Evil Triumphant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  “I salvaged Natch herself. I sensed her distress and actually had some of my people whisk her body away before she was dead.” She looked at me through Natch’s blue eyes, but in a way Natch had never looked at me. “I thought it would be suitable to wear a familiar face to greet you on your waking.”

  I frowned. “Natch is not dead?”

  “By no means — she was too faithful and loyal, unconsciously so, that I would not let her die.” The Empress of Diamonds gave me a smile that almost seemed right. “I salvaged her once before, though she never knew it, because I used Coyote as my agent to save her. As I am a carbon-based life form too, slipping in and using her body is not at all difficult. I often used her to communicate with Coyote directly.”

  “And you used her to salvage Bat?”

  “My aspect is salvage, not disaster relief.” She left her left index finger trace the line of my jaw. “Coyote was willing to work with me to oppose Fiddleback because he knew I would and could only exert power after another Dark Lord had brought something to ruination. Having enough power to conquer and despoil the Earth would be more than enough needed to destroy me, preventing me from bringing my plans to fruition, so we had an alliance born in a common enemy.”

  I smiled slowly. “So, why are you here? Am I salvage?”

  The Empress of Diamonds turned Natch’s body away from me in a coy move that would have embarrassed Natch to death. “No, but I am interested in salvaging my alliance with Coyote.”

  “I see.” I leaned back, posting my arms against the top of the bier. “You know Coyote did not trust you. The first thing I did in playing the elaborate charade he arranged for me was to destroy one of your Reaper outfits.”

  She shot me an amused glance over her right shoulder. “He always did begrudge me that little inroad into Earth, but I take my power where I can get it. Your effort was damaging, but not very significant and pales in comparison with the rampage Bat has been on to find those who took Natch’s body. Your attack did, however, draw my attention to your competence. Coyote chose you well.”

  I stared at the valley between her shoulderblades. “He wanted a weapon to use against Fiddleback. Is that what you want?”

  “I could settle for that, but I think I want something more of you than did your predecessor.” She turned full around, and intensity flooded her blue eyes. “I would make you my consort: a full and equal companion for me.” She brought her hands together, then opened them again, conjuring a neck torque formed of diamond.

  The torque drifted toward me and I felt an almost overwhelming desire to bare my throat to its touch. I could feel the power radiating off it. Accepting it would make me a Dark Lord just like her. We both knew I had been groomed by Fiddleback to become a Dark Lord, so handling the power was not a problem. All I had to do was to accept what she offered.

  In concert with her, I knew no Dark Lord could stand against us. Trained to be an assassin, with the synthesizing aspect of my creator, I could meld together creatures to form an invincible army. My Empress would be able to salvage the best of the enemies we defeated, and I would cast them in new molds. With each conquest we would grow stronger and stronger until nothing could withstand our assaults. I could annihilate everything, destroying the universe, and she could remake it in whatever image suited us.

  If we tired of it, if it ever bored us, we could begin the process all over again. It would be the ultimate quickening of the cycle of life and death, through our power, to our glorification. And all it would take was my willing acceptance of the power she offered.

  A savage agony thrust like an obsidian dagger into my stomach and started to rip up through my chest. I felt it saw through every connection of rib to sternum, the invisible blade grating against my bones like a wood-saw bumping its way across a steel rod. I raised my hands to my chest, but the second flesh touched flesh, hands and chest both felt as if they had been pierced by a million molten needs.

  “No! No!” I gasped against the pain. The torque stopped its forward motion, then dissolved. As it went, so did the pain in my chest.

  Not so the pain I felt deeper in my soul. The core of my willingness to battle Fiddleback and Pygmalion came from my knowledge that to sustain their power required the misery of helpless victims. I had felt the seduction of power when Fiddleback had offered it to me before. I had been tempted by the grand visions of what our blending, the Empress and I, would bring. When viewing it from the pinnacle of power, the misery of other creatures seemed inconsequential.

