Dark Kingdoms

by Richard Lee Byers

  He scowled the demoralizing thought away. No, damn it, they wouldn't. He'd promised to defend Louise and he was going to keep his vow. He drew on his Harbinger's abilities and cool, gray shadow oozed from his pores to flow across his skin. With luck, the Spectres would have difficulty targeting an invisible man.

  Intending to stop the creatures of Oblivion well before they reached Louise, Montrose flew several yards Up the path. When the Spectres came in range, he fired until the pistol was empty, dropping four of them. Then the vanguard of the charge hurtled into striking distance.

  The Cavalier attacked madly, again and again, flying in and back, up and down like an enraged hornet, relying on his veil of darkness to keep the doomshades' blows from landing, scarcely perceiving his foes as individual creatures. They seemed a single yammering, screeching, xeeking mass of shadow, equipped with countless sets of luminous eyes, rending talons, and gnashing fangs.

  Alighting on the path, he lunged and drove his point into the belly of a creature with Six tentacles and the face of a diseased bat. Stumbling backwards, ripples of black light washing through its chancrous flesh, the Spectre began to dissolve. But its death throes: would hinder the advance: of the doomshades behind it for at least one precious moment. Springing forward, Montrose thrust over the eroding corpse at the club-wielding minotaur just behind it. His point tore a gash in the horned Spectre's shoulder.

  Louise bellowed a kiai. Montrose pivoted toward the sound. Two Spectres had somehow gotten past him. Perhaps they'd clambered along the sheer walls instead of using the path, or perhaps they'd emerged from Nihils below the Heretic's position and then climbed back up to her. Now armed only with a knife and her kung fu, the Sister of Athena was fending them off as best she could.

  Something smashed into Montrose's back, staggering him. Addled by pain, he murkily realized that, despite his invisibility, the minotaur had managed to bludgeon him. Then he reeled over the edge of the drop.

  He frantically shut his eyes but caught a glimpse of the vortex anyway, and after that the image burned inside his mind, freezing him with terror, enticing him to a perverse but seductive consummation. He strained to supplant it by visualizing Louise's lovely face, and to reactivate his levitation abilities.

  For a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, nothing happened, and he was certain he was going to continue to fall. Then the Arcanos power stirred inside him. Keeping his eyes shut, relying on his pathfinder's instincts to guide him, flying as awkwardly as a bird with an injured wing, he lurched toward the path.

  His mystic powers faded abruptly, and he fell more than landed on the ledge, his knees slamming down painfully on the stone. Opening his eyes, he saw that he'd landed right beside Louise. She'd disposed of the Spectres which had been attacking her, but now their hideous companions were pounding down the path. The foremost were only a few feet away.

  "I need more time," the Sister of Athena said. Montrose realized that she could see him. He'd lost his veil of darkness.

  "I'll see to it," he groaned. He scrambled up, raised his sword, and his injured back throbbed. But he didn't have a moment left to heal himself, or to attempt to reactivate his Harbinger abilities either. Ignoring the discomfort as best he could, he hurled himself at the doomshades.

  He advanced, retreated, sidestepped. His narrow blade dropped, rose, shifted back and forth, deceiving attempts to block it, then flashed forward in lethal thrusts. For a few moments it almost appeared as if his prowess, coupled with his boldness, might actually be enough to see him through. He dispatched the minotaur with an attack to the groin, then slew three of the doomshades with the double reptilian faces. The remaining Spectres seemed to falter. To flinch.

  Then the whole mass of them roared as one, and plunged forward. Forced irresistibly backwards, unable to go back on the offensive, Montrose ducked and parried frantically. A bone-and-obsidian sword whizzed by an inch from his temple. Iron claws streaked at his eyes, and came close enough to tear his jade mask off. The follow-up attack sliced open his left forearm.

  "I've got it!" croaked Louise. She scrambled unsteadily to his side. Her dagger wove shaky defensive patterns in the air.

  Trusting her to guard his back, Montrose wheeled to inspect her handiwork. A lump of basalt about three feet across, composed of several smaller pieces fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, lay amid the scrcc beneath the fresh gouge in the cliff. In the center of the stone hissed a glittering Nihil the size of a man's skull.

