Rune Warrior

by Frank Morin

  Sarah gave chase. With her temporary enhancement, she ran faster than most Olympic sprinters, but Tomas still drew farther away. Anaru passed her, his face locked into an expression of angry determination.

  Tourists scattered out of his way and Sarah followed in his wake. They rounded the Colosseum and she spotted Tomas across the long plaza, near the Arch of Constantine. He slowed to a stop and waited for Anaru and Sarah to catch up.

  “Are you all right?” Tomas asked her.

  “I almost had her. Where’d she go?”

  “A car picked her up,” Tomas said. “I’ve already dispatched the mobile team to track it.”

  Anaru muttered a curse and spoke into his earpiece. “Extract. Rendezvous with mobile team.”

  A chorus of acknowledgments sounded from the other team members who had gotten caught in the crush of the crowd.

  Anaru cast one angry look at Tomas, but suppressed it quickly. The two had been slowly developing a cordial working relationship, but Sarah wondered if Anaru would ever really get over the fact that Tomas had beaten him. He’d lost the fight for leadership of the Tenth. For someone who wore his honor so tight, that had to be hard to cope with.

  Tomas and Anaru discussed strategies for cornering the elusive heka while they waited for the team to arrive. Then Tomas’ cell phone rang.

  He listened for a moment. “On our way.”

  “Anaru, you’re in command of the chase,” he told his big second. “Hunt her down.”

  The huge enforcer came to attention but managed to not salute in public.

  Tomas clapped him on the shoulder then turned to Sarah. “We’re needed at Suntara. The machine is ready.”

  Her frustration at losing Rosetta faded under a thrill of nervous excitement.

  “I hope we get a happy memory this time.”

  Chapter Five

  Our greatest glory is not in never dying, but in rising every time we do.

  ~Confucius

  Gregorios entered the secure basement vault via a reinforced steel door guarded by a pair of enforcers and biometric retinal scans. Situated in the lowest level of the Suntara Group headquarters, the site was the most secure location in the building. Moving off-site was a risk Gregorios would not accept.

  The Suntara building, situated close to the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, had housed the secret council of the global facetaker organization for centuries. The bomb that had destroyed part of the fourth floor and killed four aged members of the council had also helped kill Mai Luan. On the bad side, he had also lost a couple of experienced enforcers and an entire medical team.

  The vault was a long, sparse room lined with gleaming stainless steel. The ten-foot ceilings sported rows of lights that kept the room almost painfully bright. Alter liked it that way, and his role was vital so Gregorios resisted the urge to break a few bulbs.

  Two machines sat in the middle of the room. The first one, recently used in Sarah’s philanthropic attempt to right the world’s wrongs, gleamed in the light, its smooth steel casing unmarred. The other huddled nearby, the charred and dented casing gaping open as if it had been disemboweled. Snarled masses of wires and internal electronics threatened to spill onto the floor.

  Alter crouched beside the ugly machine with the team of engineers Gregorios had assigned to help him.

  “So, you’ve given that thing another life?” Gregorios asked as he approached.

  The young hunter leaped to his feet, grinning. “Yes! We got it working.”

  Barely twenty-five and just starting his first life, Alter was so sure of himself Gregorios got a headache just thinking about talking with him. He stood a little over average height, with dark hair and a permanent, eager expression.

  The fact that he was a hunter made things very interesting. Gregorios agreed with the clan’s eternal mission to rid the world of heka and Cui Dashi. Their penchant for removing facetakers whenever possible complicated things. Alter harbored a particular hatred for Gregorios after he’d left Reuben, Alter’s brother, dispossessed for so many years. The decision to bring Alter to the heart of their headquarters had been difficult. Gregorios was still not entirely convinced he’d made the right choice. One more reason for the two enforcers stationed just outside the vault.

