by M. K. Gibson
Riggs ducked a flaming sword attack aimed for his head and snapped an armored jab into the angel’s ribs. The punch crackled with energy as the sigils on his armor lit up like a neon sign on impact, branding the angel and forcing him back into the pack of winged warriors.
“We need to move,” Riggs announced.
“Yeah, no kidding. But if we stay out in the open, we’re dead. We need to run, now!” I responded.
“Are you kidding? This is awesome,” TJ said weakly from behind me.
“TJ!” I whipped my head around. The boy was rubbing at his face, watching the fight and trying to get his bearings. “Are you OK?”
“Depends,” he said, trying to get to his feet. “Are we being attacked by . . . angels?”
“Yes.” Chael smiled, tossing a creature made of interlocking wheels covered in eyes.
“Then I guess I’m personally OK, but I think we’re screwed.”
“Kid’s got a gift for the obvious. Sure he’s not yours?” Riggs asked, clapping his hands together and sending a shock wave of force coursing outwards, knocking back several angels.
I ignored the comment, trying instead to clear the shrine’s steps of several angels who were rampaging towards us.
“Gimme a gun! I can fight!”
“TJ, just stay behind me!”
“You need help!”
“We didn’t bring you back from the dead so you could charge in and do something stupid! Just, ngggg!” I gritted my teeth as a big nine-foot female angel broke through the ranks, leaped into the air, and brought her heel down on my energy shield. I dropped my blaster and had to use both hands to brace my energy shield to keep her foot from crushing TJ.
“TJ,” I grunted. “Run!”
“Screw that!” he said as he picked up my blaster and aimed it at the giant angel lady’s other leg.
“It won’t work!” I warned the kid. Damn it! My weapons were coded specifically for my DNA.
TJ aimed the weapon and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
The weapon, point blank against the angel’s knee, ripped it apart. She shrieked and collapsed to the ground.
And so did TJ.
What the hell?! How did he fire the weapon? It shouldn’t have worked. Only my DNA could activate it, and the gun itself took its charge directly from me. Unless . . . oh shit. The Collective transfer Riggs performed did more than we expected.
Ahh, hell.
“TJ! TJ! Can you hear me?!” I yelled. There was no response from the boy. He half rolled his eyes open, then closed them. Whatever energy the kid had, the gun had sapped it. Damn it. His Collective hadn’t yet evolved to the point where it was assembling electro-capacitent cell structure. The weapon stored its own charge, but pulled the reserve straight from me. And in that shot, it took the almost-literal life out of TJ.
“Riggs, how do we get out of here?” I asked as I scooped the kid up in my arms.
“That way!” He pointed down the stairs towards a path leading deeper into the garden. “Follow it until you reach an ancient shrine. It leads to the Room With No Doors. You will have to find your own way in, but make it fast. I can hold them back for a few minutes, but not longer than that.”
Riggs de-armored his right hand and held his fist in the air. The fist that held the Ring of Solomon.
“STOP,” he commanded the angels.
The garden suddenly quieted, devoid of all combat and noise. The eerie quiet only echoed the hate and rage the angels radiated. The celestial beings were locked in place, motionless. I felt Riggs’s tangible will spread out to each of the violent angels in palpable waves. While they ceased moving, they all stared at him with deep, murderous contempt.
“Go!” Riggs yelled. “Chael, get ’em to the Room!”
Chael responded by picking up TJ and barreling through frozen angels, knocking them to the ground. I followed as fast as I could in the wake of the giant’s destruction. Due to Chael’s long strides, I was forced to actually run.
Damn him.
“Why didn’t he . . . do that . . . sooner?” I huffed as I ran along the path, now clear of the immediate danger.
“The Ring was meant for a singular command for a singular being at a singular time,” Chael explained as he moved onward. “Spreading his will out on a larger scale only works for a short time. They will soon be free and then they will come for us. Blood will flow from the eyes and lips of the children of the God who no longer exists. It will be glorious,” he added with a slight giggle.