  Montrose grimaced. He'd never tried to pass through such a small rift. But Adrain, his mentor in the mystic arts, had once told him that if a Nihil was undersize but not too tiny, a skillful Harbinger could sometimes force it to admit him, and now he was going to have to try.

  "Now I need time," he said. He called on his powers and stared at the pocket of seething darkness, struggling to impose his will on it. After several seconds his Harbinger perceptions reported that the rift had dilated, although to normal vision it was the same size as before. The contradictory impressions made his head ache and his stomach twist.

  "Come on!" Montrose shouted, hastening back to Louise. Fighting side by side, they retreated to the stone, the Spectres slashing and battering at them every inch of the way. "Go through. You first. It's bigger than it looks."

  She whirled and scrambled into the Nihil. Watching from the corner of his eye, Montrose saw to his relief that the opening did indeed admit her entire squirming body. Her legs seemed to flop around at impossible angles as she wriggled through, as if her limbs had turned to rubber.

  Her feet disappeared. Montrose drove the Spectres back a pace with a lightning series of feints, then threw his rapier at them, whirled, and dove for the Nihil.

  When he inserted his hands and arms, pain spiked through them, as if they were being crushed. Not allowing the sensation to deter him, he struggled on. Once his head slipped inside, he beheld a phosphorescent emerald tunnel extending ahead of him with no apparent end in sight. The air had an acrid smell, and stung his eyes.

  The pain kept grinding at his body, as if the extra-dimensional passage were clenching around him, constricting his flesh. Nevertheless, crawling frantically, he made headway anyway. Until fingers grabbed his right ankle.

  He kicked backward with the foot that was still free. His boot heel slammed into something solid, and the grip on his other leg slipped away. Realizing that he had, at most, only another second or two to drag himself beyond the Spectres' reach, he wriggled forward again.

  Though he couldn't see anything ahead but more blank tunnel, he felt small, strong hands grip his wrists and heave him forward. An instant later, the Nihil passage seemed to vanish, though he could still sense the mouth of it suspended invisibly in the air behind him. He lay on his stomach in a desert of bluish sand, from which crooked towers of gnarled, eroded stone rose against a stormy sky. An icy wind blew veils of grit across the landscape, and high overhead, in the churning thunderheads, humanoid figures solidified, and then, mewling and whimpering, melted back into swirling vapor once again.

  The Tempest had rarely looked so good to him.

  TWO

  Louise hauled Montrose to his feet. "Hold the gate for a moment," he said.

  The Sister of Athena was still unsteady from her exertions, but she gave him a game smile. "We could hold it forever," she said, "since they have to come through one at a time."

  "Don't count on it," he said, concentrating to activate his Arcanos. "Remember, they're better at passing through Nihils than we are. Besides, I sense a number of rifts in the immediate area. They're liable to pop out of any one of them. However, now that we're away from the black whirlpool, I should be able to fly freely."

  Fifty feet away, a patch of air shimmered, and a trio of doomshades leaped out of it. But at the same moment, he felt the Arcanos power rise inside him. Grinning, scarcely able to believe that he and Louise had escaped after all, he felt a giddy urge to tease the monsters. To let them charge almost close enough to assail their prey
before he and his companion soared out of their reach.

  But of course it was a mad idea. Far better to play it safe. He put his arms around Louise, and his battered back throbbed in protest. Tightening his jaw against the pain, he carried her upward. The frigid wind tore at their garments. The Spectres screeched, hissed, and brandished their peculiar swords in impotent fury.

  Louise laughed down at them. "So long, suckers!" she cried.

  Montrose chuckled. "That's not very refined language for a princess, or a woman of the cloth either."

  He wended his way among the columns of weathered stone, keeping a wary eye out for any of the dangers infesting the Tempest, perils which could assume an infinite variety of forms. A creature with a lion's head and veined, transparent insectile wings, crouching on a ledge, roared at the wraiths but chose not to fly up and attack them. Streamers of amber gas, somehow moving against the howling wind, corroded whatever they touched. A gurgling fountain of red wine suffused the air fifty feet away with its rich bouquet. The scent was so enticing it made Montrose's head swim, but, certain that the liquid was either deadly in its own right or the bait in a snare, he forced himself to turn and go in the opposite direction.

