The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4)

by Chris Eisenlauer

  The man standing before Stoakes and blocking the exit was of a medium build. If he’d ever been particularly fit, he’d past that stage in his life. He looked soft, somewhere between forty and fifty. His hair was grayish. His ornaments, though polished and elaborate, and perhaps the finest Stoakes had yet seen, failed to make him look the least bit important. Indeed, they served only to make him look pretentious. “Not really. No, not here. Nothing passes into or out of this chamber without my knowledge. These are my things. My claim to them makes me exceptionally sensitive to them and the spaces they occupy.”

  “Are they really your things? From what I understand, everything in here is stolen. You are Bek Ialo, aren’t you?”

  Ialo grinned, his lip twitching unconsciously. “I am. That’s no secret. But you, you reek of secrets. Who and what are you?”

  “Perhaps I’m like you, and I come bearing a Shield, looking to conquer.”

  Ialo shook his head. “Looking to conquer, I’ll accept. But I’ve been to Chan Fa’s hall. I know all the Shields. I did my research long ago. I may not be the biggest or the strongest, but I am among the most knowledgeable. I would have to be. We all have our compensations.” He became distracted as he finished his sentence, becoming intrigued with Stoakes.

  Stoakes followed Ialo’s gaze and scrutinized his own wispy, black belly. He saw nothing and raised his gaze again to try to meet Ialo’s eyes.

  “That’s very interesting,” Ialo said, peering ever more intently into or through Stoakes.

  Stoakes was becoming frustrated. “What are you talking about? What do your faulty eyes see?”

  “Not faulty. Rather exceptional, really. Is that a knife? Is that what makes you the way you are?”

  Stoakes’s frustration bloomed into concern. Could Ialo see the Suicide Knife? Of course the Knife could be a knife and usually was, but in truth, it was a part of him, the weapon was merely an extension of something that resided within, and was permanently merged with, Stoakes’s body, no longer in tune with physical space. Stoakes moved to pull the Knife from its sheathe and end this conversation, but found it absent. He saw it pass through his gauzy black form and land in Ialo’s outstretched hand. He realized with mounting dread that he was no longer Dark.

  For the second time that day, Stoakes felt unsteady on his feet. His strength was fast abandoning him and he faltered, but just managed to support himself on his quivering front leg. “How. . . How did you. . .?”

  Ialo turned the Suicide Knife over and over, examining it. “I saw its shadow,” he said absently. “I can take the shadow of anything I can see. Taking the shadow is tantamount to taking the item, as you can clearly see.” He glanced up at Stoakes, noted his condition. “Well, perhaps not so clearly.”

  He was right. Stoakes’s vision was doubled. Beads of sweat stood out across his forehead. Nausea shot through him in waves. He thought he might lose whatever remained in his stomach.

  This was appalling, Stoakes thought. The last remaining 19th Generation General of the Viscain Empire reduced to this. He might just be able to subject Ialo—his feet, anyway—to a spray of vomit. That was, of course, if he was lucky.

  Stoakes blinked hard and as the moments passed, he began to regain some of his strength. His head cleared and the nausea passed. He steadied himself and allowed more of his strength to return, all the while feigning continued illness. Forty-two seconds had passed since Stoakes lost the Suicide Knife. He realized that he had all the strength that he was going to since most of it was being turned over in Ialo’s hands. He had to get the Knife back. Somehow he was certain that retrieving the Knife would restore him. Otherwise, he would be dead already from the Knife’s departure from his system. No Shade survived the true loss of his or her Artifact. It simply wasn’t possible.

  Stoakes continued to pretend at being sick, and at losing his footing, but this was a ruse to move as close to Ialo as possible. His legs could still support his weight under twenty-five standard gravities, which made him formidable, even without his Artifact. As he moved, he made a show at trying to support himself with his right hand upon his knee, but his hand slipped off clumsily into a position close to Ialo’s right foot. With a speed Ialo could hardly believe, Stoakes was rising, his two-fingered Secret Sword fist sweeping up, threatening to cut him in two along a whistling diagonal.

  Though terrifically startled, Ialo was fairly used to being attacked by his betters. He leapt back with reflexes not entirely his own while projecting his Shield forward.

