Hard Case

by John Hook

  Kyo was busy at her end, but had things well in hand. The fluid grace with which she moved was a curious contrast to the violence of her results. The short sword was like part of her anatomy.

  Two were after Taka, who was in no position to fight as he protected the platform. The demons clearly wanted it, but it might have been simply because we were protecting it. Izzy took out one with an arrow. I came up behind the other and kicked a field goal, ending with its head exploding against the trunk of a tree.

  Suddenly I heard a scream. Rox had apparently been holding her own against two of them. She had been training with Kyo. Unfortunately, one of the demons had cut into her legs and she really had no weapons. They were dragging her into the trees. It was too tricky a shot for Izzy. The effect on me was immediate. My vision was red. I closed the distance fast and was on top of one of them. He tried to grab me with his claws, but I spun faster than he grabbed. Because he had separated out to get me, Izzy picked him off easily. The other one, dragging Rox, saw me, dropped her and ran. I ran after him. We went crashing through the underbrush. Unfortunately, he had all the advantages here. He could move faster, his tough hide made him less vulnerable to stinging branches as we ran through the brush, and he was more agile. I probably would not have caught him had Kyo not jumped out in front of him, spearing one shoulder with her sword. He howled and thrashed, but the two of us were able to wrestle him down where the sword in his shoulder could be used persuasively.

  "Hey, stinky, long time no see."

  The demon hissed at me painfully and probably would have pulled my face off, but Kyo twisted her sword just enough to cause him to writhe helplessly. Curiously, as he came out of his grimace, he smiled that ugly smile, showing all his layers of teeth.

  "Case!" I heard in my head. I looked up at Kyo. She didn't look like she was hearing anything. The demon was only projecting to me. "Janovic is still alive. He is going to rise again and smite you."

  "Smite? Where the hell does a green goon like you get a word like that?"

  "You will wish he had killed you before.'

  "He did kill me before.” I flashed out my sword and plunged where his heart should have been. Of course, I didn't know if he had one. He exhaled with a sick gurgling sound and died. "Unlike you, however, I got to become a proto."

  Kyo looked at me. "You were having a conversation with him?”

  "He told me the stuff about Janovic again, that he's coming back, that he's going to kill me. He must be back in communication with them again.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the look of sheer horror on Rox’s face. I had forgotten. Izzy and Kyo knew, I had told them. Rox didn't know. No matter how much trouble I had with Rox, that look was almost inconsolable, a combination of terror, despair and deep sadness. I couldn't help myself, I pulled her to me.

  "He won't get you, Rox. He's after me. I'm going to stop him.”

  She buried her face in my chest. "How? We threw everything we had at him before! What is left?” She looked up at me. She was traumatized by the thought of Janovic.

  "I don't know. The good news is, I never know. That's in part why we are going to Saripha. But I will keep trying things until something works. I don't know how else to do it."

  "I want to help. I want to help kill that... monster."

  The last word was said with emphasis. Not fear, but sheer bloodlust. There was the original Rox, the darkness, but not the evil. Or maybe the evil channeled into something worthwhile.

  "Let's get going. We can sort this all out with Saripha.”

  It was good seeing Saripha again, I hadn't seen her since we recovered from the battle. She wanted to have her own space for a bit, and she was inclined to remain at the tower rather than move to Rockvale as we had. I suspected that, in the world of the living, she had been a more solitary sort. However, she greeted us enthusiastically when we arrived. I went back over my visit with the manitor. She was thoughtful. She looked at Kyo.

  "I have never encountered a manitor directly so I don't know much about them. They are more solitary magical beings, unlike the demon races."

  "So why not just swat me like a fly?” I shook my head. "Why bother checking me out."

  Saripha looked at her hands. "If I had to guess, I would say he thinks there is something you can give him."

  Saripha looked at Rox. "Did you know the manitor?"

  “I don't think I ever met him, unless it was before my present rebirth. I don't have much from the original Rox, other than my connection to Quentin."