“What’s going to happen to Riggs?”
“Delicious, painful death for The Killer,” Chael answered.
For a fleeting moment I wanted to go back for him. He was family, after all. But TJ’s form in Chael’s arms brought me back to reality.
I couldn’t save Riggs and care for TJ at the same time.
If Riggs really was Solomon and some sort of spirit-immortal, then I guess he couldn’t really die, could he? He would have to survive on his own. I cast a quick look over my shoulder, where my grandfather remained behind to give us a chance at survival. And in order to keep the boy alive, I had to press onward.
I’m sorry.
We pressed on quickly, putting as much distance between the choir of angels and us as possible. The path opened into another clearing. Unlike the rest of the temple’s massive, beautiful gardens, this clearing was overgrown and wild.
And reeked of death.
Twisted versions of nature sought to reclaim this space. The grass was brown and patchy. The trees suffered from rot and fungus. Pale white spots shone through where the bark had fallen off the dying trees. Everything here smelled of sweet decay. This place was tainted by something wrong. Something beyond evil.
Chael smiled and took it all in.
All around the clearing were the ruins of ancient buildings. Broken columns and stained stone peeked through the oily-slick vegetation.
“Which way?” I asked, and Chael moved towards the deepest pocket of jungle-like growth.
As we approached, I could see that creeping vines and foliage hid what was left of some sort of massive stonework. White stone and crystal peeked through the dense decaying overgrowth. It was as if nature itself swallowed this place, yet couldn’t quite finish the job.
The building looked like the top of a mighty palace, complete with domed roof. The craftsmanship was intricate and exquisite in every detail. But the once-giant edifice listed to one side, now in ruin. The rest was buried in the corrupted earth.
I eventually took note that there was no way in. No doors. No windows. Nothing. Seamless crafted perfection with no way inside. Was the entrance buried? Was this where we were supposed to go? Riggs mentioned a Room With No Doors. Was this it?
Chael set TJ down on the long wild grass and propped him up against a piece of white stone that had fallen off the structure. Chael began to twitch nervously, bouncing from foot to foot in childlike giddy excitement.
“Chael, what is it?”
“Close close oh Gods, so close! Close closecloseclosecloseclose . . .”
“Dude, what’s up? You’re starting to go all Smeagol.”
“Can’t you hear it? Lamentations! They know I am here. They know what we are here for. Yet they cannot stop it! They cannot stop us! Today the Light will die!”
OK, he was back to Crazytown. Every time Chael took a step towards sanity, something would happen and he would leap back four steps. As usual, I had no idea what he was talking about. But he was right in one thing. If the Tears were in there, then this was the end of the journey.
I had to focus on that. I had to keep my mind on the fact that in order for my people—
No, damn it. I had to stop thinking of them that way.
They were more than just my people or my responsibility. They were my friends. My family. If I wanted them to live out the next few days, then I had to find a way in there and get the fucking Tears of God.
So how does one enter a place with no entrance? Blow a hole in
it? That would be my first guess. But since Riggs mentioned there were occupants, that meant there had to be some other way in that didn’t resort to high explosives.
Plus, I didn’t have any with me.
So that meant there had to be something I wasn’t seeing. I switched my eyes through the various modes. Nightvision? Nada. Thermal? Nope. Radioscope? Not even close. Then, on a hunch, I switched them to a particular radiation spectrum. One through which I’d seen strange energy in Abraxas’s citadel flow. That energy turned out to be the souls of humans being sucked away and piped to him.
When I did, something happened.
I damn near went blind. I felt a power from within me surge up through my very bones. I felt the same power well up within me as it had when Chael and I were inside the Deep One. Whatever it was that Grimm had inscribed upon my bones radiated painful energy.
I closed my eyes quickly and centered myself, yet the pain inside me burned with a glorious heat. The etching that Grimm had performed to keep me free of the Deep One’s influence was somehow mixing with Nicky T’s ocular modifications. They had fused into some new vision. I saw something like the magical flow of the world interacting with the corruption of the Deep Ones.
