by Dan Schiro
The wall came down after four blows of the hammer’s rounded head, and Orion peered in through his Kangor-sized hole. Falling chunks of cement splashed into the darkness hundreds of feet below. After deploying his final spool of diamond-fiber climbing wire, Orion waved Kangor forward. The mountain of muscles squeezed in and shimmied down, his bulging shoulders scraping the dusty walls of the abandoned shaft. Orion followed his friend into the shadows as the thunderous footsteps of warmechs approached, a warm, foul updraft tousling his blond hair.
They splashed down into the prison’s stinking underworld a few minutes later, and Orion pulled out his datacube. “Illuminate.”
A clear white light revealed a river of sewage that rose to their knees, and two veiny, chalk-white humanoids kneeling on the walkway that ran alongside the stinking stream. They had been devouring something pink, and they left behind a gory heap of slick bones as they fled from the datacube’s light.
“By the gods of the hunt.” Kangor threw his huge forearm over his wolfish snout. “If Zovaco was banished to this hell, I don’t know that we can expect to find the poor man alive.”
Orion shrugged. “There might be more to Zovaco Ralli than you think.”
The two of them climbed out of the thick-flowing channel and started down the walkway. They stalked along in silence for a few minutes before the sewage channel split left and right. A large hatch stood open at the fork in the channel, and Orion and Kangor leaped onto the crumbling stone stairs that led up to it. Side by side, they followed the winking white spotlight of Orion’s datacube into a cavernous room filled with huge, silent machines. The space might have once been a penitentiary storeroom, but it had long since become a forgotten dumping ground for outdated equipment.
“If we can trust the schematics,” Orion said, referencing his memorized route, “the third ward should be just on the other side of this room.”
“Urine markings,” Kangor grunted as he sniffed the air. “Seems we’re on someone’s turf.”
Orion saw shapes flitting between large mainframes and outdated diagnostic chambers, pale faces peeking at them from atop dusty transmitter towers. Something hissed at them in the shadows at the edge of his datacube’s light. “Stay tight, back to back,” Orion whispered to Kangor. “And since I don’t think we’ll be seeing any guards down here, go ahead and kill anything that comes close enough to bite us.” Orion called a barbed saber from his living gauntlet and held it at ready.
Kangor flexed his huge hands, his yellow claws instinctively extending. “Anything close enough for me to bite will be dead.”
The two of them started down the path between the defunct machines, bathed in the light of Orion’s datacube as they stepped over fallen chunks of rock and twisted pieces of rusting rebar. Soon the hisses in the shadows slowed and solidified, forming words and warnings.
“Third ward belongsssss... to the King of Bonessss… the King of Bonessss…”
“I’m looking for Zovaco Ralli,” Orion called out, his voice echoing against immense furnaces and stacks of gears.
Laughter tittered from dank recesses. “The King of Bones knowssss… the King of Bones knows all…”
“Can you take me to him?” While Orion talked, he and Kangor edged their way across the floor. “Can the King of Bones help me find who I’m looking for?”
More laughter wheezed through the shadows. “The King of Bonessss knows… the King of Bones knowssss…”
They had made it halfway across the floor of the cavernous space when one of the creatures finally built up the courage to leap at Orion. Now in the light of the datacube, Orion got a better look at what he had briefly seen in the sewage tunnel. The naked humanoid had cracked, bleeding, ash-white skin and just a hint of great ape left in its face. Gnarled fingers slashed at Orion, but he dodged with a quick step back, and the shadow-dweller’s claws tangled in Orion’s smartcloak. Two smooth strokes severed first its decrepit hand, then its head. Howls from the darkness echoed through the room as the devolved creature collapsed in a spreading pool of gray blood.
Attacks came from every angle now, snarling and slavering. Whatever it was that had infected the denizens of the third ward, they all seemed to be mutating toward the same cracked, pasty, racially ambiguous form. Orion swung his barbed sword in fluid arcs as the mutants sprang from the shadows, and his spellblade glowed with bright red veins as it drank in a strange life force that tasted neither fully sentient nor completely animal. Orion and Kangor dripped with gray blood by the time they saw the exit on the other side of the room. A heavy iron door hung on rusty hinges, barring their way.