  Finally he found what he was searching for, and touched down on a ledge near the top of one of the columns. "No lurking beasts here," he said, "nor, as far as I can tell, are there any spatial rifts within a hundred yards. So we ought to be able to rest without any Spectres popping out at us."

  "That sounds good to me," said Louise. With a twinge of reluctance, he let go of her, and she slumped down against a boulder. After a moment, pale, scraped patches on her hands and jaws—the ghost equivalent of bruises—began to disappear. Her cuts and scratches faded as well, but more slowly. Wounds inflicted by the claws and fangs of Spectres were generally more difficult to heal.

  Montrose took another look around, making absolutely certain that nothing was creeping up on them, then sat down on an outcropping and set about mending his own injuries, relishing the sensation of the ache in his back ebbing away.

  A bolt of crimson lightning cracked through the clouds overhead, destroying the vaporous figures once and for all. A drizzle of blood began to fall.

  "What shall we do after we refresh ourselves?" asked Louise.

  "Return to Stygia and stop the Deathlords from slaughtering one another," the Scot replied. "Despite this little detour, our objective hasn't changed."

  "Of course not," said Louise, "but can we get back in time? Demetrius said that the Smiling Lord was about to lure the rest of the Seven into his trap, and I doubt we can return to Charon's vault the way we came. The Spectres won't leave that portal unguarded. The rest of the Nihils opening into the cavern are too small for us to pass through. And we're not likely to find any other rifts that lead to Stygia at all, are "We have one chance," the Scot replied. "Demetrius's mirror."

  She cocked her head. "I thought that only connected Chiarmonte's study with the vault."

  Montrose peered about. Far off in the distance:, on the ground, a pack of enormous wolflike creatures pursued a humanoid figure with an enormous eyeball for a head, but nothing was stirring in the immediate vicinity. A drop of blood splatted against the Scot's face, and he wiped it away. "It's possible that there's an opening here in the Tempest, also. Even if there isn't, the two ends must connect through the Tempest. That's the only way the magick could work. If I can find the tunnel, I might be able to force another opening," He grimaced. "Listen to me. 'If 'Might.' You can tell that I'm out of my depth. Adrain, my teacher, told me that I had the capacity to become a very good Harbinger, but I never really tried to fathom the deeper mysteries of the craft. I just took what I needed to lead my Legionnaires and advance my career in the Hierarchy. And after I secured a permanent position at Court, I was too busy enjoying my pleasures and jockeying for preference even to practice what I had learned. What an ass I was, to fail to appreciate the gift I'd been given."

  She rose stiffly, crossed the space that separated them, and put her scratched, abraded hand on his shoulder. "Don't be discouraged," she said. "You've mastered every challenge so far. We both have. We escaped the Artificers' pit and slipped into the Onyx Tower when both those feats were supposed to be impossible. And we're going to keep rising to the occasion until we accomplish what we set out to do."

  His chest ached, and his throat felt clogged. He had to swallow before he could speak. "When Demetrius's trap sprang shut on us and the Spectres flowed out of the wall, I realized something. I still love you."

  She hesitated. He wished she weren't wearing the golden mask, so he could see all of her face. "Despite the fact that I betrayed you?" she asked at length.

  "It wasn't your fault. I know that now."

  "I'm glad, because I still love you as well."

  He stared at her, half suspecting she was mocking him. "Even though I tortured you, sent you to the Soulforges, and then tried to kill you with my own hands?5*

  She smiled mischievously. "All couples have their little tiffs. I understand you were upset."

  He shook his head. "I can't believe this."

  "Why did you think I accompanied you on your mission? I mean, after you were finally convinced that I didn't mean to betray you."

  "To preserve the Hierarchy and thus prevent the Spectres from overrunning the entire Underworld."

