Penult

by A. Sparrow

  We made it across the causeway. Karla again reached for my hand. This time I took hers gladly. I was getting nervous and in need of a little human contact. I glanced at her, and she looked right back, unsmiling. She was looking worried, too.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. I kept my lips pursed tight. Her question startled me. I wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Was she talking about us or just things in general? I just kept lips pursed tight. Either way, there was nothing I could say that would portray the full complexity of my anxieties.

  As we started up the slope, something clanged and chimed in the distance. It was a pretty sound, like church bells sounding a mildly dissonant chord in unison. The white spires of the city underwent a subtle change. The blue-green glacial tint of their more shadowy recesses turned purplish, like veins behind pale skin. The Pennies who had stopped to watch us scurried off abruptly, looking a bit panicky and confused.

  “Shit,” said Karla.

  “Okay people. This is it!” said Olivier. “Raise the column! They’re onto us.”

  Chapter 64: Demons

  Georg released the clingy straps that secured the column to the beetle and let it slide off Rhino's back. It clanked like tone wood as it bounced and rolled into one of the shallow ditches that bordered the roadway. Ubaldo grabbed a U-shaped block from Rhino's back and leapt into the ditch, hammering it into the ground against the uphill side of the column. Georg attached one of the cables affixed to loops halfway up the column while the rest of us grabbed the other lines and hurried uphill until they went taut.

  “Go easy now,” said Olivier. “Equal tension. Keep it centered.”

  Slowly, we raised the column, like colonists hauling up the corner post of a barn. Loomis continued to clang its polyphonic alarm. The spectators had scattered and were fleeing back to the city on their scooters.

  When the column was vertical, I dropped my line and rushed over and retracted the lowest ring of spikes, rotating the bottom segment until the nubs lined up with those just above it, just as I had seen Victoria do. As I worked my way up segment by segment, the cracker came to life. Air hissed through its myriad channels. The outer surface grew hot and began to shimmer and ripple, cycling through a complex series of textures. Spiky supports sprouted from the base and drilled their way deep into the dirt and chalk beneath.

  I glanced up-slope, half expecting to see an army of Cherubim charging down at us. The towers of Loomis had gone all gunmetal gray tinged with purple and veiled with mist. The mist swirled and grew until it shrouded the tallest of the buildings.

  “This ain't right,” said Olivier. “This cracker's not shaking nearly as much as it needs to. Are you doing it the right way?”

  “I ... I thought so.” I stared at the segments, noticing one ring that wasn't quite perfectly aligned.

  I grabbed onto the spikes and yanked. It wouldn't budge.

  “It's ... stuck.”

  “That cloud! It's coming this way!” said Karla.

  There was a granularity to the mist now that told me that its individual components were much larger than I first thought. It was made not of water vapor but of objects. They looked like birds from afar, but they moved like bats, their bodies withered and spare like origami doves.

  Several strands swirled up and converged into a huge clot of white that arced upward forming a parabolic trajectory that peaked and dove like a huge, white amorphous fist slamming towards us. I tried to ignore it as I fiddled with the cracker, twirling the control rings one by one.

  Olivier tried to help but had not absorbed the lesson as clearly as me. The fist of doves accelerated, whistling like those screaming meemie fireworks that used to freak me out when I was a kid.

  As the fringe of lone fliers preceding the main swarm was about to hurtle into us, Olivier thrust out his staff and conjured a spell. I suppose he had intended to raise a shield but diffuse field that sizzled out the splintered end of his stick, wiggled in the breeze like a giant soap bubble before popping and splattering bits of plasma on the ground.

  I had no choice but to divert my attention from the column and stuck my sword out at the oncoming threat. Spells happened now without my having to think, which was good and bad. Spontaneity was nice but my instincts did not always make the best decisions.

  The blast that issued forth from the tip of my blackened sword was plenty powerful, but much too concentrated, punching a hole through the center of the mass of paper doves, wadding a bunch together and dropping them out of the formation. I might as well have fired a bullet into a cloud of smoke. The vacated spot filled right back up and the mass kept on swarming towards us.