In my flash of sight, what I saw was brilliant. The whole structure lit up as in the glory days of Las Vegas. But instead of hot neon, all-you-can-eat buffets, strippers and sex, I saw something else. I saw the Light of Infinite Glory and the creeping Void that sought to extinguish it.
And I didn’t mean I saw darkness. I saw Void. The absence of all. This place was at war. With the Now and the Outside of Time. I didn’t know how I knew what it was that I saw, but I did. After the images that flooded my mind when I was in the Deep One, I knew that this place served as a beachhead. A line that They could not cross. A place They could not cross.
I could see the lines of corruption, the void, pulsating in asymmetrical patterns, trying desperately, passionately, to penetrate the broken shrine. And in the same vision, the power of the shrine, while weak, fought back in equal measure. While the corruption’s assault was spontaneous and erratic, the shrine’s defense was measured and precise. It never defended harder than it needed, it did not exert more power than necessary. It met the void with angles of pure light, burning the corruption like a cauterized wound.
And for all the light’s temperance and resolve, it was failing.
For every two attacks the light defended against, a third managed to seep into the shrine. And as it did, more and more of the creeping, decaying vegetation sprouted along the outer stone.
“Chael. How do we get in?” I asked while I kept my eyes shut.
“I don’t know. Not anymore. Gone, gone, gone. Burned away it was.”
Shit.
Through the turmoil of moving energy, there was one space that held clean. A space where the corruption circled, yet could not enter.
And I’d be damned if that space didn’t make the shape of a door.
I hurried over to the space and looked it over. In my normal sight it was just a stone wall, carved with ornate runes and bird-like designs. But with this new vision, I could see script emblazoned into the rock. I’d never seen the writing before, but I heard the words in my head.
“ONLY THE TRUEST NEED MAY ENTER”
I laid my hand on the rock and I thought of the only thing that mattered. The only reason I was doing this.
My people, who would die. My friends and family, who would be killed if it weren’t for me. Friends and family who would die because of me.
Children without beds.
The door swung wide open, then sucked me inside and shut behind me.
Chapter Forty
Just A Prayer
In Flotsam Prison
Yeela looked at the bloody scene and shook her head. “I’m a demon, and even I have to admit, that’s fucked up.”
“Thank you,” Vali said.
The god and demoness stood back and appreciated their work. Before them, illuminated by the fire of seventeen funeral pyres, Flotsam Prison’s Master Torturer Gregory Gerhardt and Archbishop Maz’ael hung from the trees of the garden. Twenty-two hooks apiece were embedded in their flesh and the attached chains were bound to the boughs of the trees high above.
The two swung in the cold winter wind, moaning in pain. Vali’s sight showed him many horrible, twisted ways to kill them. But the god simply pushed his sight back down. He wanted to witness their suffering with his near-human eyes.
“This reminds me of something,” Yeela said as she watched.
“What?”
“An old comedy movie I used to watch with my mother and sister.”
“What movie?”
“Hellraiser,” Yeela said.
Looking at the glove on her left hand, the one with the red-crystal artifact, Yeela frowned. After a quick glance over her shoulder at her sister Khlabra, who was standing in the same spot where she was left, Yeela frowned even more deeply. “Do you really know someone who might be able to help?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I stabbed you in the back.”
“No you’re not,” Vali said, not looking at her. Instead the god continued to watch the men suffer. “But I understand. If someone were to take something, or someone I loved from me . . .”
“You’d do this?” Yeela gestured at the bloody nightmare of artistic expression.
“Exactly.”
“THIS FARCE IS OVER,” a deep, ominous voice rumbled from everywhere and nowhere.
The magical fires of the dead guards dimmed and lowered to nothing more than glowing embers, casting the garden back into pools of shadow. Patches of darkness swirled and moved across the garden’s grounds while laughter began to fill the night.
Vali drew his bow while Yeela crouched and hissed. Vali’s sight did not show him the new threat, only suffering and pain.
His.