  She rolled her eyes. "Well, if you must be technical, that was part of it too. But I thought we were trying to be amorous."

  "Then by all means," he said, rising, "let's be amorous." He took her in his arms and kissed her.

  He felt that he could have clung to her forever, and she seemed just as avid for his embrace, but eventually, as if responding to a common signal, they loosened their arms and moved slightly apart. Louise was breathing heavily, if needlessly. For his part, Montrose almost imagined he felt a heart pounding in his chest.

  "This isn't really the time or the place for this, is it?" the Heretic said.

  "Alas, no," Montrose said, cautiously surveying their surroundings. "We have to move on soon. Do you feel strong enough?"

  "Yes," she said. "You know what they say about the Restless. We derive our vitality from pure emotion. And the last couple minutes were extremely emotional."

  He picked her up in his arms, then levitated. Flying among the pillars, soaring high and swooping low, he made his way from one dimensional distortion to the next. Some rifts were imperceptible to ordinary sight, while others were visible as white ovals hanging unsupported in space, inky tunnels opening in rocky walls, or a wavering like air shimmering above hot pavement. Sometimes, probing them, he formed some psychic impression of what place lay on the other side, but other times, not. In the latter cases, he relied on pure pathfinder's instinct to decide whether he'd found the passage he wanted. He didn't dare start trying them at random. Aside from the danger—one never knew what predator might be lying in wait on the far side—some gates only worked in one direction, or blinked out of existence after a single transit. He and Louise could wind up stranded a thousand realities away from Stygia, with no possibility of making their way back in time.

  Once they flew over a quartet of scaly black Spectres with double faces, who gave chase until Montrose lost them by flying behind a pillar and doubling back on the far side. "I'm surprised we haven't seen more of them," said Louise.

  "I'm not," said the Scot. "They don't think we can get to the Isle of Sorrows, either. And since their goal was to keep us from interfering with the impending conflict there, they think they've won. Thus, malice aside, they see no reason to hunt us with extraordinary zeal."

  "It's going to be satisfying to prove them wrong."

  "I hope so," said Montrose grimly, swooping down toward another rift, this one an octagonal pit in the desert floor with tongues of flame licking around the edges. There were so many distortions to check, and no way to be certain he was spotting them all. Or even that time was passing at the same rate here as in Stygia. Perhaps he and Louise wo
uld return only to discover that the Deathlords' battle had been over for hours.

  Floating above the pit, he sensed that it led to a benighted swamp in the Shadowlands, an unwholesome place infested with mosquitoes, water moccasins, and quicksand. He scowled at the portal's uselessness, and Louise gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze. He flew on, heading for a dark fissure halfway up one of the rocky columns.

  En route, he sensed a tiny flaw, like a hairline crack, marring the fabric of reality about forty feet above the ground. He approached it, probed it, but received no impression at all of what lay on the other side. He started to turn away and his wayfarer's intuition froze him in place.

  "What is it?" asked Louise.

  "It's little more than a hunch, but I think I may have found it. If so, the mirror passage doesn't have a branch opening into the Tempest. But the channel is right in front of us. Behind an invisible wall, so to speak."

  "Can you break through?"

  He shrugged. "Generally I can only punch holes from the Shadowlands into the Tempest. But since there's already a weakness here, perhaps I have a chance. Let's find out."

  Drawing on his Harbinger energies, willing the tiny scratch on the surface of space to shatter into a true rift, he hammered it. Nothing happened. He lashed out again, even more forcefully. The flaw popped slightly open and instantly sealed itself again, like an eyelid blinking up and down, affording him a tantalizing glimpse of the pearly hyperspatial passage on the other side.

  "Well, there definitely is.somethinghere," Montrose said. "I can discern that much." Grunting,as if he were using every iota of his physical strength, he willed the fracture to open.

  Space tore, and the luminous tunnel swallowed them. For a moment they hurtled down it as if they'd been shot out of a cannon. Then the channel spat them back into the Tempest, and they started to fall. Teeth gritted, Montrose arrested their descent and levitated back up to the flaw, which was once again as impassable as it had been originally.