Evil Triumphant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  I drifted back over to the desk and laid the folder down in the muted puddle of moonlight making it through the wispy drapes. “I don’t know what’s down there, Damon, but we may have our staging area right here.” Page by page, I flipped through the proposal, skipping the standard boilerplate stuff that had been in the one Darius MacNeal had sent to me, and concentrated on the diagrams in the back.

  The plan was brilliant. It consisted of the equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier in the ground so only the superstructure remained visible. The base, which would be powered by a set of seven geothermal generators, would have the facilities for outfitting, maintaining and manufacturing the things needed for a full-scale military assault.

  I closed the binder. “This is it. Build-more is putting it together for Pygmalion. Sin said something about a secret project in Nevada using up a lot of Build-more resources. This thing is dated two years ago, with an estimated 30 months for completion.”

  The occultist straightened up. “We have what we came for. We will have to get location information out of Build-more.”

  The image of the Build-more grenade flashed before my mind’s eye once again. “That will be a distinct pleasure. Let’s go.”

  “No!” Jytte looked at the two of us. “We have to go down there. We have to see what is there.”

  “Jytte, we have the information we sought. It is time to leave.”

  “You cannot! We, I have to know what is down there.” Jytte descended a couple of steps. “I need you to come with me. I’ve never asked before. I need you now.”

  I acknowledged the plea in her voice with a nod. “We’ll take a look.”

  A flash of rainbow light from outside filled the library with a second of brilliance. All three of us hunkered down reflexively, but heard and felt no alarms. “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  Crowley shifted his shoulders. “That sort of light display usually only comes when something comes through a dimensional gate. With the direction it came from, I’d guess the pool or helipad. Now we know why other alarms had been going off.”

  Jytte’s eyes narrowed to blue slivers. “So we are not alone?”

  Crowley shook his head. “No. I’d guess some extra-dimensional creatures have recently discovered this place and have started looting it.”

  I rechecked the clip in the MP-7. “And, in this case, I’d suggest that enemies of our enemy are not our friends at all.”

  Chapter 24

  I shivered as I worked my way past Jytte and on down, step by step, along the stone stairway. Harsh, bright lights set at the base of the stairs leeched color from the red rock nearest them, leaving it a baby-flesh pink. I held my left arm up to block the direct light and kept the MP-7 pointed downward. I kept it trained on the dark square 20 feet below me, ready to blast anything that appeared in the corridor leading deeper on into the mesa.

  I realized, as I descended, that my shiver had come from more than fright. The air around me grew cold. I could not see my breath, but this did not surprise me because dry desert air does not allow breathmist to form except at more frigid temperatures. Even so, the chill reminded me of a refrigerator and made me mindful of ice caverns located amid the extinct volcanoes in the north of Arizona. Part of me wondered if the complex was natural, while the even sides of the corridor and the edges on the stairs told me it was not.

  Oddly enough, the lack of adornment suggested the stairs and the corridor below had not been crafted by Pygmalion. I could not imagine him having created either without the addition of leering gargoyles or seductively simple and sensuous carvings to decorate them. As bizarre and grotesque as Pygmalion’s choice of medium for his work, he did have an artist’s touch. Realizing that meant, then, that he had chosen to leave this area plain, and I determined that must have been to provide contrast for whatever work he had wrought in the heart of the mesa.

  As much as I might have wished it would be otherwise, I found my assessment of him had not been wrong. At the base of the stairs, I entered a corridor which I found a bit small and tight, but for one of Pygmalion’s statues it would have been quite roomy. Curving around to the left, the only illumination in the corridor came from the backlighting of the stairs and hint of silvery-white light from farther on around the bend.

  I turned back to my two compatriots and saw Crowley lay his left hand on Jytte’s right shoulder and give it a squeeze. Even making allowances for her light complexion and the brutal lighting, she had taken on a ghostlike pallor. She leaned back against the wall with her eyes closed and, exposing her lovely long throat, tipped her face toward the ceiling.