“What is this?” Vali asked Yeela.
Before the demoness could answer, a patch of shadow grabbed Vali by the left foot. The liquid-like blackness crept up his leg and froze like the winds of Ymir’s breath. With a sudden twist, Vali’s knee snapped with a terrible, wet pop.
As Vali began to scream, the shadow flung the wounded god with swift and tremendous power. Vali flew into the far wall with a sickening thud. As he fell to the ground, more shadows swirled around him. Again, icy-cold darkness sprang forth, clamped down on both of Vali’s hands, and squeezed. Twenty-eight snapping sounds, like firecrackers, echoed as each of his knuckles was simultaneously pulverized.
“WHILE I APPRECIATE YOUR WORK, YOU ARE BUT AN AMATEUR,” the voice sounded.
Unseen force gripped Vali and hurled him across the garden into the opposite wall. Vali felt ribs break and both shoulders dislocate. Before he even hit the ground, the darkness was upon him, cradling him like a spectral hand made of living shadows.
The shadows, still carrying the god, moved slowly across the garden. Rotating the god face first, the shadow-hand glided towards the inferium-laced razor wire of courtyard’s duranium-mesh fence.
Vali saw the reddish metal of the necrotic hell-steel coming towards him, knowing there was nothing he could do. The shadow-hand pressed the Aesir deity’s face and torso hard into the wicked metal.
Inch by bloody inch, the hand drug Vali downwards, across the razors. Vali screamed in pain before the sound was nothing more than the sound of wet gurgling. Broken, bloody and rent, the body of Vali Odinson was pulled by the shadows under the very trees where Gerhardt and Maz’ael hung.
Vali’s one remaining eye could only look upward. His body, what was left of it, could not move. The fact he was still conscious was less of a testament to his will and more a testament to the power of his equipment. The armor of The Green Knight, which prevented mortal harm, kept Vali awake and responsive through the pain.
His attacker knew it, and was using it to his delight.
“Vali!” Yeela cried as she was suddenly beside him, cradling his head. “Mast
ema!”
“R-run,” Vali softly said. Yeela stood no chance against the power. Her only option was to flee.
“No!”
“Please . . . run,” Vali pleaded, a tear forming in his remaining eye.
Yeela looked at the god, closed her eyes and shook her head. “No.”
Yeela flexed the glove on her fist and willed her sister to come to her. Obeying Yeela’s mental command, Khlabra knelt down to scoop the fallen god into her remaining arms.
The shadow hand once more sprang forth from the darkness, gripping the two demons. With a nonchalant flick, the hand threw the sisters across the garden into the far solid wall.
“TOO LATE FOR THAT, I’M AFRAID,” the voice boomed.
Above, high in the trees, Vali watched as the shadows coalesced into a form of nightmare and pain. Slowly descending down the branches of the tree, Vali saw the form of a spider-like creature with eight legs sprouting from the back of a large, man-shaped body. Eight red eyes glowed as the thing descended vertically down the tree towards him.
In his long life, Vali never really considered himself to be brave. He planned ahead of time. He made sure he was more prepared than his victims. He didn’t have to be brave; he only had to be strategic, cold, and committed.
Just like this Mastema was.
If it didn’t burn like Helheim, Vali would have laughed. He had walked into this trap like a fool. If Mastema was this powerful, then he had allowed Vali to believe he had won. He had allowed Vali to attack and maim Gerhardt and Maz’ael, if for no other reason than to pull that sense of victory away from him.
Vali sensed Mastema was near him now. Hard, strong claws gripped Vali by his armor and wounded flesh. Slowly, he was lifted into the air like child. Vali had nothing left. His dwindling supply of power could do nothing to this being. While he was a terror to gods and men, this creature was far beyond Vali’s sphere of power.
Vali opened his one eye and looked into the face of the Warden of Flotsam. Behind the chitinous mandibles of Mastema’s jaw, human teeth smiled back at him. He was held aloft by Mastema’s spider-like legs so that the god was face to face with the giant creature.