  Gregorios approached the beat-up machine that Alter and his team had cobbled together from parts salvaged from the machines damaged in the bomb blast. If he ignored the battered casing, he could almost believe it would work. They had attached a new monitor and keyboard and replaced the thick cables of twisted wires that ran from the machine to a pair of blocky helmets. The helmets were battered, scarred originals that had survived the blast.

  The faceplates were intact, if blackened. The unique apparatus looked a lot like an optometrist’s phoropter but with jagged edges. When closed over the face of the one wearing the helmet, those edges dug into the skin and helped link the victim to the machine via the nevron of the facetaker required to power it.

  It was an ingenious device that helped filter mental dissipation caused by too many soul transfers, and supposedly reversed soul fragmentation as well. Gregorios didn’t pretend to understand exactly how the filtering worked. From what he’d learned from the surviving members of the council, Mai Luan had spent decades perfecting it.

  The promise of that technology had trumped the aging council members’ good sense. Mai Luan had promised them the one chance at eternal continuation to their fading lives and they’d gambled everything on that chance. That foolish choice had nearly doomed the world.

  Mai Luan’s secret agenda had combined that marvelous technology with a unique set of runes engraved on the machines, the helmets, and the faceplates. Those runes allowed the second helmet wearer to act as a passenger in the victim’s mind and walk through their memories with them. That had been the real danger. A facetaker’s memories were not things to trifle with.

  Most of the machines had been destroyed in the blast, and every machine they knew about was accounted for. Still, he couldn’t shake a lingering worry that someone else had access to the memory technology. That worry fueled the increasing pressure on Tomas and his team to track down the surviving heka from Mai Luan’s team.

  Gregorios and Eirene had taken turns testing the one good machine over the past weeks. Everything had gone smoothly and they’d brought Tomas, Alter and Sarah along as passengers in turn. Together they’d learned much about the limits and benefits of the marvelous technology, but still Gregorios worried. On more than one occasion he could have sworn he’d felt a whisper of resistance in there. Despite all their precautions, despite exhaustive searches of the memoryscape, he’d found no solid evidence that another machine might exist. Even so, something felt not quite right. Something just beyond the periphery of his senses.

  He had learned from long experience to trust his instincts. Impatient facetakers did not live many lives.

  Now the second machine was on-line. Most of the team knew nothing of his vague worries, but perhaps with all of them walking a common memory he could determine if his concerns were justified or just old habits of paranoia dying hard.

  The vault door opened to admit Tomas and Sarah. She looked a little disheveled but, on her, the look just added to her allure. Gregorios had lived over two thousand years, but a man would have to be dead and buried not to notice Sarah. It still amazed him that Tomas has snared such a catch, and wearing Carl’s wimpy body at that. He’d never understand women.

  But he’d always love one of them.

  Eirene entered behind the two young ones and her smile affected him with undimmed intensity.

  “They’re ready?” Sarah asked, eagerly approaching the machines.

  “Yes,” Alter responded quickly. His face lit when he looked at her and he didn’t try to hide his infatuation. So far both Sarah and Tomas had ignored the hunter’s attentions, but Gregorios hoped Alter figured out soon that he didn’t have a chance.

  Gregorios motioned the group to him. “Well done, Alter. With two
machines, we can do a full test.”

  “Who’s going to test it?” Sarah asked.

  “There are five of us but only four helmets,” Eirene said.

  “Actually,” Alter interrupted with a grin. “I figured out how to add a second passenger to the original machine. The drain will be more severe, but it should work.”

  A new voice spoke from near the vault door. “Good thing there are more of us to share the load.”

  Three newcomers entered the vault and Gregorios smiled to see them. In the lead came a man wearing a fit body in its thirties, flanked by two women who looked stunning in forms that couldn’t be more than eighteen. They always did prefer cycling lives at the same time.

  Alter frowned at the newcomers and turned a questioning look on Eirene. “I thought you and Gregorios would be running the machines.”