  “What it is, Jytte?” I whispered.

  She shook her head slightly, then swallowed. “I have been here before. The stairs. I know this place.”

  Crowley gently cupped the right side of her face in his left hand. “You left a victim, you return a saviour. You have survived and you will survive.”

  “Thank you.” I saw a bead of sweat roll down over her Adam’s apple, then her eyes opened and she nodded. “After you, Coyote.”

  Though Crowley’s words had been for Jytte, they emboldened me as well. Jytte and I were both constructs of a Dark Lord. We had both fled our former masters as victims, yet now rose to oppose them. We were the slavemaster’s nightmare in black fatigues and carrying automatic weapons. We had both resolved that our masters would pay for what they had done to us and others, and right around the bend we could start collecting.

  I made my way down the corridor less cautiously than might have been prudent, but I felt armored with the righteousness of what I had come to do. That makes it sound ridiculously like a religious convert describing his visit to a den of iniquity, and it probably did approach that experience in the extreme. For the barest of moments I felt assured of the mythic quality of my quest to reach the lair of evil at the end of the corridor.

  The difference between a myth and a horror tale, I discovered, is a matter of perspective.

  The corridor opened on to a huge cavern that appeared quite natural in that stalactites and stalagmites filled it like petrified teeth in fossil jaws. Darkness hid the arched depths of some vaults, while shadows hinted at yet further chambers and corridors elsewhere. The uneven floor had a molten smoothness to it, as if it had frozen while yet fluid, or had been washed into gentle, undulating hills and valleys by eons of water seepage.

  The vista struck me as appropriate and right, except that I found it in the middle of a mesa in the desert southwest. There the formation was utterly unnatural, which meant it had been planned and designed and created by other than random chance. Had the geographical and geological paradox not been enough to point out the problem with the cavern, its overwhelming aspect would have clued me in quickly enough.

  Ice. The stairs and corridor had been so cold because an inch of ice covered every square foot of the cavern in a glittering, sparkling second skin. Icicles as long as I was tall, and sharpened to a needle’s point, augmented the vast stalactite collection on the ceiling. Their frozen counterparts looked like stalagmite seedlings about to erupt out of the floor and blossom like their stony companions.

  All around the room I saw standing, sitting and reclining shapes that looked vaguely humanoid. Muted fleshtones reflected up through the ice-coats each of the figures wore. The different facets of the ice sliced up and reconstructed their images so the ice-folk appeared to be models for countless cubist artworks awaiting resurrection when that style came back into vogue.

  I slid over to the nearest of the figures and crashed the MP-7’s collapsed stock against the ice coating a figure’s head. The ice shattered and, with a second blow, a big chunk came away. Aside from fragments clinging tenaciously to a few black strands of hair, I managed to clear the ice away from the right side of the woman’s face. Peeling off my right glove I touched her but found, as I expected and feared, her frostbitten flesh felt lifeless.

  Jytte sank to her knees beside me and touched the woman. She looked up, horrified, then bu
ried her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with sobs. I reached out and hugged her, but I had the impression that she could not feel me, nor would she have heard me if I spoke.

  Crowley crouched beside her, opposite me, and shook his head. “I think this place was kept cold on purpose, by Pygmalion. It would lower the metabolic rate of his constructs so they would go into a hibernation, it was his way of preserving their beauty.” He pointed to the diamond-stud earring in the dead woman’s ear. “I cannot think he would be so wasteful if he meant to kill them.”

  I looked around the ice cavern again. “If that is true, and it seems likely to me as well, how did the ice get in here?”

  The occultist lowered his voice to a whisper. “This is the High Country, it is winter and within the winter we get storms. There has to be a hole to the surface and enough snow and rain poured in here to produce this.”

  “But what...?” My question died on my lips as other voices echoed through the cavern. I slide Jytte back out of sight, and Crowley hunkered down beside me. At his signal, I worked my way back toward the left, past Jytte, to a low wall of congealed stalagmites and looked to the center of the room.

