He paused, trying to see Tolwyn in the gathering mist up the stairs. Had she gotten that far ahead of him? "Tolwyn?" he called. "Where are you?" There was no answer. Tolwyn had vanished into the gloom. He turned to find Mara and the others, but they had disappeared as well.
"Mara? Djil?" he called at random. "Braxon? Pluppa?" There was silence.
"Here," a voice whispered, but it was not a voice he knew. It froze him to hear it, the breathy, echoing hiss. A chill tingled up his back, and Bryce knew he was about to face death.
"Dear Lord," he gasped. "Give me stre—" He cut off the prayer, shocked into silence by the image rising from the mist.
A great skull, twice the size of a man's, floated in the air before him. Its eyes bored into his, a red glow deep in the skull. The jaw moved and he heard the whispered "here," again. The skull elongated and then returned to normal shape, as though viewed under water. Bryce took a step back, rubbing at his eyes. He wanted to turn and run, but the foulness of what was before him pinned his feet in place.
"What do you want?" he quavered.
"Christopher Bryce," it whispered, and he didn't know if it was calling to him or answering his question.
"Begone," he said, very softly, then louder and with more conviction, "Begone!" Something of his old feelings, his old training, took him then. It was a feeling of outrage at things blasphemous and inhuman. This certainly was both of those. The situation was almost ludicrous! He fumbled for his cross as he met the glare of the specter before him.
"Yes, match my gaze," the vision panted. "Look deep and submit to me. You cannot win." Coldness surrounded its words, and the world was suddenly icy. Bryce tried to look away then, but could not.
"Christopher Bryce," it said. "Come here."
He took one step forward, incapable of any other movement, as the great jaws began to open. He managed to bring his cross up in front of him. Then, as if under water, he slowly straightened his arm, touching the skull with his cross.
There was no flash of light or clap of thunder, nor any scream of dismay. The spectral being simply vanished, soundless, and Bryce stumbled back as a tugging pressure was suddenly released. He drew a shuddering breath, aware again of the darkness, the dank smell, and the slick feel of the stones beneath his feet.
He found a stairwell leading down.
113
Mara saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. Yet she knew something was very wrong. Her left hand was throbbing.
As part of the process of building microchips, it was very important to keep a clean atmosphere. Normally, finger to thumb set up the static charge that kept out random dust particles and such, but in an atmosphere particularly dense with impurities, the built-in alarm system would make her hand throb, just like it was doing now.
What impurities?
Unfortunately, she was not equipped for gas analysis, nor for extended pure breathing. She did have a tube in her arm connected to a five-minute supply of air, but that was usually reserved for potential drowning. Was now a good time to use it?
"Tom," she whispered, "the air is bad here. Pass it on."
"How interesting," came a voice next to her and she jumped, already focusing and aiming her weapon. But recognition shocked her, held her from firing.
"Thratchen?" she asked.
"You remember me! How flattering!" the cyber- demon exclaimed. "Put away your weapon. I will not harm you."
"But you're a Sim!" she shot back, remembering the battles she was involved in on Kadandra.
"Yes, and you're a Kadandran. So what? At first I did want to kill you, I must admit. I wanted to make you pay for your discoveries. You actually helped your people repel a Possibility Raid. But now I realize I was wrong. I should thank you for putting me onto my path of destiny."
Mara made no reply.
"Really," Thratchen continued. "I only came here to tell you that the air is filled with a mist that is full of spirits. Bad air, as it were. But you've already figured that out. Quite remarkable."
"Spirits?" Mara asked,looking around.
"Yes, spirits. Mischievous entities more inclined to frighten than harm," Thratchen explained. "But they can be dangerous. Be wary."
Then Thratchen was gone, disappearing into the mist.
She touched the wall, resting her hand while she calmed herself. The wall was wet, sticky. She pulled her hand back, and it came away wet with blood. Mara looked at her hand, thinking of all the people who died on Kadandra because of her findings. Blood began to drip from the wall, now, running down in bright red streams. She thought of this world, of Earth, also doomed because of her curiosity, her obsessive quest for knowledge. The blood poured down the wall.
"Illmound Keep is a house of illusions," Thratchen called out of the mist. "Nothing within these walls are as they seem."
"Why are you telling me this?" Mara screamed. "Why are you helping me?"
Thratchen's laugh chilled her. "I am not merely helping you, girl. I am helping myself."
The wall itself changed as she turned her head to the side. From the corner of her eye she saw that it was not wood and stone that gave the wall its shape, but flesh and bone. And the flesh bled.
Mara raised her laser and fired a burst of searing light at the wall, cutting a gouge in the living tissue. The keep rocked with the sound of pain, and Mara lost her footing, splashing into the blood that pooled on the floor. Crawling, she discovered a staircase leading down. For an instant, she imagined she was walking into the keep's stomach, but she dismissed the image.
