by Jack Conner
She nodded, grim. “So are yours.”
She started to move around him, trying to get at the dagger again and draw it out for another blow, but he turned with her, not letting her circle him.
Frustrated, she turned to Layanna. “Finish him.”
Layanna hesitated. Her gaze moved from Uthua to Sheridan, then Avery.
“Please,” Avery said. “Kill him while he’s vulnerable.”
Layanna didn’t move. “Just why would Sheridan destroy herself for you, Francis?” Her voice was deceptively mild.
Gods, not this. “Because ...” Avery thought desperately. “She cares for me. She’s a friend.”
“That’s all?”
“Of course.”
Throughout all this, the Sleeper on his pedestal watched contentedly, perhaps enjoying the show. He certainly made no move to help Uthua or obliterate him.
“Cut it out,” Hildra said, stepping forward suddenly. “We don’t have time for your bullshit, blondie. You’re the only one of us that can kill him. Do it!”
Layanna trained her attention on Uthua.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because ... you have a place with us. I know you think you’ve forfeited it, but you haven’t. Not if I speak on your behalf.”
Something flickered in her eyes. “You ... would do that?”
Uthua seemed to see her longing; Avery did. “I renounce the forgiveness I offered to Sheridan and give it to you instead. You have my word. Help me bring the Sleeper back to my people and they will become your people again, too. You can return to the cities in the deep. You can even return to Xicor’ogna.”
The idea seemed to stun her. “No reparations? No punishment?”
“You will be ... free. Free and where you belong.”
She chewed her bottom lip.
“Don’t listen to him,” Avery said. “He’ll say anything.”
“No.” Her voice was firm. “His word is binding.”
“He has no honor.” Just the same, Avery remembered extracting a promise from the Collossum in the block-dome of Lord Onxcor; Uthua had honored it then.
“Doesn’t he?” Layanna said, as if reading Avery’s mind. “I think he has a great deal. More than some people, perhaps.” Again her eyes flicked from Avery to Sheridan. “I’ve made my decision. Uthua will live. Anyone that acts against him will face my wrath.”
Uthua’s head dropped, just a bit, and Avery could see how weak he really was.
“Thank you,” said the Mnuthra. “You won't regret this.”
“What have you done?” Hildra asked Layanna. “Have you gone over—back to them? After all this?”
“I haven’t picked a side,” she said.
“Gods damn you, blondie.” For a moment, she appeared about to spring on Layanna, and Avery had the wild thought that this is how Hildra would die, that Layanna would be the one to kill her. But then she relaxed, or at least held herself back from attacking, and Avery breathed easier.
To Uthua, Layanna said, “You will not harm Francis.”
Uthua lifted his lips, revealing needle-sharp teeth. “He must die. The Sleeper said so.”
They glared at each other, and Avery tensed. Before Layanna could reply, a tide of figures stormed into the room, Segrul at their head. The flabby white pirate, whose infection had erased almost every human feature, squelched with each step. Avery’s group leapt back, drawing their weapons if they had them and forming a half-circle around the ramp leading up to the Sleeper’s pedestal.
“Who are you?” demanded the Sleeper, and for the first time it sounded puzzled. “I did not foresee your presence.”
“I guess not,” Segrul said, stopping just beyond Avery’s group. He held up a strange object, like a cube made of glass, but not quite, and with too many angles. It seemed both present and at the same time not, as if wedged halfway between dimensions. “My guess is you can’t see a lot of things. Especially not after this point. The branches of the tree of the future grow pretty dim, don’t they, mate?”
“If you’re saying that I may die, death is always possible,” said the Sleeper. “For everyone, at every time. I cannot see every future. I certainly cannot see how I will die. But that object you carry ...”
“A little gift from me masters. It clouds your vision, or so I’m told, and stops your ability to draw on other planes, too. Guess it works.”
“Where did you get your technology?” Layanna said. “My people lost such knowledge long ago, before we came to this world.”
“You lost it,” Segrul said. “My masters didn’t.”
“Segrul, you bastard,” Janx said. “What the hell’ve you gotten yourself into?”
