghost-like, from the sea of her loyal and obedient jailers. She trembled, behind her mask of regal self-importance, at the might she had at her fingertips, and at the grand i
mplications of what she had done here.
A Byakhee approached her quite suddenly, and powerful hands from one of the nameless Carcosans lifted her up onto its back. She thought, too late, to jump back down. All she could do, then, was scream, as the great beast beat its wings and hauled her skyward, into the false night of the eclipse, bound for that red star so near the horizon, across the yawning, empty gulf of the aether.
--Archangel realized that he had been spending the last several minutes allowing his partner in this particular swords-dance to lead, but could do very little to turn that particular tide. An educated swordsman, with Godknows-how-much experience, was going to control the footwork of a battle, and there was nothing that a mage could do with it, even if he was armed with a particularly pointy stick. Nevertheless, the necromancer’s natural arm was more than up to the task of the battle all on its own, performing flatly impressive feats with his polearm that left his left hand free, even as he remained all but entirely aloof of the other’s testing strikes.
“If you are aiming to wear me out, faceless, you are off your mark.” More importantly, however, he was now prepared to put his magic to work. The touch of his left hand – false or not – could be a death grip. It was the cold embrace of the grave, the temporal rot of death which eventually would consume all things, and when next the Phantom struck at him, he simply closed his hand around the creature’s weapon, causing it to rust and decay away before their very eyes.
In a swift motion, taking advantage of this surprise, he swept around, pushing his weight into the dolorous blow of his scythe, which pierced through the creature’s spine, if it truly had one, and out the front of his chest. The weight of the blow forced the Phantom forward, fittingly, onto his knees.
By the time Scion had fought his way back over to the pair of them, all that was left of the creature – and those that had come with it, were piles of ash, and the lingering stink of brandy.
“You figured out how to kill it already?”
“Hardly,” Archangel stooped, sifting through the ash. “... If you don’t have the body, you don’t have the kill. Is Banker here?”
Scion nodded. “I’ll get our guys up to the roof. Those men... they were with Agency Division. And their peculiarities are something we should discuss.” “Later. They might have had friends.”
--The old superstition that eclipses brought bad luck had a foundation. While the collapse of Grand Magic had meant that the modern world saw only those eclipses of the sun which were caused legitimately by the moon, those schooled in the Old Ways knew better. There were ways, means by which the sun could be silenced, and so they paid very careful attention to the latest astronomical tables, for those eclipses such as were uncalled for were dire omens indeed, as they formed augurs of the actions of potential enemies.
For her own part, Gloria was unhappy with any eclipse that was not her doing, and this one had called her up onto the roof of the abandoned hotel which she and Baha still used for their base of operations, from its earliest moments. There, she watched, keenly, and had seen both the arriving Byakhee and the departing, and knew now what it meant.
“That was Maria Frost.”
Baha gave one of his curious little smiles, inclining his head slightly. “You can be so certain?”
“Our Master has given me many gifts, of which this is one of the least. That is Maria Frost. She has allied with the Hasturites. And is doing well for herself, by the look of things.”
The two descended back into the unlit shadows of the stairwell that had brought them here, preparing to delve deeply. Baha was not convinced. “She is nothing. A convenient key. Not even necessary.”
“A convenience that has fallen into the hands of a rival power. We may be fated to be the victors, Baha, but we cannot sit idly. Our Master demands action – Glory favours the Valorous.”
“What, then, do you propose?”
Gloria pushed open the heavy, rusting doors into the storage room that they had set up as a ritual hall in the basement. Some of her followers had been along already to prepare the space for her, and she discarded her robe, stealing into the shadows cast about the room by the greenish, sickly fire that burned from irregularly-placed braziers around the room. A stone, quite seemingly natural, unworked rock, had burst through the cement more or less in the centre of the floor.
“... Our hand is forced, Erwin. Make your preparations in Terrera. It is time we awake that which sleeps beneath this city. When you have broken the seal... I will then enact that which will return our master to us.”
A young woman was being lead in, scarcely conscious to judge by the glazed look in her eyes. One of Gloria’s drug-fuelled sacrificial lambs, no doubt. Erwin gave a small smile. “... I can only hope, my dear, that your faith is not misplaced in me.”
He turned his back on the ritual that was to commence, and fled, wishing to quit Kraterburg as quickly as possible.