She told herself it was the mist spirits, trying to frighten her. They were doing a good job.
She started down the stairs.
114
Djilangulyip walked slowly down the corridor, gliding as quietly as possible across the strange surface. As last in line, he turned his back and looked the way they had come almost as often as he walked forward. It was during one such turn that he first saw the movement. It came from far back down the corridor they had traversed, a figure leaping from alcove to alcove as it approached.
"Mara, child," he whispered to the young woman in front of him. "We have followers." He ran quickly back down the corridor, looking for a convenient side passage to use for an ambush. When he found one he ducked in and looked back: the figure was getting nearer, doing its best to remain hidden. He turned again, but there was no sign of Mara or any of the others.
Had she assumed he meant for her to run? No time for second guessing now. The figure was moving with visible speed, suddenly filling the corridor with its great size. Djil stepped out to meet it.
"And what manner of creature are you?" the shaman asked congenially.
The winged monster halted, genuinely surprised by the little man's action. He tilted his head curiously, and answered the question put before him.
"I am a ravagon," the winged monster said. "I seek Kurst and his companions, to bring them before the Gaunt Man."
Djil thought for a moment, then let his hand slip from the war boomerang he was readying to throw. "I am one of Kurst's companions," he declared. "You may take me to the Gaunt Man."
The ravagon tilted his head to the other side and folded his wings around himself like a cloak. This stormer
was definitely behaving strangely.
"Very well, stormer," the ravagon said finally. "Come with me."
115
Kurst stumbled forward, his legs responding only sporadically. He had to pause every few moments as the waves of pain rippled through him.
"What is happening to me?" he cried.
But he knew what the problem was. He had seen it happen a hundred times before, to those he hunted and brought to the Gaunt Man. It was the machine. It was ripping possibilities from him, tearing them away before they could be fully realized. He remembered that this was done to him a long time ago, before he was Kurst, before he was the Gaunt Man's hunter. It was when he was —
The pain hit him again. It was awful, slashing through his memories lik
e his claws slashed through flesh. How could the Gaunt Man be doing this? There were no rune staves within his chest, no suction-cup wire devices connecting him to the machine. He fought the pain and actually managed to stand up straight. He searched the long corridor for some sign, some evidence of what the Gaunt Man was doing to him. He was in the deep cellar, in the last hallway before the iron-studded door to the Gaunt Man's workshop. Could it just be his proximity to
The walls flared with energy and blue-red sparkles burst from Kurst's body. He howled with pain, shifting to wolf form out of habit. The wolf form was stronger, more powerful than Kurst's human shape. Perhaps it could withstand this punishment better than he.
He continued down the corridor, walking on two powerful, fur-covered legs, his eyes searching walls, floor and ceiling for some clue he might have missed. The flare erupted again, and lightning arced from wall to wall in a web of crackling energy. Through the resulting pain, Kurst found understanding. It was the walls!
Carved into the walls, inscribed so carefully, so cleverly that they were almost impossible to see, were dozens of runes. The lightning bounced from rune to rune, forming an intricate latticework that mimicked the pattern over the sorting machine.
"Never life," Kurst read on a dozen runes. "Never death," he read on a dozen more.
Kurst ignored the pain, moving on when lesser beings would have collapsed long ago. He fought every step of the way, holding on to what was his with a fierce tenacity that was way beyond his endurance. His own name became lost in the rain of lightning and the swirl of blue-red sparkles, but he fought on.
He reached the iron-studded door.
The workshop. He knew the word, the name, but was no longer capable of attaching specific meaning to it. It was a huge room, and at one end was an amazing conglomeration of tubes and wires, glowing and humming now with incredible power. At the other end was the Gaunt Man. He was surprised he remembered that name.
Kurst nodded his head drunkenly, trying to recall what he remembered. He knew the Gaunt Man. He had a mission with that one, a confrontation. But he could not — something in his mind held him back. What had he meant to do with the Gaunt Man? He saw the other, bone thin and frighteningly tall, standing over a large metal plate set up on a bronze framework. A skeletal hand lost in a leather gauntlet held one of the glowing balls of blue-red sparkles, and as Kurst watched, the fist closed. The sparkles trickled from between the fingers and fell onto the plate, disappearing into the metal. Kurst screamed.
"Welcome, Kurst," said the Gaunt Man to the man- wolf. "So good of you to come. I've removed that disgusting sociability you'd picked up somewhere. You really had no need for it. Now come here."
The command was spoken as part of normal conversation, yet it whipped forth with an audible crack. Kurst took two steps forward, then he stopped. He fought against the words, the order. Then he remembered ... the machine! He had come to destroy... couldn't be done ... no possibility — what? He lurched forward and fell to his knees, gasping for breath.
