by David Finn
‘Triton,’ they said together, as their hands clasped. Black and red electricity flickered around his nails, feeding into her, along with Technicolor movies in his mind.
Their hands vibrated together. She saw reflections bouncing off the mental shadows of his mirrored mind. He was a raging storm of energy, strangely young, although she could tell he had lived for decades upon decades, possibly centuries. And underneath everything, a coldness that could have been that of the grave, but wasn’t.
Demorn saw a blend of faces and distant cities, a small group staggering through deep snow, retreating from energy cannon blasts shaking at an icy sky. The angry face of the General screaming at him about the future on a cold desert night, the sky above them a starless void.
A beautiful naked woman with a smooth voice who called him Banker, as he slyly checked out her ass, both of them reclining in bed at his luxurious apartment nestled deep within the City.
The images on the mirrors retreated, fading back to a metallic glass sheen that showed nothing.
The Tyrant brushed his finger across her brow, above her sparkling eyes. The pyramid slowly faded from his palm. He nodded politely.
‘Sorry, Princess. A lot is secret origin.’
She smiled thinly. She knew people were right to fear him. She could glimpse the ancient cold that lay below his light energy and easy smile.
‘I understand, I have one, too. Are you afraid I’m going to follow you home?’
His haunted purple vision put her magic eyes to shame. His laughter ran through her mind, light and easy.
‘That world hasn’t been my home for a lifetime, Princess.’
There was a rumbling in the sky. She looked up. A massive battleship hung above the floating island, brutal and militaristic.
He held his hand out and she took it gracefully.
‘I’m assuming banking paid well then.’
She heard him chuckle. They flew toward the ship, the pyramids multiplying through the sky.
Everything blurred as he increased speed, her body caught up in his wild energy.
She felt stripped clean, back to a spirit in a silent world of flashing color, the chains of flesh and bone gone, a vessel of light again.
9
* * *
His glowing red and purple image floated before her, a thin dark veil surrounding his core of pure, restless energy.
Blue pyramids rotated in the hazy distance. Beyond them, lay nothingness.
He said, ‘You don’t belong here either.’
The air was a freezing air-conditioned chill. She was on an observation deck of his great vessel, a huge crystalline viewing port overlooking the city.
He was beside her, dressed in his casual slacks and a light pink polo shirt, disconcertingly normal.
Babelzon lay sprawled beneath them. From this vast distance, it was silent and peaceful, staggeringly beautiful. There was no end to its untouchable towers, unholy pyramids and ziggurats glittering with commercials that changed at the whims of mega-corporations and fickle consumers. Giant water courses sparkled under a million city lights, crossed by vast wiry spider bridges.
‘Oh, look upon thy work and call it good!’ the Tyrant said, laughing with an easy sarcasm.
A wave of nostalgia and sadness came across her.
‘I remember when my brother and I first came to Babelzon,’ she said. ‘On that first glimpse, it was the biggest place I’d ever seen. I just knew we could make it in there, get lost in it, feed off it.’
The Tyrant floated close to the crystalline glass. Up here, he seemed far more solid, less a reflection. Heat flowed from his body, colors shimmered around him.
‘Is that what happened?’
She gave a tiny nod. ‘We’ve done okay. We survived. I found the Innocents. This city loves a hired gun.’
‘Doesn’t it just.’
He touched the window, drawing symbols which she recognized as the language of her dead world, the lettering perfect, every word a core truth, adult whispers in the Night Garden, almost wholly forgotten now.
Things her mother had said when she was a child. Her magic eyes kept flickering over him, a chill running down her spine as he ran his finger through the Asanti words and they vanished, her memory of those words slowly dying, too.
He looked at her with his measured calm, and then back down to the city.
‘It’s so violent, isn’t it? This city. Filled with monsters and all the cowboys to kill them. All the sick and the beautiful and the horrific and the damned. I invoked the First Power Word down there. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a reflection of me. Or if this is just the way of this universe? Through all the dimensions, little ants who strive to be gods, impossible to tame, building to destroy.’