  I saw two nearly human creatures similar to a couple I had met and killed elsewhere in Arizona. They stood as tall as a normal man and, aside from a slightly grayish cast to their skin and their pointed ears, they looked utterly unremarkable. The clothes they wore made them look like refugees from some low-budget pirate movie and could only have been improved upon if one of them wore an eyepatch and had a parrot perched on his shoulder.

  They did not disturb me because I knew they were Draolings. Dwellers in a nearby dimension, an intrepid few ventured through an interconnecting proto-dimension to play little homicidal tricks on humanity. Crowley had suggested Draolings were behind the Donner party massacre and might have been the Zodiac killer in California. With what I’d learned, I was willing to peg a Draoling as the Green River Killer in the Pacific Northwest and even suggest they played Svengali to the likes of Charles Manson, David Berkowitz and Jeffrey Dahmer.

  Even with that sort of nasty pedigree, they did not concern me, because I knew how easy it would be to kill them. And how good it would feel to have done so.

  What did concern me was the creature standing between them. Actually, standing is correct, but conveys the wrong image, because the massive beast appeared to be more at home in a four-point stance. Its stooped shoulders and crested spine just avoided brushing stalactites as it shuffled forward on little, bandy legs. Mottled flesh with a granitelike color pattern covered it from its toes on up beyond where the massive chest narrowed slightly past the shoulders to form a neck roughly the circumference of a manhole. The lantern-jawed head featured pointed ears, a flattened skull and wide but hardly innocent eyes. Two triangular slits flat in its face served as its nose. It held its mouth open, revealing a phalanx of sharklike teeth.

  The creature raised one huge fist and crashed it down on an ice-clad corpse with enough force to send a tremble through the cavern. The blow pulped the corpse’s mid-section, tearing it in half. The two Draolings immediately scrambled after the upper body like hyenas fighting over carrion, while the larger creature grabbed the lower body with one ankle in each paw. With a yank that rippled muscles in its chest and thick arms, the monster tore the corpse’s pelvis apart like a wishbone and commenced gnawing on a frozen thigh.

  One of the Draolings pulled an arm free of torso, spilling his compatriot back in a tangle with the rest of the body, then nibbled on the torn deltoid muscle. “As a snack, frozen is fine, but I much prefer my meat fresher.”

  His companion broke the corpse’s arm off at the elbow and peeled the frozen flesh back as if it were a glove. “Agreed. Snack now, then we can harvest something to be thawed and prepared correctly.”

  The behemoth just belched and spit a femur out.

  The surreality of the whole situation hit me like a runaway train. Hidden in shadow within an artificial cavern coated in ice, I was listening to extra-dimensional creatures discussing human beings as if they were range-fed cattle. What Pygmalion had sculpted into examples of physical perfection like Jytte, these creatures saw only as Purina Draoling-chow. While the credo that suggested presentation was part of the enjoyment of a meal had often seemed silly to me — especially when a meal seemed priced more as art than foodstuff — the Draolings were doing the moral equivalent of killing and eating Best of Breed at the Westminster Dog Show.

  That momentary perspective of extra-dimensional morality put creatures like Fiddleback and the Empress of Diamonds in their place, not only were they Dark Lords, but they were from elsewhere and could not view us in the way we viewed ourselves. They were predators, and we were prey, with no rights to be imagined, much less respected. That whole round of thought also made Pygmalion yet more horrible for his willful abandonment of his humanity in exchange for the power of a Dark Lord.

  While my whirlwind of thought precluded action, Jytte did not find herself so preoccupied. I saw her out of the comer of my eye as she stepped up into the open lane between our hiding places and the feasters. The rage pouring off her seemed hot enough to melt the ice and the stone beneath it, but she remained rock steady. She held the M-177 at her right hip and flipped the safety off with an snap that echoed through the cavern like a gunshot.

  The Draolings looked up with smiles on their faces. “What have we here?” asked one around a mouthful of food.