The pirate had no real face, as such, but there seemed to be a smile in his voice as he said, “The winning side, I s’pose. It’s good to see you, too, Janx. One final time.”
“Come and get me.”
“Killing you would be too easy.” Segrul lifted a pudgy finger toward Hildra. “But her?”
“Try me, fuckface,” she said, raising both gun and hook.
“Move against us or the Sleeper and we’ll shoot you first,” Avery said, and nodded to the others. As one, they trained their weapons on Segrul.
With a flick of the pirate’s wrist, the air seemed to move around him. Avery tried to spot the bend and flex of light around the members of the mystery party, but in this place, with its strange energies and bubbling realities, he saw precious little. Sheridan, Janx and Hildra aimed down the sights of their weapons, seeking targets that could not be seen, then cried out as something slammed into them, and one by one the guns were wrenched from their hands and they were knocked to the floor.
Avery pushed Ani toward the pedestal. “Hide!”
She hesitated, then edged toward the pedestal.
He dove for one of the weapons, but something blasted him across the face, sending him skittering across the crystal, and he looked up, dazed, to see Layanna crying out as something struck her, too. Angrily, she ducked back.
“You won't get the Sleeper!” she said, and her other-self exploded outward. She struck and whipped the air with her tentacles. An unseen attacker screamed in pain. Others moved against her, and Avery saw her amoebic sac flare with unhealthy light when the poison-laden tendrils struck her. She fought back, her tentacles waving, grasping ... She seized on something, Avery could see her limb curling around an invisible shape, then crushing it. The shape snapped into visibility and blood fountained from between the coils of her tentacle.
Her attackers were too many, though, and too deadly. As they struck her, her sac shrank around her, and she sagged back, and back. At last her other-self gave out, withdrawing into her body with a slurp and a disorienting lurch of reality, and the human form of Layanna collapsed to the ground.
Hildra had been knocked to the ground, but she rose to all fours and scrambled for her gun.
Segrul kicked her over onto her back. He pressed a wet white foot on her chest, forcing her down. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said, and gazed down at her with pity.
“Bastard!” Janx said. Climbing to his feet, he launched himself at the pirate admiral. Invisible shapes clutched him, holding him back. “Let! Her! Go!”
Segrul laughed. “I’ve wanted to see that look on your face for a very long time, my friend.” He shook his blubbery head. “A shame it took this to bring it out.”
His foot bore down more heavily on Hildra’s chest, grinding her into the floor.
“Get—off!” she said, but the words came out in a wheeze. She had no air to speak with. She beat against the foot, but Segrul was heavy and strong. When she slashed him with her hook, he merely bellowed and an invisible shape held the hook down.
Avery, fighting the ringing in his head, picked himself up and moved toward her. Something knocked him sideways and he felt venom burn into him. He struggled to get up again but couldn’t.
This is it, he thought, and knew it m
ust be true. This was when Hildra would die. Of course, she might only be the first of them.
“You betrayed me and left me,” Segrul told Janx, “and I’ve hounded you for many years because of it. Now the day of vengeance has come. But it’s those you love who will suffer first.” He stretched out a hand to a subordinate, and the fellow placed a revolver in the shapeless paw. Segrul trained the weapon down at Hildra’s head.
She squirmed under his foot. “You—can’t—”
Avery saw the terror and anger in her face, the horror on Janx’s, and the amused pity on Segrul as he very, very slowly squeezed the trigger.
The trigger clicked back, and the gun roared.
* * *
The shot rang loud and long, and Avery knew he would never forget, no matter whether he lived one more second or one more century, the sight of Hildra dying under that blast, pinned beneath Segrul’s foot, or the manic rage that twisted Janx’s face into an insane mask. Cords stood out on his neck and sweat covered his face, which grew red with the strain of him hurling himself against the members of the mystery party that held him. Finally, he managed to take a step toward Segrul, then another.
Alarmed, Segrul stepped back.
The mystery party must have pushed Janx back harder, as he suddenly had to strain even more. His face grew so red Avery feared his heart would burst.