  She patted his hand in a maternal way although in her current form she looked more like his older sister than his great-grandmother. Despite Alter’s lingering hatred for Gregorios and facetakers in general, he had become devoted to her.

  She gave him a warm smile. “If we ran the machines, whose memories would we walk?”

  Alter gave that a moment’s thought. “But can we trust them?”

  Gregorios smiled. “Who can you trust if not family?”

  “Of course,” Sarah said with a grin. “I thought they looked familiar.

  He should have expected her to figure it out. She was a quick study, and her sensitivity to runes and facetakers was unrivaled for a non-gifted soul.

  “Correct,” Gregorios said, extending a hand toward the newcomers. “I’d like to introduce our children.”

  Bastien made an extravagant bow, a habit he’d picked up centuries ago at the French court, and planted a kiss on Sarah’s hand. “Enchante, mademoiselle.”

  Even Sarah appeared impressed by Bastien’s suave demeanor. He’d always been good with the ladies.

  Francesca and Harriett waved to Gregorios, embraced their mother, hugged Tomas, and were soon chatting with Sarah like old friends. Harriett shared around pieces of her newest pie creation. Chocolate hazelnut toffee cream. Gregorios declined a piece, but the others soon learned why her pies had been loved for decades. Within minutes, everyone but Alter seemed at ease.

  Scowling, he ate three slices.

  He looked like he wanted to run for his gun with so many demons in one room, but he couldn’t kill any of them yet. He should have thought of that when he agreed to work there.

  Sarah turned to Eirene. “So when facetakers have kids, they inherit your powers?”

  “Not usually,” Eirene said. “No one knows exactly how the talent passes from one generation to the next. The council launched several studies over the years, but the findings were inconclusive. We still can’t determine when and how people are born with active nevra cores. It seems completely random.”

  “There has to be an underlying reason,” Gregorios added. “Our bloodlines do seem to give us a little bit of a higher statistical average.”

  Alter seemed intrigued by the conversation despite himself. “But you sired three demons.”

  Francesca picked up on his word choice and sauntered closer to Alter, a sparkle in her eyes. “Ooh, we’ve got a hunter in the house. The last couple hunters I met I had to spank with their own guns to make them behave.”

  Alter stammered, red-faced, unable to figure out a fitting response.

  Gregorios rescued him. “He’s part of the team, Francesca, so no spanking.”

  “Pity,” she said with a lingering gaze over the flustered young man. Alter was in for an entirely different kind of test of his hatred for facetakers if Francesca decided to take an interest in him.

  “And yes, Alter, we did sire three children with active nevra cores,” Gregorios added to return the conversation to topic. “By playing the odds.”

  Eirene added, “We had lots of kids.”

  “How many?” Sarah asked.

  Gregorios shrugged. “I lost count centuries ago.”

  Eirene punched him on the arm. “Liar. Let’s just say it’s a pretty big number.”

  “Like how big?” Tomas asked, grinning.

  Gregorios slipped a hand around Eirene’s waist. “How many kids do you think you could have over the course of seventy lifetimes?”

  Sarah gaped. She was still early in her first life, trying to decide if a relationship with Tomas was going to work out. Who knew when she’d start her first marriage? Seventy was probably more than she could comprehend.

  “Receptions get old,” Gregorios added.

  Eirene punched him again, but the blow lacked strength since he still held her in the crook of his arm.

  He leaned close to her. “But always worth it.”

  “Oh, please,” Harriett said with mock dismay. “Will you two cut it out?”

  Bastien gave Eirene a hug, then lifted Gregorios off the floor in turn. “It is good to see you, father.”

  “It’s been too long, Son,” Gregorios agreed.

  During the decades he’d been on the run from the council, he’d seen little of his family. Keeping his distance had helped keep them safe. Seeing them all reunited filled him with a sense of rightness that had been absent too often from his last life.

  The girls joined the impromptu reunion and Gregorios wrapped them both in his arms. “Dinner tonight’s on me. We’ve got too much catching up to do.”