“There it is,” Orion shouted between strokes of his sword. “You take down the door, I’ll hold them off!” He fell into Blades of a Wheel, whirling and slicing, whirling and slicing.
With a roar, Kangor tore the head off a chalky mutant and charged the door at full speed. His hurtling bulk half-crumpled the door with a metallic groan, and his powerful hands ripped it off its hinges an instant later. The muscle-bound vycart turned and threw the bent steel, mowing down a pair of mutants and crushing another against a piece of machinery in the shadows. As Kangor ducked into the exit, Orion backpedaled and slashed wildly, trying to hold off the horde pressing after them. When he finally stepped back over the threshold, he decided to use some of the powerful charge that had built up in his spellblade.
“Gale force,” Orion cried, calling the barbed sword back to his gauntlet and opening his hand wide.
A blast of hurricane-strength wind blasted the wave of ashy mutants, scattering them like bowling pins. As the creatures flew through the air and bounced off the machinery at painful angles, Orion charged into the tunnel after Kangor. He stopped a few dozen feet in and used the rest of the blood magic stored in his gauntlet.
“Brick wall!” A glimmer of white fire danced at Orion’s sharp fingertips, and a wall of heavy cinderblocks appeared where the rusty door had been. Not a moment too soon, either — the maimed mutants were already up, rushing and scratching and howling on the other side of the barrier. Orion leaned against the wall, panting.
“Should we rest for a moment, little friend?” asked Kangor, bathed in the light of the datacube floating beside him.
Orion straightened up and shook his head. “No,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his left hand. “The faster we do this, the better.” Not just for Zovaco Ralli, but for himself as well — his lightness of being spell wouldn’t last forever, and neither would the conjured wall.
They trekked. The obsolete sewer, power and ventilation systems would have been an easy enough grid to navigate if they had known where to look for Zovaco. Yet Wormrock Penitentiary didn’t neatly file their prisoners in cells down here. Orion guessed that the powers-that-be shunted prisoners to this lawless land to either live by their wits or, more likely, die and feed the mutant cannibals. To find Zovaco, they would need to talk to the person who ruled here, the King of Bones. When they saw skulls painted in blood on the walls, Orion thought that they just might be on the right track.
They followed the gory sigils through ventilation shafts and sewage tunnels toward the middle of the grid, and soon they saw light flickering off the slimy walls ahead. Turning down a wide cargo tunnel lit with low-burning torches, Orion saw a gate at the end held shut by a freshly forged iron chain. He quickened his pace, hoping to find and free Zovaco before his lightness of being spell faded, but Kangor grabbed him by the arm and jerked him back.
“Careful,” the vycart said in a low voice. He pointed down at the glimmering trip wire stretched across the tunnel at their ankles.
Orion looked right and left to see spear tips hidden in holes drilled in the grimy wall. “Thanks,” he sighed with a wince.
From there, they covered the next hundred some feet very slowly. Every few paces they had to stop and disarm a tripwire, navigate around a bed of thinly veiled spikes or step over raised stones that Orion sus
pected triggered the swinging blades nestled in the ceiling. Finally they reached an unadulterated patch of stone by the gate, and Orion struck the iron chain asunder with a ringing blow from a manacite maul. He didn’t even mind the noise, as whoever was at the top of the stone staircase beyond the gate probably couldn’t hear it over their own raucous voices and twangy music. After a short climb up the cracked stairs, they came to a thick curtain over a wide door. With a nod to each other, Orion and Kangor leaped through the musty barrier into a torchlit room. The rough voices fell quiet, as did the music played by rag-clad humanoids on improvised instruments.
Cold eyes and crude weapons pointed their way. At least two dozen bio-modified men and women of multiple races stood in the light of flickering flames, smoking hand-rolled cigarillos and drinking pungent liquor from clay cups. They wore rusty blades, cudgels of bone, spiked shoulder pads and heavy metal knuckles, and Orion could see the scars and brands of hard living all over their bodies. Many of them seemed to be in the early stages of whatever had devolved the shadow-dwelling mutants, with purple veins running like tears down their pale faces.