  Ialo’s Shield was quite a bit faster than Yosen’s had been, issuing forth and filling a decent percentage of the treasure room. Stoakes had watched Ialo as he was sucked into the coalescing image of the beast that had come out of him. It was as if they had switched places.

  Stoakes stared up at the reptilian monster above him as it bobbed in the air on lazy leather wings the color and luster of lead. He had seen many things in his long life, but never a living, breathing dragon. Dragons, in all their varieties, were as mythical to the Viscain as they were to all the civilizations they’d conquered. It was likely not natural, but there it was. It looked as though it were covered in thick scales of lead. Its body was at least thirty meters long, not including the tail, and was somewhat bottom heavy. Stoakes guessed that it was ten meters broad at the shoulders, probably fifteen at the haunches where it was thickest. Its head was a great triangle with spines continuing the backward angles in lieu of or as protection for ears. Its teeth were also like lead, sharp and shiny as if pinched and sheared to points. Only the eyes broke the beast’s color scheme. These were yellow eggs with black vertical slits and myriad lids that blinked from different directions, though only the outermost were opaque.

  “Do you still wish to fight?” the dragon said with Ialo’s voice.

  “You stole from me. I will have what’s mine. Besides, I’d planned to kill you, anyway.”

  Ialo threw his head back in laughter, which shook the chamber. “I know that this is what enabled you to turn into the black cloud. Without this,” he said raising the Suicide Knife caught between two thick talons, “what can you do?”

  “Ask your man Yosen. You’ve taken my Knife, but you can’t use it. Not as you are now, anyway. Am I right?” Stoakes cried. Stoakes leapt straight for Ialo with agility and strength that surprised him. Iaolo tried to move back and swat at Stoakes with his left claw, the one that was empty, but he couldn’t prevent Stoakes, arms moving in sweeping circles, from passing over his head.

  A spattering line of red surfaced diagonally upon Ialo’s right eyeball, and another horizontally across his left as Stoakes alighted upon the dragon’s back briefly before leaping back down to the floor. He had to leap again to avoid being crushed by Ialo as he dropped like a stone to crash into his piles of loot. Blood geysered from both of Ialo’s eyes, not the eyeballs themselves but from the soft unprotected flesh beneath. The pressure of the blood against the compromised structure of the eyeballs further ruined their shape, and as Iaolo rubbed with his his scaly arms, great gelatinous chunks of blood-saturated yellow fell to the floor with a terrible, wet sound.

  Ialo roared in his rage, frustration, and pain. He forced himself to calm down and left his eyes alone. “I told you,” he said through his panting, “I can take the shadow of anything I can see. Well, I don’t see shadows with my eyes. I will fill these sockets with your eyes.”

  Stoakes didn’t know how Ialo’s sense worked, but it seemed that the dragon still had to “look” for what he sought. He moved quickly, leaping back up into the air, landing on Ialo’s right shoulder for the briefest moment as he drove his Secret Sword fist into the narrow cavity of Ialo’s ear. Unnatural or not, this dragon was flesh and blood and could be hurt, so he hurt it. His fingers touched nothing, but the loud boom blew a channel deep into Ialo’s head. Blood erupted back onto Stoakes, bathing him down to his waist. Ialo canted with the explosive thrust and started to sway, but Stoakes was already leaping clear, his eyes fixed on the fallen Suicide Knife.<
br />
  He landed in a crouch, his fingers splayed across the Knife’s hilt. He could already feel the strength it provided returning to him. He gripped the Knife, held it so the flat of the blade ran just beneath his eyes, and focused intently on Ialo. The dragon shook its giant head, sending spirals of blood out its right ear and looking something like a dog trying to shake itself dry. Ialo wasn’t done yet. He sniffed at the air and then he did exactly what Stoakes had hoped: he scanned the room with empty sockets, with whatever it was that allowed him to detect what he called shadows. When his empty gaze fell upon Stoakes, upon the Suicide Knife, Stoakes captured his image in the Midnight Mirror.

  Ialo began to laugh. It was an awful rasping sound, full of triumph. “I see you, little man.”