  My perspective did not come from the pinnacle, but from the nadir of powerlessness. I had seen the desperation of people like Tadd Farber. I knew the fearful hatred the self-perception of victimization spawned in people like the Aryan Warriors. I saw the pain in Sinclair MacNeal at the callous and hateful neglect he suffered at the hands of his father. I knew these people, I counted them as friends and enemies, but I did not want to number them among my victims.

  Dark Lords clearly have a sociopathic lack of any sort of conscience. To them, people are resources to be used. They are bees to a beekeeper, but with a subtle difference: The beekeeper does what he can to make life for his bees wonderful because he draws a product from them. Because the Dark Lords find misery and fear honey-sweet, the creatures in their hives have to lead hellish lives.

  I looked up at the Empress of Diamonds. “Even if I desired your offer, I could not accept it. Fiddleback has endowed me with a mechanism that will kill me were I to take on a Dark Lord’s power against his will. He learned from Pygmalion, and will not make the same mistake.”

  “Fiddleback would never allow you to become my consort while he still lives.” The Empress licked her lips deliciously. “An obvious remedy to that situation suggests itself.”

  “I agree.” I slid off the bier and stood. “Once Fiddleback has eliminated Pygmalion, he will be my biggest problem. To kill a Dark Lord, one has to use a Dark Lord.”

  “You think like one of us already. Fiddleback says he made you, but I think you may have been a natural all along.” She closed again and pressed her hands against my chest. “You will honor my alliance with Coyote? Once you and Fiddleback have destroyed Pygmalion, I will help you destroy Fiddleback.”

  “Agreed.”

  She raised an eyebrow in a very un-Natch way. “You have a plan?”

  “I’ll put something together.” I smiled. “Right now, though, I need to return to Earth. I tried that before, but I could not get out of here. It was as if this proto-dimension had been hardened.”

  The Empress of Diamonds nodded. “It was. This proto-dimension’s nature and my aspect have a natural affinity. With a sufficient expenditure of power, I can make the dimensional wall all but impenetrable. Any Dark Lord can do that, if his aspect is compatible with the dimension. Pygmalion has done that with his dimension because of the disaster with his little pet.”

  I frowned. “Disaster? Something has happened with Ryuhito?”

  “It did, which means Pygmalion is lairing up. Even so, I know you will find a way to destroy him. You can leave this place now. And here, I make you a present.” Natch’s body slumped against mine, but I caught her before she could fall to the floor.

  With crystalline clarity, a voice spoke within my mind. “Care for her well, Coyote. You both have value to me. When you need me, tell her and I will know. Together we will not be defeated.”

  Chapter 20

  It would have seemed to me that my return and my bringing Natch Feral back with me would have sparked quite a reaction when I arrived in Earth. As I had planned before, I decided to reenter the dimension of my birth in Japan, at the Galactic Brotherhood headquarters. I made that choice because, as I recalled, we had decided to use the Japanese base as a staging area for sending people and equipment into whatever dimension we were using to get close to Pygmalion.

  I materialized in the jungle courtyard with the dimensional gateway at the Galbro facility, but no one took any notice of me at all. Standing there, with Natch’s unc
onscious body in my arms, I looked almost normal. All around me, arrayed in neat lines, I saw bloodied and unmoving bodies. Off to my right, closer to the facility’s main building than I stood, stretcher bearers stepped from the dimensional gateway and headed off with an injured person.

  “Crowley!” I started to work my way toward the man as I saw him exit the gateway. He turned toward me, his face an angry mask. He had another man’s left arm looped over his shoulders and, with a firm grip on the man’s belt, Crowley half-lifted the injured man over the lip of the gateway.

  Crowley’s expression lightened only slightly when he realized who I was, then he shook his head. “Just a minute.” As he started shuffling toward the building, I recognized the man he was helping. As if the bodies had not been enough evidence of a dire catastrophe, Bat’s blood-soaked shirt and the weakness of his staggering steps told me how bad things had really gotten.