"I am. Not. Your. Slave." The words came out of his clenched teeth like bullets, one at a time. Kurst discovered that he meant those words.
The Gaunt Man's laughter was terrible to hear. He stepped toward Kurst, advancing with slow deliberation.
"I'll rip away these feelings Kurst," he said forcefully, anger blazing in his emaciated face. "There will be no possibility of such behavior left anywhere in you. Then I'll turn you on those stormers you brought here and listen to your howls as you slay them and drink their blood." Another flash of blue-red burst out of Kurst's chest, and the werewolf whimpered with the pain. He fell forward onto his clawed hands and fur-covered knees, then onto his side where he lay gasping. The sparkles floated gently into the Gaunt Man's hand. He closed his fist, and more crushing pain assaulted the werewolf.
"You cannot defy me now, Kurst," the Gaunt Man
explained triumphantly. "There is nothing left of you
Kurst wept.
116
Scythak watched as the compound suddenly became alive with activity. Something had happened in the hospital, over in the area where all the soldiers and vehicles waited for someone to emerge from the building. Perhaps the activity was for the best. He could strike during the confusion and be on his way before they even noticed him.
"It's time," Scythak said to Dr. James Monroe.
"Time?" Monroe asked. "Are you going after Decker now?"
"Yes," Scythak replied, letting his hand shift into the tiger's claw. "And here is your reward for betraying your litter."
The claw slashed out, tearing a great, bloody hole in Monroe's throat. The doctor, eyes wide in surprise, tried to ask another question. But the words never reached his mouth; they simply bubbled out of the gaping wound in his neck, spilling more blood down the front of his shirt.
Monroe died. Then he fell to the ground.
"Stormer," Scythak spat, padding off toward the hospital.
Toward Decker.
117
Decker, numbed by the violent death of his friend and president, sat in the hall outside where the body lay. He couldn't think, couldn't weep. He could only see the pistol rise up, the bullets explode from the chamber in slow motion, the blood. He saw it over and over again, and he watched for something he could have done
differently. But all he saw was —
Blackness. It burst across his senses, blocking out everything else except the now-throbbing pain in his chest. A door swung open in the blackness before he could focus his thoughts, revealing a huge latticework pattern of glowing light. But the pattern wasn't complete yet. It still needed things added to it, removed from it. He pulled away an extraneous angle, ripping it from the pattern, and laughter filled his mind. It was a familiar sound. The Gaunt Man's sound.
"Ace, are you all right?" Julie asked, and the pattern and blackness fell apart like dandelions in the wind.
"Yeah, I think so," Decker said, but he knew it wasn't true. There was something about the pattern he had interfered with, something familiar.
"Kurst." The name appeared in his mind with blinding clarity. Somehow, the pattern was tied to Kurst.
"Julie, you have to help me," Decker said.
"Of course," she replied, but she looked confused.
"Next time the blackness comes upon me, let me go to it."
"What? Have you gone crazy? You want to go back to that awful beach? No way!"
"There's something happening," Decker explained as best he could. "It involves Kurst, and I think I was just used to hurt him. But if I go back, I think that I can help him."
"Maybe you're thinking too much, mister," Julie said angrily.
"Please, just be ready to pull me back after —"
The blackness was all around him again, washing over him like a breaking wave. Then the pattern appeared, and this time Decker studied it more carefully. He saw that it was actually two patterns. The dimmer pattern was an almost-uniform latticework that had rough edges and pleasing breaks from the whole that were a touch sporadic. The second pattern, the one that overlaid the first, was rigid and unyielding. There was no creativity inherent in the design, no flashes of brilliance. It was merely functional, defining its place with well-ruled lines and right angles. That was the pattern the Gaunt Man wanted him to force the other pattern — Kurst's pattern — to conform to.
"Choose," came the voice of the Gaunt Man.
Decker began his work, pointing out possible paths of deviance from the ordered pattern so that the Gaunt Man could tear them away. Decker hated himself more and more with each possibility the Gaunt Man slashed, but he knew that his plan was Kurst's only hope. For while he showed the Gaunt Man all of the minor deviances, he held back the bright glow in the center of Kurst's latticework.
Decker touched the glowing light, and waves of honor and nobility rippled through him. This was Kurst's greatest possibility, the destiny that life had originally set for him. But the Gaunt Man had changed all that. But maybe not as
completely as he had hoped.
"Choose," the Gaunt Man said again.
"Done," Decker answered, pulling his hand back from the light that looked like all the other lights to the Gaunt Man. And then the blackness faded —
— and Decker was in the hallway, sitting on the bench beside Julie.
"I didn't know how long to wait, but you were gone so long and ..." Julie stammered.
torg 02 - The Dark Realm Page 25
