Mindripper

by Baron Blackwell

  “Weep, lordling,” the Black Lion murmured into Enk’s ear, “because when night comes Dilgan falls. And when every soul has been sacrificed to the Fires Below, I’ll come for you as I came for your father.”

  Enk gulped, blinked. Modin was here, in spirit if not form. There was no longer any doubt, the White Worm wore the Black Lion’s flesh, the way he wore Ilima’s. Yet Enk could not bring himself to care. Victory had become something nebulous and indistinct.

  The cost! The cost was too high.

  Tizkar rocked in his chair, blind to all but the dead child clutched in his arms, deaf to all but his own blubbering, whimpering cries. Aquamarine pus seeped from the captives’ wounds, dark growths pulsed and throbbed beneath their skin. Crimson bubbles hung on the air, some of them popping, releasing wailing droplets.

  The Black Lion snorted. “Nothing to say? Really? Must say, I expected more. What did you hope to achieve by coming here?”

  Enk chuckled for the shining horror of it all, laughed at the contradictions that intensified the dark stain of his many transgressions. Betrayal cracked his bones, failure heaped upon failure. Cruelty plumed from the ground, onyx tendrils that pricked his eyes.

  “What amuses you so?” the Black Lion asked.

  The young scion laughed louder.

  Suddenly the world wailed, pounded by unseen cannonballs. The subterranean chamber shuddered: its stone walls groaned and cracked, lines stretched across its vaulted ceiling, lines thicker than a human thumb, flaws in something once flawless. Masonry bulked, then collapsed.

  A large chuck struck Suni’s hellish aspect, drove him downward upon a bestial shriek. He splattered against the sand, a jagged shard buried in his corrupted form. Daemonic flesh rippled and unraveled. A human hand flopped out of the writhing muck, a blood-covered appendage.

  “No!” Gagan cried, yanking Enk to his feet.

  Enk listened to the shouts of the surprised Peacebringers, watched the purple flames splutter and shrink, his laughter the one constant. Hate spat burning tears from his eyes. Like Mother, he decided, fate was a merciless whore. Only if help had arrived earlier the little girl would still be—

  The Black Lion twisted the dagger in his kidney.

  His mirthless laugh transformed into a soul-wrenching gasp.

  Then there was nothing keeping him upright.

  The ground rose to meet him. . . .

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Daemon Killer

  The time had finally come, but there was no fear, only horror-tinged joy.

  The Shade clattered and hummed about Kalum, bursting with excess passions, bloated with the screams of enraged multitudes. He stooped under the eave of a blood-splattered building, concealed from wandering eyes by shifting shadows. He swayed on his feet, staring at the line of yellow powder that glittered on the back of his dark palm. His heart raced, lashed by whips of anticipation.

  He lowered his face. . . .

  A musket ball cracked the air to his left.

  He jerked his head to the side, saw Ragon leading a group of five black-and-silver coated soldiers, arrayed about Fana, around the building. The sounds of an unseen mob trailed behind them, loud for the rumor of blood.

  “Thank God! There you are, sir,” Ragon said, lurching to a stop.

  “Are you insane?” the Lord-Inquisitor growled, rising from his crouch. “What are—”

  Fana pushed past her escort. “Your sword, Lord-Inquisitor, give it to me.”

  “What—?” Kalum swallowed the rest of his retort, went on in a gentler tone, “The Worship saw something?”

  The Nun gave a slight nod of her head. Behind her, two soldiers stabbed bayonets into the crowd of snarling fools streaming around the building. The wounded victims retreated, only to be pushed forward by more rioting men. Ragon and the rest of the soldiers turned, gave aid to their struggling comrades, muttering curses.

  A distant roar swelled, overwhelming the collected chatter of the clamoring throngs. Then the street shook, rocked by the crumbling of nearby masonry.

  “Now, Kalum,” Fana hissed, regaining his attention.

  The Lord-Inquisitor lifted his hand to his face, inhaled the line of yellow divinity gleaming on his dark skin. Hot nails pricked his nostril. He ground his teeth, blinked his watering eyes. A hum built at the base of his skull, a throbbing pulse of vicinal glory.