  “Take cover!” said Ubaldo.

  Solomon dropped to his knees and covered himself with the thick, homespun cloak that doubled as his bedroll and armor. Ubaldo and Olivier pressed themselves into the muck at the bottom of the ditch, while Georg took refuge behind his beetle.

  Karla just stood and gawked, mesmerized. I had visions of her walking into that patch of Fellstraw.

  “It's okay. There’s nothing to them. They're just paper,” said Karla. “Maybe they are just trying to scare us.”

  “Get down!” I dove at her knees and tackled her to the ground.

  The leading edge of the cloud came at us in two strands. They curled around and converged over the column and engulfing it in a maelstrom of paper, chewing and slashing like a swarm of chainsaws. The ground around us erupted in a tornado of grit and shredded grass. Karla cried out as one of the paper birds latched onto her elbow and snipped at her with its serrated beak. Georg howled with rage and pain as he lashed out with his scepter, struggling to protect Rhino from the onslaught, but as Urszula had warned, spells did not come easy in this corner of the realm.

  I crawled on top of Karla and smothered her, covering every inch of her with my body while the paper demon birds nipped and slashed at my clothes and skin, biting into flesh and drawing blood.

  “Goddamnit! I had enough of this shit!”

  The reluctant lode of willpower lurking deep in my belly took charge and sprang to life, expanding my force of will outward in all directions, forming an impenetrable, corrosive shield of protection. Scores of paper demons failed to breach it. They burst into flames and crumbled to ashes.

  The shield smothered all outside sounds. All I could hear now was my own and Karla's breathing. She twisted around to face me and kissed me on the lips, her cheeks damp with tears.

  I felt only numbness inside and pain where the avatars had nicked me. Maybe Karla interpreted my actions as an act of love, but what I had done for her, I had done more out of respect for the memory of what we once had. That feeling was gone now, snuffed beyond hope of reincarnation. It might be argued that a love that fragile was not worth reviving.

  I said nothing and did not return her affections, just held her close and waited out the storm, listening for clues as to what was happening around us. As the shield relaxed it allowed some sounds to seep through the barrier. Anonymous groans. Dying flutters and hisses. A tinkling as chunks of the wrecked column broke off and shattered on the roadway.

  It sickened me that we had come all this way and risked so much for nothing. After a time, a cool wind played against my cheek and I knew that my will had receded back into its source. The shield was gone, but so were the demon birds. All that remained were crumpled and brittle remains strewn all over the ground around us.

  I stood up and took measure of the situation. Karla, still a little skittish, stayed down. The column lay in pieces arrayed around a jagged stub that remained planted in the ground. The ground around it seemed untouched. He had not managed to activate it sufficiently to conjure anything approaching a root quake.

  Just off the road, Rhino lay upended, the membranes joining his thick plates between segments slashed by a thousand cuts, many studded with the remnants of the suicidal paper birds. Yellowish hemolymph gushed from wounds with each upward heave of his plates.

  I found Olivier crumpled in a ditch an
d panting, his face all bloodied. Georg lay lifeless beside him, his throat slashed, his neck broken. Ubaldo and Solomon came staggering over to join me, their clothes shredded and dripping blood.

  “Fucking avatars,” said Olivier, grimacing. “We could have made armor, a shelter, something.”

  Ubaldo's wasp landed beside her master and gently reached out with her palps to taste his mangled elbow.

  “No!” said Ubaldo. “You go! I will call you.”

  The wasp obeyed. With a flick of its wings it was off the ground and zooming back towards the shore.

  “But maybe we should call the bugs and skedaddle, yes?” said Karla, finally emerging from the ditch. “I mean, what else can we do here?”

  Ubaldo stood and stared up the road towards the city whose spires were brightening, shedding their purple tinges, returning to their original palette of glacial blues and greens.

  A contingent of heavily-armed Hashmallim, some riding on large, armored carts, others jogging on foot, had fanned out across the meadows and were making their way down to us. Above them, a lone winged Seraph, guided their assault.