  “I know you do,” Stoakes said with grave finality. He took the Knife in both hands and pulled the chisel-point deep into his own breast, just above his heart. There was no blood. With a sharp, forceful jerk, he traced a circle around his heart, and yanked the blade back out. In time with the blade’s motion, a thin red circle of beading blood surfaced upon Ialo’s breast, and with the sharp, final exit of the blade, a perfect cylinder of meat, capped with lead scales, leapt from Iaolo’s chest to the floor. Ialo’s front was washed in blood in an instant and he collapsed dead.

  1.1 BASALT SHORES

  10,735.222

  Frosted wisps of cloud parted as the Vine rushed down. It fell from the heavens, through the blood-red sky, and finally to the cracked volcanic landscape where it struck, sending ripples through magma and raising the rock tiles, which formed the planet’s surface, as they rode those ripples. The planet held no plant life, but was host to a rich variety of fungi, some of which grew to monumental proportions, forming great ranging mushroom forests or vast spans of mold carpets.

  Here, though, where the Vine touched down, where the Root Palace was even now beginning to expand to its full proportions, there was little but rock, smoking lava visible in some of the larger breaks in the ground, and a stone structure upon a crag overlooking an expansive lava sea. Farther beyond that was what appeared to be a population center, home to anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand people. Pre-landing estimates put the planet’s entire population at nearly two billion. That figure would not hold, however, not after the Vine introduced the exotic bacteria culled from hundreds of alien systems into the atmosphere with its arrival. The Empire had detected no technology of note which might pose a threat, but that didn’t mean the world was not without the means to defend itself.

  At the base of the Root Palace, midway between the main gate and the right arm of the growing courtyard wall, great bay doors, one hundred meters high and wide, opened to give exit to the Empire’s giant mobile weapons.

  Gran Mid, the bare skeleton of a snake one hundred meters long and eight meters in diameter, slid out over the ground, its ribs moving subtly like the legs of a centipede to effect movement exactly like that of flesh and blood snake. Upon Gran Mid’s head stood another skeleton, that of a man, with arms folded. In truth, though, this man, Jav Holson, only pretended at being a skeleton. He wore the Kaiser Bones, the Artifact he received from the Emperor forty-seven years ago, which gave him the power to command the dead. Jav could sense bone in the ground, could raise an army from any graveyard, but there was nothing to raise here. The planet was remarkably clean in that respect, but it didn’t matter to Jav. With or without his army, this planet was already the property of the Viscain Empire.

  Behind Jav and Gran Mid was Raus Kapler, riding atop the head of Gran Pham, a great war elephant preceded by its massive curled tusks shod with thick bands of steel to create a dual striking surface. Gran Pham, standing thirty meters at the forward shoulder, lumbered heavily, its prodigious muscles, a sickly gray-green, working visibly beneath pale, translucent skin. Raus’s Artifact, the Resurrection Bolts, gave him a command of the dead similar to Jav’s, but he, too, would be denied an army on this planet.

  Gran Lej, a thirty-five-meter-tall figure of synthetic wood, modeled after his master, Icsain, came next. Close scrutiny revealed that Gran Lej was composed of countless two-meter-tall figures locked together that were smaller representations of the larger whole. This was Icsain’s army, ready to scatter and swarm at Icsain’s order. Icsain was somewhere hidden amongst his thousands of soldiers, likely buried within Gran Lej’s breast.

  The last Gran to emerge from the Palace, occupying almost all of the space opened by the bay doors, was Gran Mal, the great walking machine castle belonging to Gilf Scanlan. Scanlan had designed and built all the Grans, but Mal was his crowning achievement, easily dwarfing its predecessor, Gran Kohm, and out-powering all existing Grans and those that had come before. It moved slowly, and with each step, the ground quaked. Its gross outline was similar to that of a tortoise, but one with cyclopean plates of shining gold making up its shell. Gran Mal followed its fellows as far as the gap between the rising courtyard walls of the Palace. Here, it stopped, dropped until the lip of its shell touched the ground, and settled in to form the gate, the impregnable first line of defense, for the Root Palace.

  Forbis Vays and Brin Karvasti, both of the Titan Squad, stayed behind with Scanlan within Gran Mal. The three of them, with the thousands of machine troops housed inside the Gran, ready for immediate dispatch, would be enough to repel any force. The remaining two members of the Titan Squad, however, continued on with the other 21st Generation Generals.