  I shifted in my chair. Saripha had a half smile.

  "I need to find the manitor,” I said. "I can't plan when I have no idea of what I'm up against. I can’t just go along with no idea of when or how he might reach out and stop me. Do you have any way of reaching out and finding him?"

  "I can try scrying for him, but I need a connection."

  "Scrying?"

  "More or less what you probably were thinking—a clairvoyant search. As with a bloodhound, it requires a trace to reach out, as you called it."

  "What about me? I was with him."

  Saripha took my hands in hers and concentrated. Her body began to deeply relax and went into shallow breathing. Her eyes became slits. After a few moments, she opened her eyes again.

  "The link isn't strong enough. You don't know where the link goes to.” She opened her eyes wider, but did not let go of my hands. "Maybe we can amplify it. Rox?"

  Rox looked up, startled.

  "Come behind Quentin's chair and place your hands at his temples."

  "Saripha, I don't have any connection to the manitor."

  "Please, just do as I say. You are a powerful conduit. I have been teaching you that and showing you how to begin harnessing it. Consider this another lesson.”

  Again, that puzzling investment in Rox. They hadn't been there at the time of betrayal, I kept telling myself. Rox's leering face, gloating, hadn't been the final freeze frame when they died. They hadn't been turned into the proto that was to be her pet. They had only found out after the fact, an abstract fact, that they had been betrayed.

  Rox held her hands to my temple. I could feel the usual results of an escort’s touch, calming me, even as I resisted it just a bit. It was instinct.

  After a few moments, Saripha shook her head. "There is not enough of a connection, even with the amplification."

  Did I do that?, I wondered. I remembered countless ghost stories where the medium is always disrupted by negative thoughts.

  "Maybe this will help.” Izzy handed Saripha the platform. She held it a moment.

  "Is this Janovic's hovering platform?"

  “We don’t think so,” Izzy replied. “We think this is a different one, but we don’t know. We don’t even know if it is really for hovering. It’s a fairly poor design for that. We brought it up here thinking maybe the technology might be magic, that maybe you might figure out something to awaken it. It might also be an object connected to the manitor."

  Rox pulled back a bit. She was fearful of anything that reminded her of Janovic.

  Saripha examined the platform, running her hands over it. For an object that allowed someone to stand on it, you could see how light to the touch it was as she first shifted it in her hands and then held it in one hand while running her other hand over it. Her hand passed over the pattern of scratches and stopped. They glowed just slightly.

  "There is some form of deep magic at work here, but it is also... sleeping."

  "Any chance you can wake it up?"

  “The container is a spell that keeps whatever is inside locked up and controlled.”

  Saripha concentrated. The scratches extended and formed patterns, glowing more brightly like a silvery spider web. They peeled themselves away from the body of the platform and spread out.

  "They are sigils,” Saripha said softly.

  I looked closer. I could see patterns now, forming circles with triangles and diamonds within them. They glowed silver blue, but looked so del
icate that even an unguarded breath might break them.

  "They are like seals. Magical locks.” Even as Saripha spoke, she maintained her concentration, her voice level, steady, slow. Saripha touched one of the sigils. It glowed slightly, became bigger, then projected in 3-D back towards me as a cylinder.

  "Put your arm through it, like a sleeve. Let your fingers intersect through the triangles in the sigil."

  The platform was humming. As I did as Saripha asked, the platform glowed, bathing the room in blue light. I felt power passing through me.

  "'It's yours."

  I was trying not to make sudden moves. "Come again?"

  "For some reason it is attuned to you already, though I don't completely understand it."

  “When you held it in the lab,” Taka was almost thinking out loud, "that's when it became warm.” Taka leaned forward. He had a small book he had made of dried bark and a stick that had been burned off at one end and was crudely sketching the designs that hung, suspended, in front of us. He was fast and quite a good sketcher. He saw me watching and smiled. “There may be magic at work here, but there are patterns and clear mathematical relationships. I'm an engineer. I'm thinking I'm looking at the thing's circuitry, magic or electricity. I can work with the patterns.”