  Two medical technicians took Bat from Crowley and helped him toward the building. Another relieved me of Natch’s body, undoubtedly assuming she had been injured in the same disaster that had claimed all these others. I caught not even a flicker of curiosity about me or my clothing, just fatigue and a concentration on the tasks at hand.

  I turned to Crowley. “What happened?”

  Emotionally, from what I could sense, the haggard man in front of me did not exist. “We won.”

  I looked back at the rows of bodies and shook my head. “We knew there could be danger, but...”

  “These guys caught it in spades.” Crowley stepped over two bodies and knelt down by a third. He peeled the gray blanket back from the face. “Mickey’s father. Broken neck, it was fast.”

  Ice cascaded through my guts. “Does Mickey know yet?”

  “How are we going to explain death to a 5-year-old?”

  “Rajani has a rapport with him, perhaps...”

  Crowley looked at me with hollow eyes. “But I haven’t even had the time to tell her that her father is dead yet.”

  My jaw dropped open. “I thought you said we won.”

  “We did. C’mon.”

  I followed Crowley into the dimensional gateway. Built into the base of a fountain, it replaced the water with an opalescent shimmer when in operation. Stepping over the fountain’s edge and stepping down did not feel all that much different from wading into water. The gateway gave me a cold shock as I first started to sink, then it wrapped me in a scratchy blanket and twisted me around, utterly disorienting me.

  Finally, I emerged amid a circle of tall, termite mounds. I saw a puff of dust from where Crowley had headed out, and I chose that route because it took me out of the way of medtechs with stretchers. Scrambling down the other side. “Crowley, wait up.”

  I got no response from the shadow man, so I jogged forward and grabbed his wrist. He tried to pull away, but I held on and spun him around. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  He opened his mouth to shout something at me, then stopped abruptly as his temper lost its battle for control. “Sorry, I...” He exhaled explosively, then pointed out the panoramic view we had from the top of the hill. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. The proto-dimension looked to me like an African savannah that bordered on a rain forest. Had the vegetation been green instead of blue, I would have had a hard time believing we had left Earth at all. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “Most of the men who died here thought this was Borneo, for crying out loud!” Crowley shook his head and his fist knotted up. “You and I, people like Bat and Hal and the Yidam, we know what’s going on. We accept the risks. The men who were here, they were just out for a job. We made them part of a battle with Dark Lords.”

  “They were already part of that battle, Crowley.” My eyes narrowed. “They could die here, or they could die in their homes. Dammit, most of these men should have been like Tadd Farber. For all intents and purposes, they were dead already.”

  Crowley’s head came up. “But they were not dead.”

  “Agreed, but their deaths here mean that others may not have to die.” A breeze blew from the valley below, and I caught the swampy scent of decaying plants. “How bad was it? Can we salvage anything?”

  “Not a question to ask me, I’m afraid. Take a look for yourself.”

  We set off down the slope toward what appeared to have once been an encampment. The jungle between the hilltop and the clearing below had a wide swath of destruction cut through it. Underbrush had been trampled, and trees had been taken down more efficiently than in a clear-cutting operation. On the trunks I could see evidence of bullet hits and a disturbing number of long claw scars that sent a shiver down my spine.

  Throughout the area I saw sodden masses of greenish slime that looked like a slimy fungus or an open gangrenous wound, it took no intelligence to determine these lumps were the source of the decaying plant scent. I paused near one and saw a flatted bullet pop out like a piece of gravel melting out of ice. “I take it these things were worth shooting?”

  Crowley nodded impatiently as two men carrying a stretcher worked their way up the narrow path we had been coming down. “Prince Ryuhito created these things. He had given them, among other things, chlorophyll in their skin so they could produce energy when basking in his glory. In fact, we noticed that out of his presence they were sluggish and not terribly hearty. They were a nasty army.”

  I stood and wiped my hands off on my gold-trimmed kilt. “You’re still pulling wounded men out of here, but they’re in an advanced state of decay. Does this proto-dimension have alternating time zones that run fast and slow?”