--Prince always marvelled at the resources the Grey Angels had at their disposal. Someone in their organization had known their way with paper – Banker, Niles suspected, if only because of the name. He had known something of their organizational boundaries through his work with the National Police Force, but now, having seen it with his own eyes, he found himself surprised.
Whether rented or owned, the ability to bring in a helicopter at what was, functionally, a moment’s notice, and without breaking a single law in the process except perhaps during the landing on the entirely unapproved roof of the National Library, was an impressive stunt. Banker himself was at the controls, when the Angels had arrived on the roof, piling into the vehicle.
As usual, he had hundreds of questions. But once he reached the aircraft and it leaped back into the quicklylightening sky, he found them dead in his throat. He no longer wanted answers as badly as he once had, because answers were usually questions, these days, and he was growing more and more anxious about it all. He looked around the passenger cabin. Archangel, his mask in his lap so that he could towel sweat off of his face, was is in busy cheek-to-cheek conversation with Scion, the two of them looking uncommonly serious. Prodigal, for his part, was patched into the intercom system, talking to Banker.
Unwilling to interrupt, Niles contented himself with this rare, low-altitude view of the city, and found himself increasingly frowning in the direction of the Old City in the Caldera. It became more and more difficult to write what he was seeing off as an illusion of atmospheric interference. It was as though the Old City was now afloat on the surface of a sea of water, so badly was it shaking and waving.
Then, as buildings in the centre began to tumble, and something was continuing to move in the dust that followed, he rose his voice so loud he had no need for his headset.
“STOP.”
Everyone was staring at him. Then, slowly, everyone was staring with him.
09 – Gloria
Vidcund spread his hands across the glass of the inner surface of his tank, stretching the semi-transparent “window” of CCTV footage until it was more clearly visible. He found this fluid he was suspended in, whatever it was, did not do much to impact his vision, or else the curvature of the tank’s surface counteracted it. The bubbles from his excited breathing, however, which had leaked around the edges of his face mask, had lead to him needing to clear up the view.
What he was viewing was utter chaos. It had taken him the better part of ten minutes to find this particular CCTV channel, one of the few that was actively working anywhere in the College of Judges campus, to his extreme chagrin. Most showed either corrupted footage that showed rococo-baroque interpretations of what it should have showed, or showed the branded test-pattern of the Secure Technology Syndicate, the Slipher-Affiliated company that had designed and installed that particular bit of governmental security. All channels save this one – a single, bleary, depiction of a rain-soaked helicopter pad, with a helicopter idling its engines to go by the rotors as it waited for the arrival of the Executive Council, who were meant to evacuate the
campus.
For the first time in an age, Vidcund was powerless to do much more than watch. The things he had seen between the physical still impressed upon his mind, sending a cold chill up his spine any time he contemplated so much as jumping from one body to the next, lest they should catch him. He had nothing to suggest they might have been malicious, but had no data on them either. The closest he had come in the twenty minutes he’d had so far was to come up with a lateral reference in another report to a Tillinghast Report, but no such report existed in the Agency network – or, as was more likely, it was so highly removed from his security clearance that the Agency did not even deign to acknowledge to him that it did, in fact, exist. He hoped this institutional ritual of blinding its brightest minds would change soon, and itself be forgotten. He was going to need all the information he could get his hands on.
The video quaked, as it had done many times before. So far, Vidcund could not have been sure there was a supernatural explanation for the earthquakes – while the lowlands were far from any particularly active tectonic faults, the Old City was built in the caldera of an ancient volcano, and just because it had never shown any inclination to be active before, didn’t mean, to his untrained speculation, that it couldn’t become active in the future.
As he saw the lawns around the platform rupture, and the platform itself buckle, spilling the helicopter onto the lawns in what was about to become a blazing inferno of rending metal, that speculation died. Tendrils,
unmistakably composed of animal tissues, and yet as wide across or wider as a stout tree, were now breaching that lawn, reaching out and groping for something.
One fear overrode the last, and Vidcund could sit idle no longer. Closing his eyes, trusting his stars, he jumped.
--From overhead, the damage looked a lot worse than it doubtless looked on the ground. Prince could see most of the buildings of the restless slopes of Old Town collapsing, their outdated “heritage-mandated” engineering principles no match for the absolutely obscene movement of the ground on which they sat. While he was far from being a study in the subject of Geology, Prince had certainly never seen anything like it. The ground was moving, waving, like thickened water. Some force beneath it was imparting more energy into the rock than he would otherwise have thought possible.