  I smiled at the youthful enthusiasm in Taka's voice and face. He never seemed as buffeted as the rest of us by the events we were caught up in. He was always focused on the tech. I returned my attention to Saripha.

  Saripha looked up at Rox. "Lay your hands on his temples again.” She did so, hesitantly at first. Her hands were cool. It's hard to describe what I felt. Energy passed into me, flowed out to her and came back into me.

  "Close your eyes,” Saripha said. I didn't know if she was talking to me or Rox, but I did as she asked.

  Even with my eyes shut, I could sense some of the blue glow.

  "Let yourself float. Be willing to leave your body."

  I didn't like the sound of that. My personality wasn't psychically adventurous, but I tried to relax, breathing deeply. As I did, I felt a warm flow that emanated from my temples. There was a slight rhythmic pulse. The pulse grew stronger as I grew progressively lighter. I opened my eyes. A tunnel, dimly lit by blue light, opened in front of me and I was floating through it. I looked to my right to find Saripha floating at my side. I looked to my left to see what I assumed was Rox. Curiously, she was wearing the hooded cloak that I had seen her in after becoming the proto named Katrina, when I had fought Janovic. I couldn't even see her face. I looked back to Saripha, puzzled.

  "You've done that to her. You feel vulnerable here. This makes her easier to be with, veiled and controlled. She is very powerful and you two are deeply connected. That is why you can't let go of it. But you are going to need to. Your life may depend on it.”

  My chest tightened and I started to feel myself pulling back from Saripha and Rox, growing heavier. Then a warm flow from my temples and I felt my nerves ease. I was back with them again.

  "Where are we going?"

  "I believe this path will connect us to the manitor."

  The light blue tunnel in the darkness became brighter, though not by much. There was the smell of old cigars and stale beer. A tinny jazz tune that I couldn't quite place floated up. I could see the bar and grill, but it was like looking down a long tube. I sensed Guido sitting at his booth, still, contemplating. Suddenly he looked up. His eyes glowed red. His dog-like snout wrinkled, pulling back, exposing his fangs. The word "No" exploded in my forehead, right above the bridge of my nose. It was not spoken, there were no sound waves. It was as if someone had punched me.

  I careened in another direction. I heard Saripha shout, but saw she was no longer with me. The cloaked Rox was, but we were no longer floating through a smoothly arcing tunnel, but one that was more like the path of a corkscrew. It was no longer lit by a soft, blue light, but a cold gray one. Unexpectedly, the tunnel split. Rox went one way, calling out, and I went another. My tunnel became darker, illuminated in a dark red contrast.

  Then I started falling. There was no tunnel, only darkness and red. Someone else was in charge of this journey. I landed hard. There was no pain, but an unbelievable sense of weight. Standing required great effort.

  I took in the scene like a sleepwalker. It was horrific, but I felt mostly empty and powerless. Janovic leered at me, blood covering his face and running down his body. He sat at a rough hewn wooden table, also running with blood. Rox, as Katrina, in her robe, but with the hood pulled back, had been split open on the table and Janovic was eating some portion of her flesh that I couldn't even get myself to focus on enough to know what it was. Even the room was formed of mud and blood, making sickening sucking noises.

  Janovic grinned. "Ah, you made it, Case." He looked down at Rox, who was alive even as he consumed her. He smiled more widely. "Oh, yes, her. Don't worry about Katrina, I have just freed Rox.”

  Something made my eyes move to one side of Janovic. Rising out of the mud and the blood and the stink was another Rox. This was the Rox I knew, the one whose face was emblazoned in my memory. I felt rage and horror spiral together in my stomach, but my limbs were so heavy, there was nothing I could do.

  My eyes drifted up. There was an odd light far away in the darkness above me. There was a figure of light with something like wings, but they were more like sails. For just a moment it had a face, soft and feminine, and I felt something I couldn't describe coursing through me, and then it vanished.