  “No.” Crowley started down the hill again as he explained. “This dimension has a bacteria that breaks down chlorophyll. Ryuhito did not realize that when he brought his creatures in here. The bacteria was not enough to kill the creatures outright, but it did weaken them. That’s probably why we survived as long as we did — they were not in top form.”

  We crossed from stone to stone across a stream and worked out way back up toward the compound. On the way up I saw an area where all the undergrowth had been uprooted. A twisting trench with shallow rootlets running off in all directions cut across the swath of destruction. At the lower lip, the green slime covered the ground like a foot-and-a-half coat of green-yellow wax.

  “Bat and his people made a stand here.” Crowley shook his head. “When I found Bat, he was wandering through the jungle looking for more of the enemy. After he ran out of bullets and his bayonet broke, he went after them with his bare hands. He showed me the sites of three kills and said he forgot where the others are.”

  Three fallen trees had been used to bridge the plant-rot foam. I crossed it and started up the steepest part of the hill. In the dark loam, I could see impressions of enormous hooves. Superimposed over them, I saw smallish clawed footprints and then a few larger and more slender footprints. Judging by size and relative depth, whatever the creatures that lay rotting had been, formidable would have been an understatement when applied to them.

  Coming up over the lip of the hill, I saw a scene that explained to me Crowley’s anger. Warfare is death and destruction, but too often gets remembered in terms of a person’s heroism in the face of brutal chaos. Memorials are raised to the innocent dead, and heroes are remembered with ceremonies, but the sheer cost in life that results from a war is difficult to quantify and so incomprehensible that memorializing it defies even the most talented artisan.

  Rotting plant-stuff the color of peppers long gone bad covered the compound like a lake of pea-soup vomit. Big and little chunks of things floated in it like islands fighting off its destructive tide. Men waded through it, dragging yet other men from the clinging gelatin with great sucking sounds. A quick check determined whether the rescued man was alive or dead, and his status determined if he was placed on a stretcher for immediate evacuation or left lying in a line with the other dead men.

  The swampy miasma choked me and made my eyes water. Just looking at the battlefield, I could tell how things ha
d gone. Ryuhito’s troops had advanced, been stopped and slowly driven back, but not before inflicting incredible casualties among the defenders. Sharpened stakes stuck up out of the slime and toppled piles of sandbags marked where defenses had once stood. And, between the stakes and the fortifications, at the thickest part of the slime sea, four huge islands lay dead.

  I recognized the Plutonians from the one visit I had made to their home dimension. At that time, they had seemed incredibly big and powerful, but lying on their sides, their blood mixed with streaks of green foam, they were pitiable. I had no doubt that their strength had won the day. I knew, from some of the preliminary plans we had knocked about, that a half-dozen Plutonians were the minimum number we had thought about using, which meant, at worst, we had suffered 66% fatalities.

  Looking at the pile of human bodies, I knew that estimate might be light for creatures as fragile as me. “Do you have numbers?”

  Crowley nodded curtly. “Plutonians: 100% casualties, 66% dead. Myrangeikki: 100% casualties, but it is only a minor wound. Vetha is off in Plutonia tending the two injured Plutonians and expects them to recover. Humans: 99.5% casualties, 70% fatalities. The remaining 30% require medical attention. The Internal Defense Cadre troops came through the best; the fatalities are mostly our workers.” The shadow man opened his arms wide. “I’m the only person who did not get hurt.”

  “You know better than buying into survivor’s guilt.”

  “Yes, dammit, I do know better than that.” The shadow man folded his arms into the silhouette of his chest. “I know I survived because I have training and experience. I also know that I survived because the Yidam and Will Raven both dealt with things that could have killed me. I owe them my life, and they’re dead. And now, with all this, there is no way to make their sacrifices count for anything.”

  I frowned. “We can get more people, can’t we? We have no need to abandon the plan, do we?”