Elementary

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Pathetic.” he stated, his disdain piercing his calm demeanor. “You still represent my family. At least attempt to comport yourself with a modicum of dignity.” An amulet glowed, and he raised me to my feet.

  I reached my hand into my coat without thinking, and my fingers touched the butt of my father’s pistol. I slid my hand around its heavy weight. It gave me a small hope.

  “Is this how it ends?” I tried to sound contemptuous, but I suspect my voice merely betrayed my terror.

  “No,” he answered, again calmly, as though discussing the weather. “I have been given the task of preparing the engine. My trust is not yet restored, so others must complete the ritual.”

  My voice shook as memories swelled, rushing up from their dark places again. I could neither help the tremor, nor what I said. “Please,” I begged. “Please, not that.”

  His eyes stayed me from further remonstrations. They held no pity. Not a glimmer of concern, or regret, or even embarrassment at what he proposed. His free hand gestured behind me, and I turned to see. Two men, the one tall and the other stout, came into my view and approached me, gliding or on marionette strings, each according to his nature.

  I pulled the pistol from my coat, using my turned body to hide the gesture. I then faced him, holding the pistol in both hands as I had practiced on the Campania. Using both thumbs, I drew back the heavy hammer.

  “Let me go,” I said.

  My brother’s expression remained unconcerned. An amulet glowed in his hand. “I would not, even if I could,” he replied.

  We stood a few dozen feet apart armed with pistol and amulet. The men’s voices cut across us both.

  “Do we intervene, Mr. Blue?”

  “No, Mr. Grey. These minor dramas will add spice, more piquant for being a sibling squabble. The fear will keep the engine powered for now. This tableau will resolve itself shortly, and then we may proceed.”

  A key turned a lock in my head, and the germ of an idea formed. Mine would be a desperate act, drawn from two statements of unknown provenance.

  I pulled the trigger. The horse pistol jumped in my hand, shocking me with both its recoil and the loud report in the confined space. Acrid smoke flooded my nostrils and obscured my vision. My ears rang as the gray cloud slowly cleared.

  The bullet hung in the air just short of my brother, locked in a wall of Air at the edge of his conjuring circle. It dropped to the ground, the soft lead nose crushed in. He stood poised, ready to defend himself again.

  But the first shot had only been a ploy to distract him. Pivoting a quarter-turn, I discharged the remaining shells at the closest of the fiery sigils. One struck, shattering its backing like a dropped clay pot, and destroying the glowing symbol in a burst of flame and energy.

  I knew the two men had thrown themselves toward me the moment my intent became clear. They were far too late to prevent my assault upon the symbols. I hoped only to disrupt their rituals and sow enough chaos that I might escape.

  Instead, a river, a sea, an ocean of power flowed into me as the sigil ruptured, borne by my connection to the infernal engine. It drew from me, but with its form now disrupted, the energies freed now traveled back along the bindings to me. I had not understood the full import of what my brother had said until that moment. And it nearly destroyed me.

  The life essence of five, ten, fifty, a hundred Fire Masters poured into me, far more than I could contain. I threw my head back, my arms out straight and stiff at my sides, as torrents of pure flame poured out of me. The lanterns burst in the heat of my Fire, their fuel blazing it as it flowed down the dry wooden pillars, scorching and catching them one by one. The other Fire sigils detonated in turn, as the power released by the one I had broken lashed back into the others, detonating each in turn. Their torrents joined what already surged into me.

  Mad with power, drunk with the energies that infused me, I understood for just a moment what my brother had sought. Then, beneath that, I felt the first energies I had taken fade, felt the first soul fade into ash. A woman, my own age, taken in torment. I felt all her happiness and joys morph into the pain, fear, and despair that marked her final days. My sufferings had marked only the first tastings of the first course.

  The life essence of hundreds born to Fire washed over me, powering me, and I became as mighty as any god. And my name was Vengeance.