Orion steeled himself for a bloody fight, only to freeze when he saw Zovaco Ralli at the center of the small mob. The thin trislav sat on a throne of fused skulls and wore a manacite gauntlet on his right arm, unmistakably a spellblade. In his armored fist he held a conjured silver chain connected to the collar of the hulking red durok kneeling before him. Blue veins ran through the chain, feeding fresh life force to the spellblade gauntlet on Zovaco’s arm.
“Hold,” Zovaco bellowed, an instant before the grim creatures could attack. “Any who harm those men will face my wrath.”
As the others stood down, Orion called his long knife back into his gauntlet and smirked at Zovaco. “So, I was right. You have been trained by the Guild.”
Zovaco narrowed his three eyes and tilted his bulbous head ever so slightly. “I was wondering if you would figure it out.”
“What did you think I’d do when I did?”
“I trusted that you would figure out the next part as well,” Zovaco said with a nod. “That I’d broken away from the Guild to wrest control of the galaxy’s destiny from their hands.”
On some level, Orion realized that he had figured out that much about Zovaco Ralli. “A nice dream. But you had to know they’d try to kill you.”
“Some dreams are worth dying for.” Zovaco jerked the chain conjured from his spellblade, yanking the bio-modified durok forward to fall on his belly. He seemed to contemplate the prostrate brute for a moment. “But that dream is as broken as Thusulus the Beast, now that I’ve taken his throne. Worse yet, I’m responsible for getting the two of you thrown in here. Who else? Aurelia? Not Mervyn, I hope?”
Orion shook his head, chagrin tightening his sharp features. “No, that’s not…”
Zovaco gazed at Orion severely. “My god. You fools are here to break me out.”
Chapter 28
"Well… yeah.” Orion shrugged. “Of course we came to break you out.”
“We still have time before the election,” Kangor added.
“The election?” Zovaco stared at them for a moment, then closed his three eyes and shook his head. “My friends, my poor, foolish friends.” With a sigh, he cast a glare at the assorted toadies that stood around the throne room. “Clear the room,” he commanded, a growl to his voice that Orion had never heard.
The bio-modified convicts filed out through the lone door carved in the stone wall, careful to keep their distance from Orion and Kangor. “After all that’s happened,” Zovaco said, “there is no way that I could still win the vote.” His thin, rag-draped frame slouched on the throne of fused skulls. “You shouldn’t have come here for me. You shouldn’t have risked your lives.” He snapped his chain, and the huge durok lying at Zovaco’s feet struggled up off his belly and went back to kneeling.
“This is not over, Zo.” Orion stepped closer, glancing warily at the grotesquely muscled humanoid Zovaco had shackled with his spellblade. “Merv has it all lined up. He has evidence he can release to the ‘sphere that proves you were framed. He’s got an MP on his side ready to pull back the curtain and expose the bastards the Guild bought to make it happen. Plus, a lot of voices still support you.”
Kangor nodded. “Many say that this is what happens to a man who promises to help the people instead of helping the rich get richer.”
“So, Mervyn sent you here?” Zovaco toyed with the chain links wound around his silver-swathed fingers. “He knew that if he secured my release legally, the guards would murder me before I ever set foot outside of Wormrock.”
Orion held up his own manacite gauntlet. “Mervyn doesn’t know you as well as I do.”
Kangor grunted at this. “Nor do I, apparently.” He sniffed the rank air with his wolfish nose. “How did you come to possess the demon metal, too? How did you come to rule this pit in little more than a week?”
“Yes, this must be a bit of a shock.” Zovaco gazed down at Thusulus the Beast. The artificially enhanced titan kept his watery yellow eyes on the floor, the ragged bone-stumps of his thick durok horns pointed at Zovaco. “I quickly understood how it was down here — those who controlled the clean food and water ruled, while those who scavenged the shadows changed, mutated, devolved into… something less than sentient.” He looked up at Orion and Kangor. “I trust you became acquainted with the White Whispers on the way?”