  “I choose the restaurant,” Harriett said immediately, which started an argument about the venue.

  Gregorios let them work it out, smiling to see their good-natured bantering. He noticed Sarah had taken Tomas’ hand, and the captain was looking a bit nervous, as he had more often of late.

  Alter looked like he wasn’t sure how to react to demons acting like normal people. He frowned again, turning to Eirene. “So my great grandfather…”

  She took his arm. “He got a lifetime all his own.”

  “How does that work?” Sarah asked. Then she blushed as if realizing how personal that question was.

  “We look at our lives differently than even most other facetakers,” Eirene said. “I believe it’s what’s helped keep our faculties from dissipating as quickly.”

  “I think loving you just keeps me young,” Gregorios said.

  She smiled. “Each lifetime we choose to commit to each other, we hold those vows sacred. When our responsibilities force us to take actions that might invalidate those vows, we begin a new life, one in which we have not made that commitment.”

  “But you’re still you?” Sarah looked uncomfortable with the idea.

  “It’s a matter of perspective,” Gregorios said. “We choose to take the view that some moral obligations are tied to the life of the body. Others are linked to the soul.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Alter said.

  “Think about it, dear.” Eirene patted his hand. “It will eventually.”

  “Know the difference,” Gregorios said. “Stay true in each life, and things work out.”

  Sarah asked, “But what did you do if you didn’t like what you looked like in one of those lives?”

  Gregorios shrugged. “Never happened.”

  Eirene added, “One thing most first-life mortals don’t realize is that the body doesn’t really matter. It’s the soul that endures. It’s the soul that counts. That’s the fount of a person’s true beauty.”

  Sarah grew thoughtful, and Tomas turned their attention back to the mission at hand. They quickly agreed that Bastien would power the gleaming Sotrun machine and the girls would take the Franken-machine, linked with a power-sharing rune.

  “And we’ll see if we can get both machines to work together and drop us into a shared memory,” Eirene added.

  She moved toward the Franken-machine. She had reached the same unspoken realization as Gregorios. Better she test that one first. Alter would be motivated to keep her safe instead of being tempted to allow an “accident” to dispose of Gregorios.

  Sara
h and Tomas joined Gregorios next to the Sotrun III machine. Alter joined Eirene next to the Franken-machine. They arranged reclining chairs around the machines and settled back. Bastien, the oldest of the facetaker children, and Francesca, who was several hundred years his junior, began preparing the helmets. She paid particular attention to Alter, who looked uncomfortable with her hovering close by his head.

  Sarah asked, “Who’s picking the memory?”

  “I will, dear,” Eirene said.

  She grinned. “Make it a good one.”

  “But not too good,” Tomas said. “We don’t want to get distracted.”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Eirene said. She glanced at Gregorios. “I always loved Florence in the spring.”

  “Sounds good to me.” If his suspicions were groundless, they’d still have a great time.

  If not, it would prove an excellent place to hunt.

  Chapter Six

  That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. The rest is facetaker propaganda.

  ~Aldous Huxley

  Sarah hated the faceplate.

  Francesca, in her trim, teen-aged body, gave her a reassuring smile before folding the phoropter-like plate into position. The jagged inner edges dug at Sarah’s face around the eyes and along the line of her jaw, as if they were clawed extensions of a facetaker hand.

  She shivered. It still amazed her that she had lain unawares under facetaker powers hundreds of times without seeing through the smokescreen of the technology.

  “Engaging the machine now.” Bastien spoke with a smooth French accent that helped ease Sarah’s worries. She should try to get Tomas to talk to her in a voice like that some time, maybe over dinner.

  A humming filled the dark helmet as the machines came to life. An acrid smell tickled her nose, then the cool metal of the faceplate warmed. Seconds later, searing heat rippled across her face and the jagged edges dug in deeper. They never left a mark after a memory walking sequence, but it always felt like she would arise with bleeding scratches.