  The two men were nearly upon me when I turned. I clapped my hands together, and a sheer concussive wall of Flame burst away from me, a solid sheet of red, yellow, and blue that shattered the closest pillars, causing the floor above to sag, and sweeping the two men away in a tide of pure, lambent Fire. The heat and force of my rage should have been sufficient to have rendered their bones to ash when I smashed them against the far walls, but it wasn’t.

  The force did strip their seemings away, however. Mr. Grey stood, a shambling thing of clay and iron and Earth, still moving on his invisible puppet strings, while Mr. Blue roused himself, a swirling ball of Water, oozing and gray as any slug. Mouths and eyes, some against its flesh, others on stalks, emerged and disappeared, tiny tides rippling against its obscene hide.

  In any other time, I would have quailed at the sight of them. I had heard of golems of Earth, but as mindless things, incapable of speech or reason. I could not even begin to fathom the creation of a golem of Water. Golems that spoke and thought represented something completely beyond my experience.

  My enemies gave me little time to contemplate their natures. The creature of Earth struck first. I walled the Water thing away behind a curtain of flame, and turned to deal with the attack. It made a gesture with its hands, cupping them together and lifting up. Lesser golems began emerging from the dirt, scores pulling themselves upright from the damp ground. I replied with Fire, drawing the flames around me in a maelstrom of heat and energy. When I stopped, the golems stood frozen, baked into hard clay.

  Mr. Grey opened and closed his fists again, and the ground opened beneath my feet, pulling me down. The crack widened like a maw, and I scrambled to escape before I could fall, only to have it heave open again as I sought purchase along its edge. I slipped down and inside, clinging with my fingers to the crumbling lip.

  I heard another great heave of Earth and saw the other side of the gap closing toward me, seeking my entombment. I desperately directed my borrowed energies against the sagging floor above, bursting it from below. Debris fell around me. One large timber, already on fire, lodged where I could stand, and I leaped out of the crevasse before it slammed closed.

  With my coat smoking from the flames and my skin burned where it had been seared by falling embers, I rolled onto my side and saw Mr. Grey closing in on me, his hands now claws opened to rend and tear. He passed between two barrels that remained upright. I saw the heat haze rise from him from his earlier immolation, and I knew his weakness.

  I augmented the natural fires, heating them into furnaces, and directing their blasts into Mr. Grey. He was Earth, and therefore immune to Fire. Heat shimmered and rose from his bony frame, and portions glowed red where the heat had been most intense. I waited until he passed near another barrel, but it proved unnecessary. His own heat immolated the cask, bursting it.

  Water struck Mr. Grey in a hundred places, cracking his superheated form. His legs burst first, clay shattering as cool water washed over them. Then his arms and chest exploded in shards. He fell heavily to the ground and rolled onto his back. More golems began to form in the mud.

  I struck two more barrels with balls of Fire. One proved to contain dirt. It simply failed, leaking dry soil onto the bubbling, steaming floor. The second, filled with water, exploded with a satisfying thunder and hiss, and poured a stream directly onto Mr. Grey’s face as he lay there. His head simply burst, throwing sharp-edged pieces of clay about the room, and finishing him.

  One piece struck me above the eye. I pressed my hand to it, and it came away bloody. I held my glove
d palm to my head to staunch the bleeding.

  I turned back toward my brother. I did not need to wonder why he had not attacked me from behind. The amulets around his neck had burst, fusing themselves into a lump that still smoldered. His hand and chest had both been destroyed, cut by molten metal when the amulet burst. I suspect that his death had been instant, from the moment I destroyed the sigil.

  I walked toward him, seeing his face beautiful and unmarked. I felt sorrow and regret, not so much for how he ended, but for what he had become. For an instant, I flashed back to our time as children, when he had protected me from an older boy who was tormenting me. He had done it for his reasons, and not mine, but I still had been grateful. I tried to hold onto that memory, but could not. He had taken even that from me.

  The energies within me waned more quickly now. I felt each soul winking out as its life essence dissipated. More still flowed in from the shattered sigils, but fewer and fewer, as a flood slows to a trickle. I used a portion of my waning energies to burst the other sigils, freeing those trapped in Air, Earth, and Water. Though I could not feel them as I did Fire, I had no desire to leave them behind for those who made and used this place.