Demorn took her mask off, put it in her jacket.
‘This is the real prize of the Run, isn’t it? It’s not the bucks. Most of the winners could make better and less dangerous money freelancing. Alex sure could.’
He looked at her with magnificent rainbow eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This dreamy little tête-à-tête. Your sensitivity, which is only partly fake. It’s clever, Mighty Tyrant. Makes it seem like you’ve kept your heart clean, all the way up at the top of the world. But don’t you ever think it’s incredibly fucking cheesy they have to hear a prepared monologue?’
He kept looking at the city below. His voice was gently amused. ‘You’ve bypassed the pacification rhythms obviously.’
‘I’m trained to spot misdirection. The mask helps. But when I’m chatting with a total stranger in his floating fortress, and not thinking about my gun, I know something is up.’
She looked at him directly, with a mysterious smile.
‘But seriously, I’d rather have a glass of wine, smoke a jazz cigarette, and listen to the fucking Beatles if all you want to do is build a connection, man.’
He laughed easily.
‘Satellite footage surfaced last year of you fighting in The Grave. Killing walking skeletons, making jokes, talking to yourself. Your popularity blew up. You’re a legend down there, Demorn.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘So you keep saying. Who the hell cares. Legends come and go.’
‘It ate at Capitan Roberts, made him reckless. He was right off the deep end.’
She giggled, her voice super dry. ‘I wish it had affected his card playing. He had ice in his veins on the tables.’
The Tyrant laughed lightly through her mind. ‘Please tell me you didn’t play him in The Grave.’
She shrugged. ‘It was lonely and I was bored. The connection came online in the last few months. It was really all we had in common.’
He looked at her, his rainbow eyes unreadable.
‘And now he’s dead and the marker is paid.’
She smiled. ‘Dead enough. And all paid up. I’m betting a lot of the Runners take a shot at you.’
He looked so young, but comfortable in his power. ‘Can you blame them? They feel invincible.’
She wandered away from the window.
‘No, I don’t blame them at all. I blame you. It’s your brutal invention. You’re searching for something. You must have been fond of Alex though. Nine time champ.’
‘She was different. One of the best,’ he said warmly.
‘Oh, one of the very best,’ Demorn said, looking up with sparkling eyes. ‘With stunning blue eyes, awesome tits, and a fantastic ass to boot!’
He chuckled. ‘She shot at me more than once.’
Demorn pressed her hand against the opaque window. The sky was so vast and blue.
‘Why do you need me? Is it just to talk about how hot she is?’
He placed his hand next to hers on the window. She didn’t feel afraid at all.
‘It’s your eyes. You can see the bones in the sky, enclosing us, drawing death upon this world, this universe, as it has done to so many others. As it did to Asanti.’
She saw pyramids appear in the sky, below and above the ship, translucent,
surging with energy and the symbols of Triton, refracting from portals scattered throughout the known universe.
Beyond, the blue vanished, turning a terrible grey, as white bones wrapped around this world, the whole dimension.
With his flickering purple eyes, the Tyrant looked at her with a strange kindness.
‘You see it too well.’
She sighed, almost sinking to her knees before the horrible knowledge, that knowledge she had felt since the Vegas mission. And now, in the presence of the Tyrant, it all came flooding back. She saw the slow, creeping death which travelled through the symbols upon the pyramids, a grid of invitation to an ancient dark, inside which dwelt insane endless gods of power that wore flesh just to mock it, obeying no rule but that of chaos.
She saw the sterile machine which lay behind them, the dead heart of a dead pantheon, ceaseless, alive but un-alive.
Demorn cried out, exerting all her mental conditioning as she pushed away the sudden, intrusive image of Asanti, her Mirror World dying, again and again. It was a stark promise of what would come to this city, this world.