Orion nodded. “They were charming.”
“In any case, when I decided I wanted to survive, well… Orion’s right.” Zovaco’s mouth pursed with contrition. “I have been trained to play the same bloody game as he, bonded with a spellblade of my own by the Assassins Guild. Once I arrived here, all it took was a sufficiently brutal demonstration of my abilities, and…” Again he jerked the chain, and again the great mountain of red hide came sprawling forward on the natty rugs. The veins running through the chain back to Zovaco’s gauntlet glimmered with a fresh surge of blue light. “After defeating Thusulus but denying him the dignity of death, this grisly throne was mine.” He sighed, a heaving of his thin chest. “Parliament it is not.”
“You know,” said Orion as he folded his arms across his chest, “you could have told me everything from the beginning. You knew the Assassins Guild wanted to take you out for leaving their ranks. But you made us go through Dawnstar, all of that, for nothing. We could have all been killed, Zovaco.”
Kangor bristled. “Many aboard the Star Sentry were. Some of the Briarhearts, too.”
“Regrettable casualties of an invisible war.” Zovaco straightened on his bony throne. “But you knew what I was, Orion, and you still came to free me. You still hope to put me in Parliament. Why? Certainly not for your Election Day bonus.”
“I just want you to make good on your campaign promises,” Orion said with a smirk. “And you can be sure I’ll be expecting exactly seven million UC when you win.”
Zovaco turned his intense gaze to Kangor. “And you feel the same, my friend?”
Kangor snorted, and his eyes narrowed as he seemed to think for a moment. “You say the guild of assassins is behind you?”
“Forever.” Zovaco offered a single resolute nod. “I only want to give back to the galaxy the free will that the Guild has stolen.”
“Then I am with you.” Curling a lip, Kangor shrugged his massive shoulders. “We all have shadows in our yesterday. We can only look to the light of tomorrow.”
“Very well.” Zovaco’s mouth twitched with a slight, sad smile as he rose from his macabre throne and addressed Orion. “I trust you have a plan.”
Still wary of the brute kneeling at the end of Zovaco’s chain, Orion pulled out his datacube and called up the projection of the prison schematics. He began to explain the highlighted route to the penitentiary command center, but the thin trislav quickly cut him off. His finger dancing through the hologram, Zovaco showed
Orion and Kangor a way up that would take them through collapsed walls and loose panels to the administration sub-basement. “We’ll come up through the floor right in front of the command center,” he concluded. “Trust me, I’ve had plenty of time to learn my way around this place.”
Orion looked at him skeptically to see if he was serious. “But you’ve only been here — what? — nine days?”
Zovaco replied with a slight shrug. “I move fast.”
“Good, because we’ll need to.” Himself especially, Orion realized. While Kangor had packed on extra muscle to deal with the gravity, and Zovaco seemed somehow unaffected, Orion could feel his lightness of being spell fading. “But we need to cause some trouble first. End projection,” he told his datacube, “and access secure channel, preset one.”
A moment or two passed, and then a voice crackled through the datacube. “Well, well,” said Costigan. “Took you long enough.”
“Shove it, Cos,” Orion said, smiling at the sound of the familiar voice. “What’s your status?”
“All good,” Costigan said through a hiss of static. “We’ve located AD in C-wing, and Reddpenning and Zagzebski have been assigned over there. Red says she should be able to pop the Exile’s lock from the nearest guard station, soon as you say when.”
“She is good,” Orion said, clasping his flesh hand into his living-metal gauntlet. “Tell her to set Aurelia loose.”
“Copy that. What about me, Seals and Adler?”
“Open a few dozen cells wherever you’re stationed, see what you can make malfunction.” Orion bit his lower lip. “Be creative, but don’t get crazy. We just want to keep the other guards busy, we don’t want a full-on riot.”
“Copy that,” said Costigan again. “Implement a half-ass riot.”
“Over and out, dick.” Orion snatched the datacube out of the air. He looked at Kangor and Zovaco, and then his gaze drifted to Thusulus the Beast, still on his knees. “What about him?”