  The wall of Fire behind me failed with a hiss and a mighty steam. The gray, sluglike thing, mouths roaring in a hundred gibbering voices, glided toward me, faster than I could run. I saw the doorway I had entered, measured the distance with my eye, and fled.

  The thing struck out against me with a dozen small tentacles that flew across the gap separating us. I dodged most, but one wrapped around my bare hand. I screamed as a thousand tiny needles pierced my flesh, each a tiny, jagged tooth determined to saw into my bone. The tentacle pulled my arm backward, spinning me away from the exit. I fell heavily, landing with my brother in sight. He began to slowly burn, his chest now agape and flesh rapidly sloughing into the unholy flames he had wrought.

  The thing, its glutinous form erupting in tiny, toothed mouths surrounding a greater maw, pulled me toward it, a gray rope tugging me in great heaves. The agony in my hand flared again, and the sensation grew of ripping skin and tearing muscle.

  I panicked, lashing out in brute force. I flailed at it with a pillar of Fire, hurling tree trunks of pure flame, and flogging it with my waning strength, now reduced to a scourge of smokes and sparks. Somewhere in this my control failed, and I smelled my own hair burn away as Fire took it. I was still sufficiently imbued with the power drawn from the shattered sigils, and flush enough with stolen energy and terror, that the separate balls of burst flame merged into a single lambent stream, focused on the horror.

  The dry beams and pillars over the creature, awash in the naked heat of my fear, began to smolder and burn, joining those lit when I destroyed the monstrosity of Earth. I sustained just enough of presence of mind to turn the scorching heat away from my own skin as I drove it back and away from me.

  The abyssal thing struck back, binding me with the thinning tentacle, and launching a storm of eyes and gibbering mouths. I destroyed the swarm, and the one that followed, and the one that followed that, hurling Fire and Fire and still more Fire, with each mouth and eye detonating in a tiny flare of steam and ichor, as a Creature of Water met a Master of Fire and was thrown down.

  In an eternity we strove, though hardly more than a few seconds, before its strength waned, and it could no longer defend the thread that bound us. I broke it with one final heave, forming my left hand into a blazing brand that cut through the greasy tendril holding my right. The strand lost its grayish cast and fell to the smoking ground as a thin stream of common water.

  I glanced quickly at my hand. The flesh appeared intact, and not stripped (for all of the sensation), but dotted with a thousand tiny pricks of blood. Something about that chilled me more than seeing bone and torn flesh. The skin heaved as something moved underneath, and I felt faint.

  The thing lashed at me again in my distraction. I blocked the dozen tentacles that exploded from around its fanged mouth and drove them back, burning several into steam that immediately regrew. I redoubled my attack, drawing from the fading wellspring of power released into the chamber, hurling pillar after pillar and lash after lash and bolt after bolt, driving Water back with Fire, until I pierced its seeming and my charge struck home.

  The thing shrieked. A thousand mouths opened as one, emitting a piercing, keening wail in a hundred voices that pierced my soul and tore at my ears. Gouts of steam burst forth as my Fire struck home. It quailed before my assault, seeking to draw back and flee.

  I pursued it, tearing at its flesh with a molten hammer of naked power, fury, and fear. It visibly diminished as I tore its essence, ripping pieces away that fell as simple water. Its flesh rippled and heaved as mouths and then faces pressed outward, as though trapped inside a bladder. One emerged from its side, first the face, and then the torso of a girl, naked and beautiful, her mouth open in a silent scream and her eyes fixed on mine in terrified and mute appeal. She stretched one arm toward me, tiny fingers reaching for me in desperation, before the thing’s flesh heaved and she was drawn back into it, like a child drawn beneath the waves to drown. The expression of naked terror as her face disappeared back into its side shook me to my core.

  I beheld my own fate in that girl, that night I first escaped from Dr. Holmes’ hotel, and what had been planned for me here. I comprehended then, for the first time, just how much danger I had blindly, stupidly courted.