A reminder of extinction, the mark that all exiles can never forget. He caught her with a graceful hand before her knees touched the ground. His perfume was light and breezy.
‘No kneeling from you, Demorn.’
She focused, gripping his arm as she rose. Her eyes cleared and she focused upon the bracelet on his wrist. It was not made of delicate gold. It was a grim Steel Bracelet, tight upon his white skin, the metal perfect and cold.
She could see small signs of red blood around the metal on his white hand. Words shifted ceaselessly in the steel, symbols and images writhing in the cold metal.
‘The Steel Bracelet,’ she murmured. ‘Some of the legends are true.’
‘Yes’ he said with a soft irony.
‘I make it look gold because it looks less like a chain that way.’
10
* * *
He pulled her toward him. The last of the sky pyramids vanished, and the blue triangles slowly faded from their palms. Ah, but it is a chain, she realized.
‘When did Triton get to you?’ she said.
For a moment she saw the fire stir within him, the wild energy swirl inside his mind. He could obliterate her quite easily, of that she was quite sure.
But Demorn held her gaze. Not all his power was in the here and now. Some of it was in the distant past, and some lay in the endless void of the future, howling to be born.
With her damn magic eyes that saw too much, she knew that.
He said, ‘I knew them long before they went by that name. When I first met them, they were just a nameless fear. And we ran from them. My whole group of killers and magicians and soldiers. We ran.’
Their palms vibrated, shining with the pyramid, shuddering against the crystalline window. She felt a deluge of information about to come, a flood of data her mind instinctively resisted.
‘Let it happen,’ he whispered in Asanti.
The thief fell through the dark pit, the bracelet burning his arm and skin, sneering at the horrific pain, his heart corrupted, the plaything of mad gods. He could feel the codes staining him, damning him.
Tendrils of sticky cobwebs and fouler barbs slowed his fall, not stopping it.
Finally he caught on a slimy vine, grasping at a ledge grown of thorns and jagged bone. Everything in him bled. His eye was gouged out. They had taken that, too.
The link to the Sorceress was gone. A hollow, dead spot in his mind. The grief he had expected to feel was mute and blank. Each time he tried to reach her, all that leered back was the rotten face of the Undead Twin. His magic was the negation of his sister, useless to him in this damned place.
Things moved in the pit beneath him. He brushed through the cobwebs with his good hand, the viscous liquid slightly burning his skin.
With so much pain, what was a little more in the end? Well, it all hurts, he thought with a surprising dryness.
He saw the creatures writhing beneath him, thousands of them, perhaps more, massive tentacles, gross wingspans spanning miles, climbing over each other, all of them churning in the chasm, reaching upward, the noise an indescribable howl of frustration and anger.
There was no pain in them, no hope, no remorse — only a hideous dreadful hunger that could not be sated.
The Pyramid shone through the churning mass, a sick purple light that gathered strength, soaking his ruined features. He saw their beginnings, churned out in a squashed, dead dwarf star, stained by the blood of aborted gods. There was no redemption in the invocations that had spawned the twisting mass, no longing for it.
This was death in life, spewed out of the womb of a twisted master plan, a thousand gods combining their energies, born in a ritual of pyramids and spheres, screaming demigods cursing against fate as they were thrown into the abyss, souls wrapped in god-chains.
And while he had thought in his idle dreams that he knew the evil men could do, as he could recognize the evil he could do himself, nothing had prepared him for the absolute absence of anything but hate and hunger, the viral thoughts blinding him, the screaming inside the pit.
The Steel Bracelet burnt through his arm, surging into his blood stream when he stopped falling.
In pain, he rose into the air, through the suffocating stench, out of the Pit he had fallen into.
He was not healed, he was not saved. The Pyramid was imprinted on his soul forever, the markings of a ritual for gods gone mad.
She was shaking. He drew her to him. The connection between their minds faded. His body was thin and warm. Blood dripped from the Steel Bracelet.
‘It’s horrible,’ she breathed.