  Tsking, Fana grabbed the hilt of Kalum’s sword, and he allowed her to yank it free, stumbling back from her hallowed aspect. He grunted, his scrotum tightening, as if in terror of what was about to happen.

  Her eyes shone, glowed with the semblance of a golden dawn as a gilded disk appeared above her head. Incomprehensible words poured out of her mouth, words that twisted and skittered at the edge of hearing. Words that unspooled from her mouth as more brilliant light. Her finger ran along the length of the blade.

  “A Sophic Nun,” the crowd croaked as one, then dissolved like a shack before a roaring flood, their courage and bluster now little more than flotsam.

  Kalum squinted his eyes. The Lesser Name inked into his skin purred, hooked by the same excitement that struck it every time it gazed upon the imprisoned Holy Consort within Çorak. A shadow of its passion pricked his loins, stroked him to panting stiffness.

  Suddenly, it was all he could do not to throw himself at her, all he could do not to rip her habit off and . . . and. . . . The back of his throat vibrated for the beginnings of a primal growl.

  She lifted her incandescent eyes from the sword, peered at him with a kind of muted hunger all of her own, no less epicurean despite its remoteness. The muscles webbing her face flexed.

  They shared a single breath.

  An inhale and an exhale.

  Kalum lowered his gaze. Shadows danced about his feet, careened into laughing aberrations, horned monstrosities, clutching forked phalluses. His blood roared with the fury of resplendent abstractions. It had begun, the madness of the Gold Dust was waking within him.

  “Done,” Fana said, her voice crowded by the thunder of the nearby bombardment. But he would have heard her even if the clamor had been ten times louder.

  Kalum looked at her. Her eyes no longer shone, but the air seemed to ripple with the memory of what had been done. A strand of blood-colored hair lammed outside of her ivory coif, thrashed by a kicking breeze.

  She held out his weapon, hilt first.

  “Thank you,” he said, taking and re-sheathing it.

  “Better hurry.” Her eyes shifted away from him, studied the pulsating cannonballs sailing through the sky. The hem of her habit rippled like indecent skirts.

  Kalum turned from her before she could transform into something even more beguiling, brushed the strap of his musket, touched the handle of his pistol with flexing fingers. The golden fragments buzzed louder in his veins. The thunderous concussions cuffing the air transformed into high-pitched squeaks. Stone facades bubbled and ran like super-heated ice.

  The instant he stepped out from under the eave, he quickened his stride into a lumbering dash. His heart soared, thumping to a new sub-audible rhythm. Colors swam up to touch the sky where the cannonballs fell from view—violent plumes of neon greens, ruby reds, and charcoal blacks.

  Like ants from burning anthills, people inundated the streets, running out of smoking tenements, fleeing in scattered herds, pointing up at ponderous skies. These crowds eventually thinned, chased by billowing clouds, heavy with Silver Dust. Once engulfed, the stragglers fumbled and collapsed, gasping, their heads sheathed in flames of the deepest blues.

  Kalum ran toward what they recoiled from, traveled through an imaginary tableau intertwined with the real. Up ahead, a woman with lacquered fins growing from her forehead cowered on the street. He leaped over her prone and gaping form. And over there, a three-eyed bull maundered upon oozing tentacles, snorting out clouds of lemon-colored string. He weaved around it, slowed ever so slightly to avoid its thrashing limbs.

  Closer. The Mindripper’s end was coming closer.


  Great willows, some rivaling the tallest tenements of the Shade, sprung up from the ground he treaded, shedding leaves like luminous snake skins. The Lord-Inquisitor laughed inwardly, buoyed by a lunatic glee, exulting in the beatific pageantry. There was an extraordinary peace in the manifest madness searing his mind, a sense that his eyes were at last opening, having spent decades with them shuttered.

  He reached his long-sought destination three heartbeats later and marveled at Worship Osei’s ability to so perfectly weave the infinite probabilities to his benefit. The Pit’s dome roof had become a broken and smoking husk. Deformity clung to its walls, illusions of festering flesh, yellow and brown with rot. A bevy of napping infants, dressed as Peacebringers, strewn its ruinous perimeter.

  Holding his breath, he readied his musket, threaded past shifting obstacles, and entered the Pit’s shattered threshold. Sinister light leaked from fissures in the floor, painted serpentine patches of writhing mist in vibrant but cruel hues.