  Rage replaced fear, snuffing it like a candle. I had been a foolish child, secure in my arrogance and power, and unmindful of the plentiful warnings placed in my way. I grasped in that moment a truer, deeper understanding of the depths of evil, and the cup of it from which I had nearly sipped. In that moment, a chrysalis opened in my mind, and an adult emerged. A tiny portion of me mourned the loss, but the rest came in glory and anger.

  I had squandered the bulk of the energies placed into my hands, wasting the remnants of the captured souls on flailing flashy attacks. In an instant, I drew those that remained into me, marshaling the diminishing streams of power that still flowed through the room. I shaped them into a tiny dart of purest Fire, shaped by Mind, and cast it into the heart of my enemy. The thing simply vanished. In my memory, its seeming vanished the instant before I struck it. Perhaps it was a trick of the eye, or of the mind. Either way, it was gone.

  I glanced around, searching for more enemies. I saw none. Fires burned throughout the room, clinging to the walls and roof beams where they had sat in the fuel. My brother’s chest and belly still smoldered and burned his skull. A line of Fire moved slowly, consuming his perfect face and creeping across his scalp like a grassfire, flaring and burning individual strands of hair. The bone thing against the far wall looked to be hardly more than a pile of ash and dust. I heard a soft sound through the increasing crackle and roar as part of the overlarge arm fell and rolled. I thought I saw a hand twitch, or it was a trick of the dancing firelight?

  The last dregs of power dribbled away, leaving me drained and exhausted.

  I fell to my knees as the agony in my hand rose. Raising it to my face, I saw the back had swollen into a hard nodule of pustule-covered flesh, where minutes ago there had been just skin and vein and tendon. My shirt, already torn and scorched, gave up a strip easily. I moved to bind the wound. The moment the cloth touched the swollen lump, a ripping agony tore through me. The flesh split open, and stinking green pus laced with tiny worms burst onto the dressing and my fingers, searing them.

  I vomited, heaving bile at the pain and the sight of parasites within my flesh. I closed my eyes against a wave of dizziness, then opened them and cleaned the wound as best I could. A flash of movement raised what remained of the hair on my neck.

  A single, baleful Eye centered in the back of my hand, nesting in my torn and bleeding flesh. It regarded me with a pure, malevolent evil. I cried out in horror and drew back, stretching my arm away from me. The thing blinked heavily, twice, gobbets
of pus and skin clinging to its large pale ball. The eye shifted its glance to my fingers, and they twitched of their own volition.

  Abject terror lanced through me, both at the Eye and its claim on the control of my hand. On impulse, I grasped a shard that had fallen near, a scorched splinter riven from the beams overhead in my assault on the mouthed creature. Clutching the blackened wood, without thinking, I drove it deep into the Eye.

  Agony as sharp and intense as if I had plunged the splinter into my own eye lanced through me. I screamed again and again, and fell forward, fainting in the warehouse’s basement.

  I do not know how long I lay prostrate, but I awoke to blazing heat in my nostrils, and the sensation of heat searing my cheek. My hand throbbed as if seared in molten iron, and as I opened my eyes I saw the Eye, hale and whole, staring at me from the back of my hand. The crackle of flame and the searing heat grew as the entire underside of the warehouse floor above burned, close to roasting me. Tongues of flame lapped eagerly at the dry wood, devouring those few portions that did not already burn.

  The floor would soon come down, and I had to flee. I lacked the strength to snuff a candle, much less the inferno around me. Gathering my father’s pistol from where it had fallen and what remained of my coat, I escaped the burning dungeon. That first breath of cool air as I emerged from the warehouse, so laced with the noxious odors of London, tasted sweeter than the finest ambrosia.

  Clutching my maimed hand tight to my chest, I fled into the night.

  • • •

  She unwound the dressing that covered the hand. Ichor dripped from the lesions, staining the desktop. The Eye regarded her, its stare hateful and malevolent. Her hand’s own flesh, stinking and enflamed, writhed as the Eye fought to escape the weakening spells that bound it.

  Her gaze traveled down from the desk in the second floor room to the small chicken yard below. The hatchet remained buried in the stump. The cautery rested beside it, heating in the small fire.