  “We fight,” said Ubaldo.

  Chapter 65: Replica

  Karla shut her eyes, pinched her face and shrieked in a pitch almost beyond the range of human hearing, a talent most humans lose by the age of three.

  “You are calling your insect,” said Ubaldo, crimping his brow.

  “Yes! Of course,” said Karla. “We can’t fight this many. They will destroy us.”

  “Go, if you want,” said Ubaldo, shrugging and turning away. “I will stay.”

  “Yeah. Me too,” said Olivier, sighing.

  “And me, as well,” said Solomon, running his hand along the shaft of his scepter.

  “That is sheer foolishness,” said Karla. “Everyone, call your bugs! We live to fight another day.”

  Her agitated eyes sought and demanded my support.

  “Come, James. You will ride with me. We will go find your Tigger.”

  I looked away, unable to endure her beckoning stare.

  “I’m thinking … I might stay … too.”

  “What? Don’t be so ridiculous! Come with me. We can still get away.”

  I didn’t really want to stay. It felt wrong, though, to run off and leave our friends to be massacred. It wasn’t bravery or stupidity operating here. It was loyalty. Besides, we had come a long way to get here. I just didn’t see the point of running away, particularly since I was already dying in the only place that mattered to me.

  Karla’s burly robber fly came hurtling up over the top of the hill skimming its tarsi against the tall grass as it kept low across the sloping meadows. The creature, well over a hundred pounds, pulled up on a dime, alighting beside her as gently as a leaf.

  “I’m staying.”

  Karla shot me a pissed grimace and glanced away, but then she directed another darting glance at me, this one infused with a speck more worry and guilt. I did not engage her directly, watching out of the corner of my eye while she hopped into the saddle and rapped her heels against her fly’s back.

  “Fools!”

  Her robber fly burst away, back from whence it had come. I snuck a peek at her zooming off, but I had no regrets.

  Several falcons that had emerged from the city broke off to intercept her, while the rest kept pace with the Hashmallim and Cherubim on foot below, providing air cover. The Pennies took their time in getting us surrounded. They were being ultra-cautious.

  They must have found it suspicious to come across such a tiny force of invaders. They probably have thought this was a trap; that a larger force of raiders lay in wait somewhere out of sight. I could only wish.

  Three Seraphim now hovered above each line of advance, while two contingents of chariot-like scooters swooped around behind us, converging to cut off our escape route across the causeway.

  “Okay fellas, this is it,” said Olivier, as he attempted to rise but collapsed again to his knees, his head drooping. “Fuck! I think I lost a bunch of blood. I can feel it in my head.”

  From behind the gleaming towers of Loomis, a parade of other winged devices emerged—slow, frilly, pastel-colored contraptions, built more for comfort than combat.

  “The Lords,” said Solomon.

  Olivier crouched, panting. “Oh, they’ve come out to watch the slaughter. How special.”

  Several long trains of carts pulled up on the ring road just above us and disgorged their sluggish Cherubim cargo, standing stiff and tall. Hashmallin marched into chevrons on the slopes.

  A peculiar, heavily armored cart arrived and a pair of Hashmallim dismounted, unloading from the back a huge device with a long shaft and strings connected to bulbous outgrowths. It looked more musical instrument than weapon—an unholy three-way cross between sitar, harp and bazooka.

  The ranks of Cherubim halted about a hundred meters out. A lone Hashmal emerged and strolled down to a point in the meadow about halfway between us and the sitar wielders on the ring road. He was sheathed in a sparse and satiny armor that padded and protected only the most vulnerable parts of his body, including a half helm with flanges that covered his neck.

  He called down to us in that strange language of theirs. When we did not respond, he cycled through French, Spanish and German before he made it to English.

  “Why are you here?”

  Solomon and I just looked each other. Ubaldo just glared and caressed one of the huge arrow shafts he had liberated from the Hashmal on the boat.

  “We’re returning one of your poles,” said Olivier.