  The ground shifted beneath his booted feet, wailed as if it might plunge downward.

  He stilled, lungs burning for the lack of air.

  “Maybe we should flee,” a voice said, rising from a gaping void.

  “No!” another voice answered the first.

  Kalum slinked closer, poked his head over the rim of the hole. A band of luminous fog whirled then parted, revealing a sullen-mouthed boy perched on a wax throne, a rag doll clutched to his breast. A wrought-iron helmed warrior loomed before the boy, his cape of leering faces whipped by sulfur laden gusts. Electric sparks leaped from the ivory markings seared into the surrounding ground, crackled and buzzed as malevolent lightning.

  “Look!” the boy cried, gesturing at a black skeleton crushed beneath a jagged piece of rubble. “The plan is ruined.”

  Kalum took a slow breath, lifted his musket to the gap. . . .

  “Not quite,” the helmed warrior replied, “I can bring forth three of the Soul Eaters on my own. That should be enough if we work—”

  The outline of a howling face pressed out of the back of the warrior’s iron helm, glared up at—

  The roar of a controlled explosion.

  The kick of a fired musket.

  A plume of noxious gas.

  Coughing, Kalum tossed aside his musket, unholstered his pistol and fired it. Something immense and unseen reached up from the whirling silver and white, plucked and tore at his mind. Suddenly it was as if he hung from a hook, reeling toward oblivion. . . .

  Then he was free, rolling away, lurching back from the seething void, his heart a hammer in his breast. The air wheezed with musket balls, rising from below, pinging off of stone.

  Kalum staggered to his feet, stumbled down the winding stairs, the world wheeling for the Mindripper’s attempted violation. Clouds of Silver Dust roiled about his descending form, tried to seduce him with the promise of sleep.

  His legs slowed, lulled by wisps of lethargy.

  His eyelids fluttered, laden by glimpses of his erstwhile home.

  The air cried with subterranean horror, the muffled shrieks of souls sacrificed to purchase hellish power.

  He paused, shook his head. Hand trembling, he reached into his coat and thumbed glass vials. Colossus waves of indigo tinged black battered, crashed against his mental shores.

  TODAY YOU DIE, LORD-INQUISITOR!

  Kalum recoiled from the Mindripper’s mental voice, hissed as fiery cracks appeared across the walls, wiggling with murderous intent. He brought an uncorked vial to his nostril and sniffed.

  A howling river of molten glass tore through the Lord-Inquisitor, carrying him forward once more. His muscles twisted and contorted, zoetic with living fire.

  “Death comes!” he bellowed.

  Heard the snapping of chains and the rustle of metallic scales in response.

  Saw a daemonic glow emanate from the fog below.

  He escaped the dark stairwell, strode onto the first gallery. He unsheathed his sword with a well-practiced twitch of his wrist. Golden lightning flickered and coiled along the blade, illuminating the smoky benches at the margins of the chamber.

  A violent tremor struck the first gallery, wobbling the ground beneath Kalum’s feet. He gripped his sword tighter, roared with boundless joy as his mania waxed even brighter.

  “Come!” he raved. “Come!”

  A snarling visage rose above the stone railing, an apparition clothed in daemonic flesh and torch-lit abstractions. Abstractions that shattered the illusions that tried to contain its unreal form.

  The railing cracked beneath the creature’s grip.

  And, for a grisly moment, its ghostly eyes remained fixed on Kalum’s blade, its barbed tongue lolling, its elephantine skull askew.

  Then Kalum was charging at it, borne forward by frenetic madness, his sword hammering through the interceding intervals.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Scatter

  Pain. Unearthly torment.

  The sound of battle and running feet.

  The sense of blood pooling out from a gaping wound.

  Enk blinked, saw a little girl’s face pressed into the ground across from his own, watched her peer at him with dead and watery eyes. Her prepubescent face was ornamented with fetishes cut from green confection and glittering sand. The view yoked at his soul, limned his world with grotesque meaning.

  What do you see? a whisper that rose to rib his mind, a whisper that spoke in his uncle Gezer’s voice.

  The words conjured an image of two boys wrestling beneath riveting environs—children with identical faces.

  No-no! I’m nothing like him!