‘It’s just a memory,’ he said.
She ran her hand across his face. ‘I’ve seen your soul. It blazes with energy. You don’t have a single scar.’
He touched her hand softly. He was a tender Tyrant.
‘It was a long, long time ago. My group was scattered to the four winds, almost totally destroyed. But I escaped. I healed. I grew stronger. The General called the Steel Bracelet a curse, you know. He said it would bring damnation, that it would change me.’
‘Did it?’
The Tyrant’s eyes flared and purple traces of thin light flickered over her face, the light oddly cold. She knew he could kill her where she stood.
‘Of course it changed me.’
The Steel Bracelet rattled cold and brutal on his wrist. ‘I was a thief who got lucky. I’ve never taken the Bracelet off.’
‘Can you?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s a part of me now.’
‘Would you though? If you could?’
The Tyrant glistened. His physical body was almost invisible, just a shining core of energy. His laughter was free and soft in her mind. Around him, the observation desk changed, becoming a humid tropical observatory, filled with thick green plants.
A luscious waterfall fell from a rocky cliff around his burning form.
‘Only you and Alex have asked me that in centuries,’ he said quietly. ‘What is it with you Innocents?’
She laughed, sitting by the side of the pool, running her pale hand through the hot water.
‘Oh, we don’t have that many rules. I don’t believe in them. I want the type who ask curveball questions to mysterious Tyrants they meet.’
He was floating across the water. His robe was gone, all she could see was the energy storm, his face golden and shining, that thin veil of dark spiraling around him, around everything. It encased her too, and Demorn saw the blades surrounding her, ghostly and shimmering, as they did in the Innocent’s Cavern.
The Swords never leave me, Demorn thought, and that made her feel good, enclosed in steel.
She stood up.
‘I didn’t see you as the relaxed leader type, Sword Princess.’
‘That’s probably because you don’t know me. You really think I give a fuck what Roberts said about me on his TV show? He’s currently lying without a
head in his own blood. He’s fresh out of things to say.’
She glanced at the invisible watch on her wrist. It was suspiciously silent.
‘My brother manages my image. I’ve got no idea what he’s pushing right now but it’s usually a variation on sensitive assassin who will do anything for the right price. We got a shaky connection going in the final months on The Grave. You could probably trace the movie leak right back to him.’
He nodded appreciatively. ‘I meant no offense, Princess.’
‘None taken. I think it’s cute you dig the ad. Truth is, I like beautiful girls, cool comics, and singing very badly to classic songs on my nights off.’
‘The answer is no by the way. I wouldn’t take the Bracelet off.’
‘Well, haven’t we all learned something special today? Now, a thirsty girl could do with a cola.’
Ice tinkled. She was holding a tall glass in her hand. She drank slow and deep.
The Tyrant placed a hand on her shoulder.
‘I do kind of have a crush on that sensitive assassin.’
She took off her leather jacket and let it hit the floor.
‘Well, who would have guessed? Advertising works!’
She drew herself toward him, still laughing as he started to caress her. She raised her mouth to kiss him.
‘Final disclosure, I like country music too,’ she said, after the second kiss. ‘Hope that doesn’t shatter illusions.’
His laughter was bright and free, echoing in her mind. She saw the dark veil part, revealing the true core of him. A dazzling purple fire and a million refracted images. She saw Alex dramatically entwined with him in some crazy pleasure dome, surrounded by multiple partners, turquoise water covering their sparkling forms.
It made Demorn feel good and free. Her own past felt a long way from her. Everything was fragmentary.
‘I don’t even know what country music is,’ he said, smelling like the blue rose he had given her.
‘Good,’ she said, pressing herself against him, letting his dark veil fall over her. She felt her clothes fall away, burnt by his power.
‘I’m an old fashioned girl, so no pleasure domes just yet,’ she murmured, between two more hard kisses. Her lips sparkled with his incredible energy, power searing into her, reality slowly slipping out of context.