Suddenly moving forward, Segrul cracked Janx across the face with the butt of his pistol, and the big man sagged to his knees. Blood drooled from his mouth. His wounded eyes strayed to Hildra and took in the sight of her, blood spreading out from behind her head, then he looked away. When he turned back to Segrul, a slow-burning anger had replaced his rage, but it was far more frightening.
Segrul patted Janx on his bald head, laughing when Janx struggled to get at him. “I feel better now," the pirate admiral said. To the air, he said, “End this.”
Just vaguely Avery could see the air bending, traveling up the ramp toward the Sleeper. Still in shock over Hildra’s death, Avery watched as the Sleeper finally roused itself, flexing its body.
Too late.
Unseen shapes tore at it. Rips opened along its top and flanks, and pale white blood gushed out, steaming.
“NO!” Ani cried, leaving the safety behind the pedestal.
The Sleeper bellowed, a sound that shook the room, perhaps even reality itself, and the chamber rocked as the mystery party continued to assault the great being. A crystal stalactite broke off and shattered on the floor not far from Segrul, making several pirates leap away.
“What are you doing?” Uthua growled, still kneeling on the floor with one hand supporting him, knife sticking from his back. “Leave the Sleeper be, you fool! Whoever your masters are now, Segrul, they need the Sleeper alive!”
Segrul did not deign to reply. Above, on the pedestal, the Sleeper gave a gargantuan roar, then slumped back, dead. The world seemed to groan and shudder with his passing, and the crystalline walls blazed with strange colors, but then the world grew stable again and the colors rippled back to normal. As Avery watched in disbelief, invisible shapes tugged at the Sleeper’s head, turning it this way and that, then wrenched it off. White blood bubbled out of the place where it had been attached, smoke rising from it. The Sleeper’s priests may have had ice in their veins, or something close to it, but the Sleeper’s blood had run hot.
Carrying their grisly burden, the members of the mystery party moved down the pedestal toward Segrul. The pirate admiral nodded to an underling, who spoke into a strange-looking radio.
Avery stared as the head of the Sleeper, dripping white ichor, was carried through the air by invisible hands and placed on the ground at Segrul’s feet. Segrul regarded it with interest but made no move to touch it. He seemed to be waiting for something, or someone. His mysterious masters?
Ani huddled by Avery’s side, and he wrapped an arm around her.
“What have they done?” she said. “After all this, and they kill him?”
Wordless, Avery brought Ani toward where Hildra lay. Janx and Sheridan gathered around her. A pale-looking Layanna had to drag herself there. They were all but weaponless now, and the pirates held every advantage. Janx held Hildra’s ruined head in his huge hands, tears welling in his blood-shot eyes. He didn’t seem able to speak.
“What now?” Sheridan whispered.
“Is there a back way out?” Avery said.
All bent their heads to look, except for Janx, whose eyes were only for Hildra.
“I don’t see anything,” Sheridan said.
To Ani, Avery said, “Do you ... feel anything? Any way out?”
She shook her head. “There’s only one door.”
Footsteps sounded, solemn and inexorable, and Segrul and the other pirates turned toward the doorway. At last, with a groan, the pirate admiral hefted up the head of the Sleeper. As one, the pirates dropped to their knees and bowed their heads toward whoever it was that would come through. Avery realized that he was digging his nails into his palms. At last he would get to know who his group’s enemy was, although it might be the last thing he ever knew.
Two shadows flung themselves on the floor ahead of their owners, trailing in from the hall, and gradually their owners stepped into the room.
Layanna let out a breath.
“Davic!”
Indeed, the blond and handsome Collossum, Layanna’s former husband (or whatever the R’lothan equivalent would be) was one of the two who had entered. He looked victorious yet purposeful; he had business yet to do. It was the other, however, that interested Avery. He had seen that face before. After a moment, it came to him. He would never forget it. After all, he’d last seen that face within the amoeba-sac of a Collossum that had been charging toward him in a ruined underground city, side by side with Sartrand.