  Hilene Tanser and Nils Porta could fly under their own power. Hilene was the winner of the last Artifact Competition, but she was also an impressive graduate of the Locsard Psychic Academy. Nils had been the top student at the Academy at that time, however, and had won his Artifact for that honor.

  Nils Porta’s ability was unique. Without the aid of his Artifact, he’d been able, through force of will alone and on demand, to substantially increase his bone mass, the shape of which he could alter and thrust from his skin, and with which he could form a spiked, armored shell—the end result looking not at all human. In this state, he gained a limited form of telekinesis, granting him totally free mobility in any direction, and a kind of radar sense, enabling him to navigate. His bone was of a density that made him an excellent juggernaut, which even if damaged, could heal at a rapid rate. Raus Kapler had dubbed him, in this configuration, the “Porta Fighter.” Nils had been the top Locsard student, but only because Hilene had gone the route of the Artifact Competition.

  With his Artifact, the Alloyed Splitter, Nils’s bone was transformed into an organic steel alloy that was stronger than diamond. His shape was streamlined as well, with three four-pointed pinwheels, fat at their bases and tapering to wicked edges, along a two-meter horizontal axis, the ends of which formed deadly points. The middle pinwheel was the thickest and largest, spanning two meters tip to tip. The outer pinwheels were half the size of the larger and dotted with projections—knives—jutting out at forty-five degrees. The Alloyed Splitter also enabled Nils to break apart, much like Icsain’s Gran Lej, into thousands of much, much smaller versions of his transformed state, which he was able to control. This, according to Raus, was the “Cloud of Gnats.”

  Hilene Tanser was the granddaughter of a participant in the Artifact Competition prior to hers, but she was far more skilled in the Darkness Piercing Spear Hand than her grandfather had ever been. More terrible, though, was her Locsard-honed ability to become insubstantial, like a ghost, and yet still affect physical space. Though her Artifact, the Attenuated Splitter, gave her the appearance of being an animate statue of implacable steel—the Emperor’s idea of poetic justice, some said—her power to become intangible was perfected, made inexhaustible, and enhanced so that she could temporarily divide herself into ten perfect, independent copies. This time Jav, not Raus, had given her the appropriate moniker of “Secret Weapon.”

  She was a hundred and fifty-eight centimeters tall, and only slightly taller while Dark with the Attenuated Splitter, mostly because the helmet was disproportionately large and bulbo
us, though not, strictly speaking, a helmet at all. She was thick—not fat, but athletic—and small-breasted. While Dark, very little was left to the imagination except for her face. She was, indeed, a living statue of smooth, seamless steel.

  The nicknames for both of the final additions to the Titan Squad were often used in jest, but never in condescension. They wielded power far too great for anyone to treat them lightly. Nils was bookish and quiet, humble, but never allowed anyone to push or taunt him. Hilene commanded respect at all times. She understood and obeyed hierarchy, but there were few she accepted as equals or betters. Few could argue.

  Hilene flew close to Jav now as they approached the road leading up the stone structure up on the crag. Nils, by default in the Porta Fighter configuration when Dark, flew high, between Jav and Raus upon their Grans.

  The structure they all approached looked equally naturally-occurring and man-made. Myriad spindly rock arms spread out from it gracefully, making it look delicate and beautiful, but there was no mistake. It was a castle and it held the local power, whatever that might amount to. An entourage was already making its way down the road from the castle and the Viscain contingent would meet them before too long.

  “What do you think, General Holson?” Hilene came close enough to Jav to ask.

  Jav shrugged. “Scanlan’s instruments picked up some unusual energy signatures. They don’t appear to radiate from the very basic technology here, so we might be in for an interesting surprise.”

  “Do you still find yourself surprised when meeting the opposition following planetfall?”

  “Sometimes. There will always be something new, I suppose.”

  She nodded. “I am always impressed with the variety, never the intensity.”

  Jav snorted. He’d seen enough in his first three years to easily discount her sentiment, but in her defense, the opposition had never again risen to the level presented by the Gun Golems or by Garlin Braams. He hoped it never would again. He wasn’t put off by her comment, either. She only knew what she’d experienced so far. In previous conversations, she’d shown respect enough for him to believe his statements asserting the disparity between then and now. He counted himself lucky, too. She required much convincing from most others.