  Suddenly, I was yanked backwards by a force. I was flying, almost tumbling, back through the darkness.

  21.

  "What happened?"

  I was sitting on a rock near the entrance to the tower. It was morning. I had collapsed the previous night, but had had only a very fitful sleep. I was vaguely aware that we were all there and accounted for after the experience, but we had not had any chance, nor the energy, to talk. It had been all in our minds, hadn’t it?

  Izzy was sitting to one side, working with Taka's sketches and the platform. Rox hung back on the porch, a bit of a cipher, her face unreadable. That last scene I had witnessed was in some ways as cornball as a B-movie, but it certainly hadn't relieved my ambiguity where she was concerned.

  "Don't get me wrong, I love a roller coaster ride as much as the next guy, but I take it that wasn't the way things were supposed to go."

  Saripha smiled wanly, picking herbs for the breakfast that she actually needed. "No, not quite.” She stood and gracefully pulled back her silver hair. "I was careless. You were right about the manitor. He is real power. He is ancient, whatever he is. As soon as we made the connection, he tossed us off effortlessly."

  "So why didn't we just come back?"

  "Because nothing much between the worlds is linear. It wasn't like we traveled down a straight tunnel and he just bounced us back down it. We were flung away; he didn't much care where he bounced you."

  So we became separated because we were just bouncing randomly?"

  "Yes and no."

  "I know you are a witch, but I like the fact that you usually give me straight answers, even if I don't always believe them."

  Saripha smiled more widely. "Actually, I didn't 'bounce' immediately. He held me briefly with his spirit. I could feel him rummaging around inside my head. I did what I could to protect myself and he let me go. I don't know why. I also don't know what he found out from me, if anything. I was able to sense his power and the fact that he is probably the most ancient being I have ever been in contact with."

  "Are we in danger?” Izzy asked. Most of the time, he was so intent on the platform one might not even know he was listening.

  "Good question." Saripha was thoughtful. "It’s hard to say. He is much more powerful than Janovic, but for that reason, he doesn't consider us a threat, as he showed with Quentin earlier. If we have to go up against him ever, we are way out of our class unless we can discover his vulnerability. More likely we would have to come up with a very powerful binding."
/>   "So how did we end up with Janovic? A lucky—or unlucky—random bounce?” I had already recounted what happened with Janovic, although, like a bad dream, it was already beginning to fade.

  "There was nothing random about that. And by the way, it was just you, not you and Rox.”

  I looked over at Rox, startled. She met my gaze but said nothing.

  "Janovic was able to take advantage of your disorientation and the fact that I was no longer guiding you. You might have been able to fight him off with Rox's power, so he separated you. All of that was a show put on for you."

  "Why is he so powerful? And why doesn't Mr. Dogface, who's so ancient and all, put a leash on him?"

  Saripha shook her head. "There's a lot we don't know about Janovic. The only thing I can guess is that he has very powerful patronage that even the manitor will not move against."

  "So, why hasn't Janovic moved directly against me?"

  "I suspect that is the one thing the manitor can do for now. From what you said, I think that Janovic is contained. He is trying to draw you into seeking him out."

  "Yeah, well some things never change. All he has to do is tell me where to find him and I'll be there."

  "Maybe it would be best not to seek that challenge."

  I looked at Saripha. Our eyes met. She smiled. "Of course, that's not an option. I don't know what I was thinking."

  "What about the angel?"

  "I'm a witch, not a shrink."

  I rolled my eyes. "You're a friend. Take an educated guess."

  "It's very hard to do. In the context as you described it, it would be easy to see it as your mind grasping at some fragile shimmer of hope, or a sign of strength in the face of hopeless odds. The trouble is, that really doesn't fit you."

  "Yeah, I’m a little more cynical than that."

  "Maybe, but that's not what I meant. You are hard headed and push through things from some stubborn idea of the way things should be. You just keep going until someone stops you. You don't necessarily act out of some great sense of hope. You just keep going because you have to."