  Jytte hit the carbine’s trigger with a mechanical precision that made the rifle seem part of her. The initial three-shot burst sent a trio of cartridges arcing through the air to clink and clatter off a stalagmite’s icy sheath. The bullets caught the speaker in the chest, compressing it violently in a lethal Heimlich maneuver that spewed most of his meat-cud out over the floor. Blowing out his back, the bullets sent a spray of bright, arterial blood out to drench the large monster.

  As Jytte shifted her aimpoint slightly to the right and let another burst go, my early training clicked in and my mind analyzed her attack with clinical clarity. Because she stood only 25 meters from her target, the 56-grain 5.56mm bullets were traveling well in excess of 3200 feet per second when they actually struck the other Draoling. At that speed, the bullets fragmented the second they hit anything solid. The one that nailed the Draoling in the wrist severed the hand from the body, while the one that hit it in the ribs exploded into countless metal shards that shredded everything in the chest cavity. The last bullet hit the Draoling in the jaw, turning a leering grin into a gape of horror before the head snapped back and the body somersaulted away into the shadows.

  Jytte shifted her gun to cover the behemoth, and a curious sensation rising in me forced me to shout at her. “No, don’t.” Somehow, I knew the creature, and I knew that to shoot it was not going to be effective.

  I don’t know if she heard me or just chose to ignore me, but she tightened her finger on the M-177’s trigger. The bullets hit solidly in a ragged line running from the monster’s right hip on up to its left shoulder. They staggered the creature and dumped it back on its buttocks, but none of them pierced its hide.

  Howling in furious pain, the creature rolled forward and, digging its black talons into the ice, scrambled straight at Jytte. Without giving the creature a second glance, Jytte hit the clip release and slammed a fresh magazine home in the carbine as the first dropped toward the floor. Working the charging lever, she started to bring the gun up again.

  Acting without consciously knowing why, I vaulted the stalagmite wall. I knew there was no way I could land on the ice and remain upright, so I never even tried, landing on my left thigh and buttock, I slid toward Jytte and kicked out with my right leg. I hit her in the left hip, knocking her out of the monster’s path, then I twisted myself up onto my left knee and drew the Wildey Wolf in my right hand.

  The creature charged on, picking up speed. Icicles teased from the ceiling by its back cascaded in pieces down around its shoulders. Ice fragments gouged from the floor
filled the air like snow kicked up by a horse galloping through a winter’s field. Its bellowslike lungs pumped air in and out, the huffing and puffing of an organic steam locomotive bearing down on me.

  Part of me knew, as the musty, sour breath hit me from 10 meters away, I should be terrified. The greater part of me, though, knew that to succumb to terror would be to die. Even as the creature raised its right paw, the black, scythe-blade talons trembling with expectation, I knew I had it. I raised the Wildey Wolf and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet entered the creature’s face through the right nostril and immediately sent a blue-black geyser of blood back out in its wake. The creature’s gait faltered almost instantly, and the raised paw caught a stalactite, breaking the stony protrusion off. That slewed the body around toward where I had been hiding. I flattened against the floor and felt its left foot brush by barely above me, then heard more snapping and crackling as the monster crashed to the ground and lay still.

  Rolling on to my back, I saw Crowley helping Jytte to her feet. She shook her head and blinked her eyes a couple of times, but looked no worse for the wear. Crowley looked at me and smiled. “That was damned cocky, you know.”

  I frowned and reholstered the Wolf. “Nonsense. The nostril slit was about the size of a large pizza slice. A blind man could have hit it easily.”

  “I know. That wasn’t the cocky part.” Crowley’s green eyes sparkled. “Shooting only once was.”

  Jytte stood and looked quizzically at her carbine. “Why did your shot kill it and mine had no effect?” She hesitated for a second, then added, “More precisely, how did you know my bullets would have no effect?”

  I got to my feet without help and folded my arms. “I’d seen Draolings before, and Crowley here had impressed upon me how they had been the genesis of some pretty fearsome folklore. Lots of things we’ve seen in other dimensions are like that.”