“Muugists,” Avery whispered. “They’re Muugists.”
Layanna paused. “I think you’re right ...”
Avery knew there was nothing the R’loth feared more than the awful beings that had forced them from their own set of dimensions. Many of the R’loth had worshipped the Muug, and some, the Muugists, had maintained that worship in secret even in this new world. He understood now how the Muugists had seized control of the pirate armada; the pirates had worshipped Davic as the representative of all R’loth, and he had bent them to his will.
Visibly straining, Segrul held up the Sleeper’s head for Davic and the other Muugist, who seemed to be the leader. He was taller than Davic and dark of hair, but not unhandsome. His face was broad, his nose long and his forehead high. It was a bold face, a face carved from granite. This was Sartrand’s boss, Avery supposed. Sartrand had just been the spokesperson, but this was the real head of the Muugist cult. And Davic was a follower.
“Lord Thraish, we’ve done it,” Segrul said, his voice proud, the voice of a fanatic that had just done his god a great service.
Thraish, if that was the name of the lead Muugist, turned to Davic, who carried a large case of some sort. Davic opened it and set it on the floor. Steam, or perhaps vapor from dry ice or some otherworldly equivalent, curled out. Davic accepted the offering of the Sleeper’s head with his bare hands and, with all due reverence, installed it inside the case, snapping it closed once more. He checked something on the outside and bowed to Thraish.
“The head is secure, my lord.”
“Excellent.” Thraish’s voice was cultured but heavy. For the first time, his gaze swung to Avery’s party. So did Davic’s. Davic’s eyes lit on Layanna, but he did not look surprised, nor did he move to speak with her.
“Kill them,” Thraish told Segrul.
“Wait!” Layanna said. “You don’t have to do this. Davic, I don’t know what lies they told you, what promises—”
“Shut up!” Davic snapped. “You don’t know anything, and you never have. Not about me. Not about the Order. The Lords of the Outer Spheres shall mete out justice to your kind.”
“But the Sleeper—”
“Enough,”
said Thraish. “Come, Davic, we must hasten. Our deal with Duke Leshillibn does not permit delays.”
With no further words, he strode from the room. Davic paused a moment, eyes on Layanna, as if conflicted, then picked up the case and hurried after his master. Avery was surprised they did not press a vassal into carrying the head but supposed they trusted no one else with it. It, or what it could do, was obviously of great importance to them. That meant the Sleeper was still in play, in one way or another. The Muugists meant to accomplish with the head what Avery’s party had meant to accomplish with the whole creature.
Even as the Muugists’ footsteps faded, Segrul turned to his people. “You heard him. We have to make way. But first I have some business to conclude.” To the empty air, he said, “See to our friends.” Looking Janx in the eye, he touched his forehead in an expression of farewell. “Tell the other shades in the Deep Halls that this is what happens when you fuck with me. I want them ready when I show up.”
Janx’s jaws bunched. For the first time since Hildra’s passing, he spoke, and his voice sounded ragged and grating, like lead scraped over concrete. “I’ll be ready for you.”
For a moment, doubt flickered in Segrul’s eyes, but then the air rippled before him, moving in the direction of Avery’s group: the mystery party was advancing. They would serve as executioners. Avery couldn’t see them, but here and there he could now make out a dapple in the air and knew they were approaching, though he couldn’t tell exactly where from.
“The guns!” Sheridan said.
She dove for one of the pistols, Janx for another. Before they got five feet, invisible shapes blasted them sideways. Janx was wrenched off his feet. He screamed and beat at something that Avery couldn’t see, and his throat constricted as something squeezed it.
Sheridan flicked a knife, but it struck nothing. Before she could make another dive for a weapon, one of the mystery party was upon her. She screamed as something lashed her. She tried to pull away, but an invisible limb drew her forward. Something grabbed her about the neck ... and squeezed. She started to turn blue.
Avery grabbed up a gun from the floor and tried to find a target but couldn’t. He looked to Layanna for help, but she was wan and sickly-looking. He knew there was no chance she could bring over her other-self.