  “Poles?”

  Olivier gestured towards the shattered remains of the cracker column heaped in the road.

  “Yeah. Thought you might like it back.”

  The Hashmal stared straight at Olivier, his expression flat.

  “This realm is off limits to you and your kind. The surface is forbidden to you. Place your weapons down and give yourselves to us. We will process you appropriately and humanely. Otherwise, you shall be dispatched without mercy.”

  “Yeah, well how about you dispatch this!” said Olivier, brandishing his middle finger.

  Ubaldo, his arrow already strung, raised his bow, but the Hashmallim with the sitar-like device were quicker. One aimed while the other plucked its one thick strand. The space before it grew as blurry as the air above a flame.

  None of us took cover. We saw no projectile. We didn’t know what was happening. But when the wings of the device whipped forward, a shock wave came hurtling towards us, refracting the air before it in concentric waves like ripples propagating across a pond. It wafted harmlessly through the ranks of Cherubim, but the wave gained power and solidity the farther it flew.

  Ubaldo shot his giant arrow at the thing. It stuck as if had hit a wall of mud and tumbled back at us. Just before the wave hit, Olivier and Solomon each managed to unleash a pair of stout pulses from their scepters, but the blasts simply vanished, their energy consumed and incorporated into the oncoming force.

  The wave slammed into me with the force of a speeding truck, bludgeoning my ribs and my head. My sword went flying from my grip and I fell backward, clutching my middle, struggling to breathe as it sucked the air right out of my lungs. The wave lingered over us and swirled like a tornado, scouring away what remained of our already shredded clothes.

  Ubaldo and Solomon dove to the ground. Their weapons crumbled like unfired clay. Stubborn Olivier took the full brunt of the blow and was summarily slammed to the ground. I rolled into a shallow gully and covered my face until the wave and its vicious little back eddies had dissipated.

  The air cleared to reveal Cherubim advancing in close formation from three directions, followed closely by their overseers. Olivier lay writhing and coughing in the tall grass beside me.

  I spotted my blackened, swollen sword lying on the ground. It had somehow survived the blow. I reached for it and groaned. The broken ends of my ribs crunched and stabbed at me when I moved. With great difficulty,
still woozy from the blow to my head, I rose to my feet.

  Solomon knelt on the ground, looking hopeless and beaten, but Ubaldo was crouched, trying to pry a rock out of the turf. I stuck my sword out at the Cherubim and tried to summon a pulse. More often than not, my will failed me when I needed it most.

  “That’s it people. I’m done,” said Olivier, rolling over onto his back. “What the heck? They can’t say we didn’t try.”

  I stood glaring at the sword in my hand, begging it funnel my will against the plodding Cherubim. The bumps and etchings in its textured surface wavered in and out of focus.

  Within that mental and visual haze, a strange clarity came to me. A faint echo of the Singularity reached out to me. The intricate patterning on the now swollen and blackened blade suddenly made sense. It looked just like the cracker—a scale model faithful to every nub and groove in the full-sized column. Victoria had been in the process of modifying and activating one of the captured columns in the grotto when she turned her aggressions to me. While fighting me, perhaps she inadvertently transferred its structure to my sword. Could that really be true?

  I stabbed the dull point of my sword into the ground and pried at the lowermost nubs with my fingernails. A ring of spines popped free. I folded them flat. The segment was then free to rotate, just like the original cracker. I rotated it and worked my way up the shaft. The sword grew hot and began to hiss and vibrate and lengthen and swell.

  The Cherubim paused, halted by their Hashmallim. The sword began to vibrate. I worried that this model column, while functional, would ultimately project only a tiny fraction of the force of the real ones. But as I freed the topmost ring of spines and turned, the ground began to shake vigorously beyond an island of calm demarcated by a ten meter radius around the sword point.

  Ubaldo dropped his stone and dragged Olivier into the circle of calm. Solomon, re-energized and heartened by hope, found his legs and came over to help. The harp wielders hustled closer with their apparatus and fired off another blast.