  Enk refused to countenance the revelation the thought sparked. Even though he had witnessed first-hand the toil strangling Cat had exacted upon Tizkar, he continued insisting that they were not the same. Ilima was of the Senmonth bloodline, he told himself, such a wound would not kill him. He had not sacrificed his only friend in the name of revenge. He had not!

  Liquid fire seeped from the young scion’s eyes.

  He tried to rise, cringed like a beaten dog from the upwelling pain.

  Esoteric light leaking, darkness enclosing, he drifted downward upon a nebulous absence. . . .

  ■■■

  The Lord-Inquisitor wheeled at the center of ghoulish violence, laughed and danced among raving hallucinations. His blade shone brighter, a star descending into the realm of Men. He missed his mark, cleaved a stone pillar in two, spun to smote a crocodile hide. The daemon howled obscenities, rolled across the cracked and battered ground, leaking liquid magma as blood.

  A new wail rifled the air, ponderous and sepulchral.

  Kalum shifted away from the first horror. The floor shivered beneath his boots as a second Soul Eater grappled its way onto the gallery. With eyes like fiery pits, the creature leered at him. With talons agleam for nightmarish flames, it sprang at him.

  He retreated, pursued by its hellish fury, his sword questing, always questing but coming up empty. His shoulder met the wall, and he whirled. Stone crumbled, smashed into shrapnel and powder. Then the first abomination rejoined the fray, ribboned in magma seething fissures.

  The Gold and the Red Dust roiled within Kalum, mixing and separating. His heart cudgeled his inside, and ethereal attacks battered his mind. He warred in four dimensions, weathering unspeakable onslaughts. Chasms opened with almost every blow he avoided or withstood. Within and without.

  There was no time for breath or thought. The Soul Eaters would not allow it, they clang to the wall, charged across mist-strewn floors, lunged like hounds, maws gaping, snapping, and snarling.

  Sweat mattered his back and neck, fire charred his lungs. He felt himself slow, sensed the golden divinities swimming within fade, an evanescing quickened by the living fire in his veins.

  The Lord-Inquisitor pivoted, turned upon ever shrinking margins, escaped destruction by thinner and thinner hairs.

  His steps faltered. . . .

  He dipped, bent back with one knee slidin
g across the ground, then parted daemonic flesh when a Soul Eater took the bait. Another line of hissing scarlet blossomed upon hideous flesh, consuming the silver fragments hidden in curtains of twirling fog.

  The ebb of his withdrawal reversed, transformed into gleeful pursuit.

  ■■■

  Enk traded deconsecrated ground for ground just as unholy, slinking from glittering sand to inner heights to pitch-colored earth. The descent—if the lost of consciousness could be called such—was one of plunging through forested silks, ending with an impact that nearly resulted in the collapse of his ethereal form.

  He gasped, puffed out a cloud of luminous mist. The light leaking from his skin dimmed until he almost seemed a piece with the surrounding dark. Ilima glared down at him from an elevated position, awash in the arcane secretions of his cylindric prison.

  Enk flinched from the dark-haired boy's unflinching gaze. The ground beneath them roiled, spasmed with their shared body’s floundering exertions.

  He sat up, glimpsed the abyss from an entirely new vantage. Vague phantoms nimbused the rim, flickering outlines skipping closer.

  “I’m sorry,” the young scion’s voice sparked another release of dwindling effulgence. “I convinced myself that this was the only way, that betraying you was just another thing that had to be done.”

  The ghostly image of a young boy performed a whimsical cartwheel in the luminous shadow Enk cast before the cylinder, then evaporated to the enthusiastic clapping of an adolescent choir.

  “But you were right,” Enk whispered, coming closer. He placed imaginary fingers to the wall of his friend’s resplendent cage. “You’re always right. I can’t finish this on my own, I’m not strong enough. I need your help.”

  Something wet splattered, caught them both entirely unaware, sent their eyes gazing upward. Crimson rain fell, spilling from the woolen void at the apex of the darkling sky.

  ■■■

  Kalum was an enraged tyrant, hammering his enemies with a blade steeped in the power of the Waters Above. The very world groaned and shrieked before his mad aspect as the horrors he had once fled before retreated from him. He gave neither them, nor the one that controlled them a chance for respite.